South Walton Life
Defying Definition
Spring 2004 by Alex McRae
Even the musicians behind the popular Dread Clampitt band struggle to put a label on their eclectic concoction.
The cast is right, but the plot is all wrong. Instead of the hot, new, up-and-coming band searching desperately for a lebel, it's one of their fans.
On the front patio of the Funky Blues Shack in Destin, a young woman chatters excitedly into her cell phone.
"C'mon down," she pleads. "It's Dread Clampitt. They're great!"
A short Pause, then, "Dread Clampitt."
Another pause, longer. Her brow wrinkles, she looks away and then says, "I don't know what you'd call it. They're sort of ...Bob Dylan-ish."
Well, not quite. Bust most everyone struggles to describe the sound produced by the quartet named after the unlikely combination of Jamaican Dreadlocks and Jed Clampitt, of The Beverly Hillbillies fame.
Inside the small club, people are packed elbow-to-elbow, feet slapping and heads bobbing to a sound that blends a hint of early-Dylan folksiness with a pinch of Caribbean spice, a dollop of serious Southern rock and a heaping helping of bluegrass twang.
The sound is impossible to pigeonhole, but is no more eclectic than the players.
Balder Saunders picked up a mandolin at age 7 and by junior high was a phenom on the pick-and-grin circuit. He later parlayed his Panama City school boy trumpet-playing into a gig witht the U.S. Marind Corps band, shich led to assignments in New Orleans and Okinawa, where Saunders was exposed to everything from funeral jazz to Far East zen funk before moving back to Florida to pick for a living.
Not long after moving to Grayton Beach, Suanders approached on-time Elvis bass player Duke Bardwell, who was overseeing a successful property management company by day and scratching a musical itch at night and on the weekends. Saunders was looking for a roommate. Serendipity dropped on him like an anvil. Waelier that same day, Bardwell had been contacted by his godson, Destin native Kyle Ogle. Burned out after a musical odyssey from L.A. to the Rockies, Ogle wanted to return to the beach and asked if Bardwell could recommend an inexpensive place to bunk.
Within days, Saunders and Ogle were living - and writing songs together - as Dread Clampitt.
Not long afterward, at a music festival in south Georgia, Saunders met Australian fiddle prodigy Justin Lewis Price-Rees who had recently come to America to reunite with south Georgia's Max Tillman, who had backed Price-Rees up Down Under when he won the first of his three Australian fiddle championships at the age of 14.
Price-Rees eventually joined the group, but it was clear something was missing. Bardwell was asked to come aboard as bass player. It turned out to be the missing piece of the puzzle.
"When he said yes, we were just bowled over," says Ogle. "It was just what we needed."
The band's fan base grew rapidly as they picked their way through nightclubs, restaurants and bars in the Panhandle and in festivals across Georgia and Florida.
The group was having a ball, but everywhere they went, the same question dogged them.
"People ask what to call it," says Price-Rees. "We don't know. It's just music. It's what we like to play and when we're together, well, it just clicks."
Rocks is more like it.
When he isn't ripping off a finger-bruising, string-bending riff, Ogle's punched-up back beats are the perfect counterpart to Barwell's rock-solid bass line. Together they create a rythmic pulse a Swiss watchmaker would envy. With Saunder's mandolin pick spewing notes bright as gemstones and Price-Rees by turns screeching like a Turkey in the Straw olld-timer or soaring symphonically above the others, the total effect is hard to describe and impossible to ignore.
They do it all without a drummer but you wouldn't notice from the wasy the crowd moves - clapping, stomping, singing along with some of the band's original tunes.
Until the road calls, regular local gigs keep the power turned on, including one that may be the biggest tribute to the band's popularity and drawing power: a noon to 3 pm Sunday gig at the Red Bar in Grayton Beach.
Travis Cox, the Red Bar's weekend manager, says it's no accident business increases threefold when Clampitt plays.
Asked to describe the band's sound, Cox says, "Bluegrass." But after a pause, he reconsiders. "Well," he says, "it's not. Not exactly. All I know is... it's good."
Where Dread Clampitt is concerned, that's one label nobody disputes.