Friday, October 16, 2009
Crawdads fan goes fishing for memorabilia
Emily Paine Carter | Special to So Salem
David Barker holds a 1988 Roanoke Times photo of Mad Andy and The Crawdads.
Emily Paine Carter is columnist So Salem. You can contact her at 981-3430 or via e-mail.
Emily Paine Carter
Recent columns from Salem, Glenvar and western Roanoke County
The friendly Realtor calls himself "a private person."
Forget that! David Barker couldn't resist appealing for memorabilia of his old band, "Mad Andy and The Crawdads."
Seems that David had been swapping Facebook messages when -- as things tend to do on that site -- one thing led to another: pal Eric Darby suggested he join the online Mad Andy and The Crawdads Fan Club.
David said that lead singer Andy Taylor had created the cyber-club, then anointed David and keyboardist Erik Brady "site administrators." (Full disclosure: Erik is my son; by the way, Erik-with-a-K isn't the newspaper photographer.)
"I felt kinda sorry for the club," said David, "since there weren't any pictures. So I posted one from when we performed at Festival-in-the-Park, 1989 [main stage!], along with a picture of that pretty cool band T-shirt."
He'd love to find flyers from their gigs. And where is that Roanoke Times Extra feature? Parents Betsy and George Barker had laminated Mark Morrison's Dec. 1988 story; "it's somewhere in a roomful of boxes from when they exchanged houses with [brother] Lewis," David sighed.
Well, David was delighted: I just happened to have the story's color photo, shot beside ye olde Brown Hardware's wall. It's prominently displayed, just above my personally autographed Captain Kangaroo glamour shot. (We SO love our brushes-with-greatness.) "Out of the garage" was the headline -- since the band was graduating from garages and my back porch to bigger venues. (I showed them the chords to "Louie Louie" -- innocent lyrics, actually -- then bowed out. The rest is history.)
David recalled The Crawdads' winning a talent show at Paolo's restaurant and playing the late, great Iroquois Club several times, my (surprise) birthday party at Salem's bygone Town Club and "Rock-toberfest" ("a big deal! A Cellar Door production. It even used TicketMaster!" David marveled.)
Other band-mates: Craig Eversole, John Almonte and Ben Spraker --who had some smokin' guitar licks. David remembered that Ben liked 'way more heavy metal than did the others, and figured he's the only one who might be in a band ("he was in one in Georgia a few years ago").
David chuckled over Andy's intro back then: "I'm Andy -- not-the-sheriff-of-Mayberry, not-of-Duran Duran -- Taylor."
A Salem High School yearbook once featured The Crawdads, but "we just kinda disbanded after a few years," said David. "I don't really remember why.
"But it was such a fun time in my life, a big part of our lives then," mused David. "I'd love to find more Crawdads stuff. And someone suggested a reunion...." He grinned, and walked on with good memories.
