If you grew up in South Florida in the mid-eighties you were all over a band called Charlie Pickett and the Eggs. Charlie Pickett had a hell-rockin' band that played hopped up greasy bar rock about drug addicts, whores, and love gone wrong. Think Rolling Stones circa 1969-72 but filtered through late 70's and early 80's punk. Like a handful of other bands of that era, whose under appreciated and under-known work continues to resonate in strange and unprecedented ways today, these musicians flew under the radar, worked without a net, without a blueprint, without direct forebears and with little regard for the musical bones they picked over. Rising out of the fertile and groundbreaking underground music scene of the Southeast in the early 80's, CP and the Eggs (and later the MC3) were all motorcycle boots and sneers, and rode a squall of throat-grabbing feedback and Stonesy musical middle fingers. They were as much Thunders and Reed as anything country and their tales of scoring in Miami projects ("Overtown”), cowboy dreams ("A On Horseback") and laconic survivors' humor were unlike anything being heard on the nascent college rock circuit. For proof, check out “Liked It A Lot,” the love song that didn't just hurt, but had a streak of existential horror in it that STILL raises the hair on our battered souls. Charlie Pickett and his boys took the understanding of roots and rock and morphed and molested it and came up with something utterly original. Their fearless dismissal of stylistic straitjackets was pure punk and emblematic of a time when the rule book had been tossed out and the possibilities seemed as endless as the horizon Charlie wrote about riding towards.

Pickett forged his brawling-roots mix of Johnny Thunders, Sun Records and trailer park Lou Reed in Florida bars, then bottled it to in-your-face effect on hot vinyl. That rattle 'n' smack now sounds raucously prescient. like a long-lost high-time link between the Replacements and the Drive By Truckers.He signed to the Minneapolis label Twin-Tone (home of the Replacements, Soul Asylum, etc), got a little radio play up north and played a bunch of shows.

A friend Bob Mascaro taught him how to play guitar.  They were in the first and third acts of a play at the old Hollywood Playhouse.  They had nothing to do during the second act at rehearsals and performances so Bob decided to teach Charlie how to play.  After that, his cousin, Mark Markham, showed him the blues lead boxes and his journey began. 

A bit later when Mascaro was managing a local up and coming bandt 'The Cichlids', he took Charlie and his new band The Eggs on as a favor, and got them booked into the Premier Club with the Reactions and The Eat.  The club owner seemed to like them and kept bringing us back.  Ted Gottfried and Leslie Wimmer then started their record label and at that time Charlie was playing with Johnny Salton, Dave Froshneider, and Johnny Galway.  Things took off a bit for them at that point.

Bar Band Americanus

Like a lot of other dateless suburban teenage boys, Charlie was heavily into the Rolling Stones from about 1967 to 1972.  Nearly every night, Charlie found himself going to sleep with the records spining the sounds that would become an influence on his music for the rest of his career. The influences are easy to spot, old bloozers like Son House and Howlin' Wolf, rockers like the Yardbirds and Velvet Underground. It's also easy, in retrospect, to draw the lines between Charlie Pickett and Green on Red, the Gun Club, a more hillbilly Dream Syndicate and a more art damaged Jason and the Scorchers. At the time, though, what they were doing with their influences came out of the slums and swamps of Miami like a tormented yowl.

f you accept the premise put forth by Keith Richards that the title of "greatest rock and roll band in the world" is determined on a nightly basis, then we want to tell you about some guys that owned it on quite a few nights in the 80's, a band that, for a variety of reasons, fell through the cracks and never got the recognition they deserved. Twenty plus years on, we're aiming to rectify that with the release of Bar Band Americanus: The Best of Charlie Pickett and ... Joining a big handful of other bands of that era, whose underappreciated and under-known work continues to resonate in strange and unprecedented ways today, these musicians flew under the radar, worked without a net, without a blueprint, without direct forebears and with little regard for the musical bones they picked over. Charlie Pickett and his boys took the understanding of roots and rock and morphed and molested it and came up with something utterly original. Their fearless dismissal of stylistic straitjackets was pure punk and emblematic of a time when the rulebook had been tossed out and the possibilities seemed as endless as the horizon Charlie wrote about riding towards. Recently Charlie has just completed recording “What I Like About Miami” for the Bear Family Records label in Germany last year, and having just about finished recording the same song with Bobby Tak and buddy Ian Hammond on guitar.  In between they keep active playing local club dates all around Florida and beyond.

When asked about his recording process, this is what Charlie has to say; “I write the music naturally—if you call blues riffing, “writing.”  The words are much more work.  If I a good line or theme comes to me, I try to write it down and transfer it to a notebook to use later.  For example, I was thinking about an old girlfriend and contrasting her to my wife, Penny, and it occurred to me that I could have been with a crazy nut, but I was so lucky to have been with Penny instead.  I wrote down several variations on that, like, “I could’a had crazy, but I got Penny instead.”  Eventually, building line on line, I wrote the song Penny Instead (which is one of my favorites).”

On Recording, Charlie was quoted in saying, "Look at the paper notes on the cover of Cosmo’s Factory – lean, clean, and bluesy.”