Vintage St. Pete: The Mad Beach Band

To borrow from an old saying, if you remember the beach town music scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you probably weren’t there.

Bars from Pass-a-Grille to Clearwater were jammed with young people Friday and Saturday nights indulging in Bacchanalian excess – the Budweiser flowed like wine and most everyone nipped outside, at one time or another, to enjoy a naughty joint in the parking lot.

Everywhere, there was music. There was rock and there was roll, and also a new kind of in-between something, an amalgam of country, rock and folk music literate and smart and liberally laced with humor. John Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker were architects, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris were heroes, and Jimmy Buffett – long before he became a lifestyle guru – was the music’s clown prince.

And in 1979, Pete Merrigan was King of the Beaches. As the people-pleasing main man in the immensely popular Mad Beach Band, he worked the clubs weekend after weekend, during the week too, singing and swinging and delivering a live-wire gumbo of country, rock, blues and Buffett for delirious fans. Drinks were downed, and good times had. They were wild nights.

The fun never stopped. Until it did.

“All those years ago, I couldn’t even think 40 years ahead,” Merrigan says today. “I couldn’t think four years ahead. I was pretty convinced I was gonna die young, like many of us were who were living the way we were back then.”

There has, of course, been a lot of water under the John’s Pass Bridge. Still, Merrigan, who regularly plays around town as a solo act, is rubbing-his-hands-together excited about the reconstituted Mad Beach Band, which still exists to thrill and chill.

“It’s taken me a long time to give myself credit for what I do, that I’m a pretty good frontman and a pretty good songwriter,” he admits. “I don’t pretend to be the greatest at anything. And as I look around the band, I’m in awe of the other players, that I get to play with the likes of Lenny Austin and T.C. Carr, and a songwriter as good as Dave Williamson.”

Austin and Williamson are guitarists, while Tom “T.C.” Carr’s blues harmonica and vocals are the stuff of legend. Longtime Mad Beach bassist Vinnie Seplesky is in, as is drummer Tom Kennedy. Across the board, this is a collection of revered bay area musicians.

Carr’s virtuosic harmonica playing, which can trill like a bird in springtime, honk like a freighter or roar with the ferocity of a hurricane, has over the decades provided the defining edge for a dozen of the most popular blues, rock and Americana bands to play the beach-and-beyond circuit.

He was born in Tampa and raised in Gulfport, and discovering music felt like the opening of a door. It was an invitation. “I found a voice where I could say things through the harmonica that I couldn’t say any other way,” Carr says. “I fell in love with it and I never put it down.”

“For me, it’s a real treat to play with all these guys, who I consider to be at least a couple of notches more talented than I am,” says Merrigan.

Everybody of a certain age wanted to live by the beach. It wasn’t all condos then, in the ‘70s, and if you could find a small house in Madeira, or T.I. or on Sunset, you could walk to the shore, and – most importantly, if you were so inclined – walk to the nearest bar.

Buffett was extolling the virtues of beach town life in song, one clever lyric after another. Sun, sand, beer, sweet women and salty, non-conformist humor. It was a siren song for young musicians who had no interest whatsoever in the 9-to-5 grind.

Pete Merrigan heard the call. In 1974, he arrived in Madeira Beach, an ex-pat from New Hampshire, with a good-time group he’d put together called Captain Sam’s Travelin’ Band. They played for tips at the Keg & Cork Pub, a boozy hole in the wall on John’s Pass.

Merrigan, unwilling to face another snowy winter back home, stayed in Florida after the group splintered. Lacking the confidence – yet – to play gigs as a solo, he convinced his New Hampshire pal Pete Shackett to investigate the sunnier climes.

Back home, Merrigan and Shackett had played in a successful road band called Gunnison Brook; they frequently shared billing with Aerosmith, a Boston-area group they were friendly with.

Their two-man harmonizing ‘n’ humor act was an instant hit in beach-town bars.

“We had the duo, Shackett & Merrigan, and more and more T.C. started sitting in with us, till it was nearly an every-gig occurrence,” Merrigan recalls. “And then Harry Dailey moved in across the street from me on Madeira Beach.”

This was to be the first of many game-changers. Dailey, a full-time professional musician who was then the bassist in Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, rented a beach house during his off-road stretches.

He began sitting in with Shackett, Merrigan and Carr. Birds of a particular feather. “That’s when we started calling it the Mad Beach Band,” Merrigan says. “I remember when Harry walked in and said ‘Hey, I got us a gig.’ We said ‘Oh, so it’s us now, huh?’

“But the thing was, we couldn’t keep calling it Shackett & Merrigan if it was Shackett & Merrigan & T.C. & Dailey.’” And so they were the Mad (as in Madeira) Beach Band. 

At Clancy’s: Merrigan, left, Carr, Dailey and Shackett.

