The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show - Prater's Creek Gazette

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Arts and Music

The Prater's Creek Gazette

14th Issue Summer 2007 Page #7

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Local Band Celebrates 20 Years Of Pickin’ and Grinnin’

Mark, Ed, Don, Chuck and Scott Photo April 25 marked the 20th birthday of The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show. Twenty years ago, the sister of the bass player in Ed Campbell’s old punk rock group, Next Generation, asked if he could put something acoustic, something country, together for her boyfriend's motorcycle gang's party.

Ed had gotten himself a harmonica rack, trying to emulate his acoustic heroes at the time, Neil Young and Bob Dylan, and was doing a few gigs in Clemson opening for rock bands. (I still think he blew you, and your bands' butts, off of the stage Matthew Knight. Back there "repairing your amp" or whatever you said you were doing making all that racket behind him while he was performing!!)

Ed immediately called his friend Don. Years before Ed had just gotten a Fender Telecaster and a mean little Fender amp, and Don had gotten a set of used drums. They set up in the basement one Saturday afternoon and, to quote the Frank Zappa song, "Joe’s Garage": "a couple of quarts of beer to make it so the intonations wouldn't offend your ear". It was awful sounding but the most fun they had ever had. Don called themselves "The Drovers" out of his love for John Wayne. Ed said to him "That is the coolest name for a band! I’m gonna call a band that someday!” Don laughed like "Yeah, sure".

Clovis aka Don Ed called Don, who was living in Greenville, to ask if he wanted to help out with playing the motorcycle party. He said yeah, was told to go by Ed’s mom's house back in Greer and get the washboard out of his mom's storage room. He had bought that washboard back in 1973 on one of his family's “big Saturday night trips to K-Mart”. Ed’s favorite band at the time, he was 14, was Black Oak Arkansas. Black Oak's lead singer was Jim Dandy of course, and he played the washboard. Ed had bought the washboard the night Black Oak was to be on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert.

Ed told Don that he also needed to come up with a stage name for they were to honor the tradition of Minnie Pearl, and all the “Cousin” and “Uncle" so and so's that were in old time country. And also like Bob Dylan nee Zimmerman. Don renamed himself “Clovis”.

They learned about 12 songs for the party. They were two Ed had written that later were on The Drover’s long ago forgotten, cassette only, first release. These were "Virus of Love" and "Good Morning Schnecksville" a shout out to their great buddies, The Big Runts, who billed themselves as "The Loudest Band in Pennsylvania". The Big Runts were Mark and Matt Stickler who were from Schnecksville, PA, or "Pennysltucky " as they always referred to it.

Mark and Ed also learned "You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" by Dylan. This song would remain a concert staple for the band for years. They learned "Roll Another Number" by Neil Young, "Your Cheating Heart", "Folsum Prison Blues" (these last two were the very first songs Ed ever learned to play and sing.

Soon Chuck (“Badger”) joined, playing an electric guitar laid across his lap, playing it like a lap steel.

Sean, Chuck, Ed and Mark They got a fella name Treetop to play bass and started gigging around. “Treetop” soon dropped out of school and moved away and Sean Gould, took over on bass and adopted the stage name “Doyle”. There would be over a dozen people who played bass in the early years. All electric basses, except for a few months in 1988 when “Clem” was on doghouse. The first night he brought his upright bass over to practice the rest of the band was in awe. They had all kinds of musicians playing bass that wanted in on the fun. Rock guitarists, drummers you name it. All trying to learn to play root-fifth root-fifth. We started gigging around the upstate and “Luke” started drawing their flyers. The band got a big following playing down at Big D's Piggy Strut BBQ after Clemson home football games. Rob Keller started playing bass, and even though he was monster rock bassist, he had trouble playing country music. Ed would write out these giant set list cheat sheets for him saying "Nine Pd. Hammer-G-C-G-D-G-C-G_D-G, etc.!

The band were to play a show at Studio B, in Greenville, SC, opening for a band from Texas who had gotten a lot of exposure on MTV and in the press. Sean/"Doyle" was going to be gone on spring break in Florida that week so "Luke" and "Badger" asked a guy who worked on a carpentry crew with them, and who was the lead guitarist for an area classic rock band, if he would want to play bass for the show. Scott Hill took the stage name "Homer" and learned a set's worth of Drover songs on bass. His first practice with the band, there was a keg of beer and a house full of teenage girls, including French foreign exchange students. The show went over great. He had so much fun he asked what he needed to do to stay in the band and Ed told him to get a mandolin. It was the first instrument in the band that wasn't a guitar or bass.

With every new show, “Luke” would draw a flyer. Most of them were nine panel cartoons, one of which appears in their self titled first CD. The flyers became somewhat of a scandal in Clemson. (Nobody has any of these anymore, I wanted to put some up in this issue!) So much that on two separate occasions, students' classes, different professors, different subjects, consisted of nothing else but the discussion of whether these flyers should be up on every telephone pole downtown. One of the classes was an Economics class! Today, because of these flyers, a band and/or club can be arrested for stapling flyers on telephone poles in Clemson, SC.

Jim and Tammy Bakker's, and Jessica Hahn's, scandal was in the news every day, and Ed wrote a song called "The Ballad of Tammy Faye Bakker" which became somewhat of a upstate cult favorite. Especially after a local AM station, WCCP, started playing it. They were strictly a hard rock/heavy metal station at the time, but they played the cassette recording of it (which was put out under the punk rock band's moniker "Next Generation") and got a lot of requests for it. (Continued on the next page)

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