[altroots] Fwd: Fw: Sad News to Pass on...

I was asked to send along this message from one former ROOTer, about another former ROOTer.



From: Brian Everhart <bceverhart13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Jun 16, 2005 8:23 PM


St. Petey Twigs (aka Barry Cuda) from the old Silver King Band reports
from Key West..

    Angela Altieri (Flo Mingo to her fans) slipped away from us just over
two weeks past her fiftieth birthday on May 16, 2005 at a hospice
near Hamburg, Germany after a ten year battle with cancer. It's hard
for me to write objectively about Flo. I am still in love with her
twenty years after we broke up as a couple and the Silver King Band
parted ways. We met and fell in love in 1975 as art students in
Florence, Italy. We both graduated from Eckerd College in St. Pete a
year apart and headed out to bohemian San Francisco in 1977. For her
23 birthday I gave her a book on bicycle touring in Europe and low
and behold, summer of 1978 we took off and did just that for over a
year. How many people would up and do that? We settled back in St.
Pete in fall of 1979. I became involved with the organization
ROOTS-Regional Organization of Theatres South- and Angela- then a
waitress at Aunt Hatties- came into contact with performing arts
people of all kinds and liked it. Her visual art training was stalled
at the time. I was performing with a medicine show revival and had
been invited to perform at the Festival of Fools in Amsterdam 1980.
One of the guys in our troupe could not make the journey and I
cajoled Angela into donning a washboard, singing, and
performing.baptism by fire at an international theatre fest! She was
a natural performer blessed with a wonderful voice. The medicine show
ended and Angela and I took off on yet another bicycle tour of Norway
that summer. We used her washboard (manufactured by the "Silver King
Washboard Co.") as a rack on the back of the bike, as a table, as a
percussive instrument and, oh yes, as a washboard. One thing led to
another and I was hired for a month to play in Horton, Norway. Angela
sat in a couple of nights and the owners of the club insisted we stay
an additional month with Angela as part of the show. It was during
this time she began to blossom as a performer.

     Upon our return to St. Pete we ran into Rock Bottom at Circus
McGurkis 1980. Nick Danger and the Heat- a band Rock had formed- had
fired him. I asked him if he wanted to play music with us and tour
Europe. He said yes.  Our first gig as the "Silver King Band" was on
New Year's Eve, 1980 at the Big Apple West. Our collective philosophy
was that if you combined craftsmanship with showmanship you didn't
need the usual musical instruments (guitar, bass, and drums) to win
and hold an audience. Rock and I were such bizarre cartoon characters
on stage that I believe the audience related to us through Flo Mingo.
She was a natural entertainer; blessed with a strong voice, excellent
rhythm, graceful stage presence, and a streak of exhibitionism. She
also "got it". Too many musicians think they have to be playing lots
of notes all the time. Flo inherently understood the Miles Davis
dictum, "play the notes that are not there". She'd pull back from a
serious scrub rhythm to just nail a backbeat for a while. To spare us
from the hard rat-a-tat-tat of thimble on washboard she pioneered the
use of drum brushes. She wore out so many washboards we finally took
one apart and dipped it in chrome. Then, Eddie Kirkland took it home
and carved out three holes in it with a pocket knife and wired it
with three little mics he had snagged from old 1960's cassette
recorders. Viola, the first electric washboard? It was the last
washboard she ever needed. Her visual arts education found direction
through her costume choices as well as the decorating of her
washboard. We were just so different and obviously having such a good
time performing, people both stateside and in Europe embraced us. We
spent half our time in Europe and the other half in the Tampa Bay
area. We were not really interested in starvation tours of the
greater USA and never really attempted to branch out over here.

      For me the downside of her rising career was the adulation from her
male fans and the affairs that followed. I believe it eventually led
to our breakup as a couple as well as a band. She found a good man
in Joerg Hoffmeyer- a psychotherapist based in Hamburg. After
dealing with me and Rock for five years I guess there is some
symmetry there. We parted ways as a couple and a band in 1985. She
formed the Hokum Hepsters later that year using the Reverend Billy
Wirtz on piano as well as Chief Billy and Rose Romance and toured
Northern Europe. They actually got mo' better press than Rock's new
band "The Cutaways"- of course, she could wiggle in ways that Rock
Bottom couldn't. I think it was important for her to prove to
herself that she had grown enough as an artist that she could fly
without me and Rock. After the success of that brief tour, she
stopped performing for a while and concentrated on family, becoming
a mother when her son Shawn was born in December, 1986. She was
living in Germany and pregnant with him when Chernobyl happened.
Hmmmm.cancer..makes you wonder? After a short hiatus to care for her
newborn son and husband, we revived the Silver King Band on a
sometime basis in 1988 and she began playing with German based blues
players as well. Two worthy German based bands she performed with
regularly over the last decade are "The Mudsliders" with Steve Baker
and Dick Bird and "Bluesphoria" with Henry Heggen and Brian Barnett.
Both bands released excellent compact discs. Blues veteran and
childhood friend of Muddy Waters, Eddie Boyd dubbed Angela "Queen of
the Washboard" in 1983 and it's hard to disagree. I'm proud to have
been able to get past our breakup and come to cherish her new
family. I'm also proud to have helped her discover and nurture her
performance abilities and to have shared the stage with her (and
Rock). I'm sad that she will not be around to relive and laugh at
the many mutual personal memories we had in our travels. I'm sad she
leaves a grieving son and husband. And I'm sad that we all are
denied her talents as a performing artist, a caring, loving human
and what more might have come. She would have enjoyed knowing how
many people have come forward since her death to vouch for her
influence on their artistic lives. I cannot believe that after
twenty years her passing grieves me so.

      Rock Bottom gone and now Flo. Shit! If I had known I was going to
live this long I think I would have abused my body more. I'm going
miss you, Angela. You were a ray of light in my life.

Note: There will be a celebration of Flo Mingo/Angela Altieri's life at
Skipper's Smokehouse in the afternoon of Sunday, July 24 from 1-5 pm.
Angela's husband Joerg and son Shawn will be bringing both old Silver King
Band CDs as well as previously unavailable CDs she cut with the Mudsliders
and Bluesphoria from Germany. Angela's family really wanted to do
something of this sort back in Tampa Bay because they knew how many
important friends and fans she had here. This is a great chance to collect
more of her discography and help defray some travel costs and medical
bills still facing them. A $10 (non-obligatory) donation is requested. But
just come out and show some love.

The blues live on.                 Peace, Twig

Angela Altieri (aka Flo Mingo) discography (vocal and/or washboard)

1981 -  My Balls are Blue b/w Loving Machine (w/ the Silver
King Band) 45 rpm record

1883 -  Live at the Dive (w/ the Silver King Band) LP

1989 -  Our Very Best Woogie (w/ the Silver King Band) Cassette

1991 -  Escape From the Planet of the Bar Managers (w/ the Silver King
Band) CD

1994 -  Blues, Shuck, and Jive (w/ the Silver King Band) CD

2000 -  Loves So Good (w/ Bluesphoria) CD

2001 - Spirit's Gonna Rise (w/ the Mudsliders) CD

2005 - Across The Border ( w/ Yellow Moon) CD





--

Kathie deNobriga
PO Box 1087
Pine Lake GA 30072  USA
(404) 299-9498 phone & fax
(678) 427-9673 cell

"To stumble is not to fall, it's just a way to move forward more quickly."
        Ben Cohen, co-founder Ben & Jerry's

"If you fall down, do it again 2 more times. They'll think it's part of the choreography."
Nick Condos, tap dancer extraordinaire


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