“Shackett and Merrigan and T.C. really enjoy themselves and don’t come off with a really heavy attitude about being artists,” Dailey told reporter Peter B. Gallagher in 1977. “That’s one of the things that appealed to me about Buffett. Although he certainly is an artist, he doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

Their cache rose when Buffett himself – invited by his moonlighting bass player – played a few songs with the band at the tiny Keg & Cork.

“We already had a good, large following,” Merrigan reflects. “After the night Buffett sat in with us, our brand really rose in value. Of course, back then we weren’t calling it a brand. But any time Buffett was anywhere near, we could not quell the rumors that he was going to come in and sit in again.

“We all knew he wasn’t, because we’d ask Harry, and Harry would say ‘Nah, he’s not gonna do that.’ But more and more, people would just show up knowing the Buffett connection.”

Keg & Cork, June 17, 1977. Jimmy Buffett sits in with the band (from left Merrigan, Carr, Shackett and Dailey). The impromptu set lasted nearly an hour. Photo by Tom Zeason.

Seplesky joined to take the bass chair when Dailey was out of town.

Their sets were peppered with the country/rock favorites of the day.

Shackett wrote “Beer Drinking, Foot Stomping Good-Time Music,” and it became the band’s anthem. Dailey coined the term “St. Partysburg.” Merrigan wrote the irreverent “Willie Nelson For President” during the 1980 election season, and the band released it as a single, followed by his songs “Sweet Potato” and “Champagne Ladies.”

(Merrigan sued a Tulsa record promoter for plagiarism in 1980, claiming the man had “re-written” Merrigan’s Willie Nelson song. Merrigan – who had fortuitously copyrighted it – won the case and was awarded $240,000. Which, he says, he never saw.)

In time, the band got booked in theaters, as the opener for the likes of Pure Prairie League, Dickey Betts and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

It was a great run – the band made the rounds of Clancy’s, Nick’s, the Oyster Shucker, the Blue Room, Skip’s Beach Bar and a dozen others, again and again. “Even when downtown wasn’t a place most people wanted to go, it was really hard to get our beach fans to go to a club downtown,” Merrigan remembers. “It was definitely a beach crowd.”

For Merrigan, the bottom fell out in ’82.

“The club scene started changing a lot, and we ran into a lot of canceled bookings, and bounced checks,” he says. “And my drinking was out of control, I will admit. And I wasn’t the only one. With a couple of notable exceptions, it was a pretty drunk band.

“I had tried to quit drinking, but the fans wouldn’t have it. I’d have people in my face – almost literally, but certainly figuratively – shoving shots down my face. And I got to the point where I’d take a shot, and ‘one, two, three!’ with somebody, and throw it over my shoulder instead of drinking it.

“I figured at that point, I’d better bail out and dry myself out. And not die.”

The Mad Beach Band broke up (Shackett, for reasons of his own, had already left). Merrigan, Williamson, and the now Buffett-less Dailey started a trio they called Spare Parts, and in 1987 – the year Merrigan took his last drink, his last anything – the old band began to book the occasional reunion show.

And then … “We all decided that we really loved each other, but we didn’t want to be a full-time band. So we just left it that we’d play together whenever the money, and the venue, and the event was right. And that’s kind of where we are now.”

Late ’80s reunion: Front row, from left: Dave Williamson, Lenny Austin, T.C. Carr, Harry Dailey. Back row: Norman Duzen, Pete Merrigan, Bobby Miller, Vinnie Seplesky.

Harry Dailey is dead, as is “Stormin’” Norman Duzen, the Mad Beach Band’s longtime piano player. Drummers – 11 of them – have come and gone over the decades. “As in Spinal Tap,” Merrigan laughs, “some of them just spontaneously combusted onstage.” When Tom Kennedy sat down at the drum kit, he immediately became a key member of the gang.

Carr survived three heart attacks, a near-drowning, and the death of his beloved son. Always and ever, music was there for him.

Everyone’s got their own gig – Merrigan plays solo, Carr fronts his own band, the others play in all kinds of different configurations – but the Mad Beach Band, even today, remains the mothership.

Their infrequent shows together, as a rule, play to packed houses.

“I think there’s two things going on,” says Merrigan. “One is that we’ve all gone our separate musical ways; I’ve developed a new, solo fan base, and the other guys have developed their own fan base. So we’re bringing those people in – they’re new to the Mad Beach Band experience.

“And in addition to them, it’s the old-timers who, for them, a Mad Beach Band show is like a family reunion. It always has been. It’s like Christmas and New Year’s and Thanksgiving all rolled together when we get together – even if it’s in the summer!

“And we see people in T-shirts from the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

Today: Lenny Austin, left, Vinnie Seplesky, Pete Merrigan, Tom Kennedy, Dave Williamson and T.C. Carr. Photo by Jim Tizzano (RIP).