The White Water Band III

The semester is wearing me out as it crawls toward a close. . . .

So, the White Water Band had the Coop in which to practice and a bus in which to travel. We also had our line-up: Terry and Jim on guitars, Harlan on bass, Kirk on drums and the kid on percussion and vocals.

And when we were practiced enough, we went out and played. As I said in another post, we played bars. True. But that wasn't all--maybe not even half--of our work. Most folks from around Marshall would better remember us for dances played at the swimming pool and community center. We played some campgrounds. We played once for my the electric company my aunt worked for, one of its big public events. I remember poor old mountain women climbing out of the stands and begging us to stop (or turn down), as if their they were about to bleed to death through their ears. We played outdoor street festivals. One of my mom's "favorite" memories of coming to hear the band play is of a summer afternoon in Hot Springs--when the place was dead, without the lively attraction it has now--when the band was set up on a flatbed trailer on the main street near the railroad tracks. She says she stood there listening to us blast away at the crowd and didn't even hear the train passing less than 100 feet from her. That's loud!

White Water was a cover band. I've been trying to remember some of the songs we played, and I've come up with a few.

• The Doobie Brothers--"Long Train Runnin'" and "China Grove"
• Kiss--"Rock & Roll All Nite" and "Black Diamond"
• Led Zeppelin--"Stairway to Heaven"
• ZZ Top--"La Grange," "Heard It on the X" (I think) and "Tush"
• Lynyrd Skynyrd--"Freebird," "Sweet Home Alabama," "On the Hunt," "Tuesday's Gone" and "Simple Man"
• Ringo Starr--"It Don't Come Easy"
• Foghat--"Slow Ride"
• Mountain--"Mississippi Queen"
• Moody Blues--"Nights in White Satin"
• Procol Harum--"Conquistador"
• Deep Purple--"Smoke on the Water"
• Rolling Stones--"Jumpin' Jack Flash"
• Bachman-Turner Overdrive--"Takin' Care of Business," "Let It Ride" and "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet"
• Santana--"Oye Como Va," "Evil Ways" and "Black Magic Woman"
• Grand Funk Railroad--"I'm Your Captain/Closer to Home" and "We're an American Band"
• Marshall Tucker Band--"Can't You See"
  
• Jethro Tull--"Locomotive Breath"

That's all I can think of at the moment. Some of them we did fairly well--or thought we did. Some of them--"Nights in White Satin," for example--I can't imagine how we did at all!

I should also say that we did two or three original songs. I seem to remember one Harlan wrote and one Terry wrote, but I have no memory of these that I can get hold of. And I started my songwriting career with the band. We did one of the first songs I wrote: "Madison County." I still remember it--some of it at least.

Madison County is the only place for me.
If you gave me the world, there's no place I'd rather be....

I have a couple more posts planned about White Water--our biggest adventure, the defining event in my memory of those years, and my leaving the band.