I would like to first thank everyone for visiting our website, registering and contributing, whoever you are. YOU ROCK. Consider this a combined thank-you from Peter, Matt and myself - the participating members of this Sq2 reconstruction.
Secondly - I would like to thank Peter for taking my suggestion of a 25 year Squirrel reunion seriously 2 years ago… We all owe him a huge round of applause for, at the very least, creating this website. I try to help out here when I can and have been the “keeper of the rehearsal tapes / chief archivist”, but for the most part, mainly the content, architecture and engineering of the site, Peter is responsible. The same can be said for nearly all of the the songs of The Squirrels.
Thirdly - I’d like to thank Russ, who has appeared to have retained brain cells full of detailed memories of some gray areas during our early years as a band. Without Russ we would not have our wonderful 4 song EP from 1982 to listen to now. It is the best we ever captured. He has proven to be a great beta tester of the functions of the website for a few months and will forever be a Squirrel, even if squirrels aren’t a indigenous species in Hawaii.
Fourthly - I’d like to thank Paul for his guitar playing skills, his wonderful voice, musical brotherhood and his lifelong friendship. Paul, I hope you show up here at least to shoot the shit - but I completely understand why you can’t do the gig. It’s all good and you are great.
Okay - enough thanking… I was getting sick of it myself.
I hope that this place can become a place that might bring back familiar faces and introduce new people to the mix. This is a website devoted to a band called The Squirrels, just a band, but minstrels in tune with an extended family of friends that grew through the years of our union. Years later it is so clear to me that even though we failed to “make it big” - we made it through and are here now, in some form. At least we aren’t battling some huge record company for rights to the songs.
The diversity of people who frequented the downtown wilmington music scene was unique - from the town “Blue Velvet” was filmed in, you might have a mixture of - lawyers, architects, public officials, punks, potheads, absolute drunken wretches or snake wielding photographers attend your shows. Usually the unsual happened - Wilmington was not the “big city”, but what that afforded you was the fact that you could indeed be “big time”, if at least for a weekend.
The end result of this period for The Squirrels was - we never left town. We played nearly every bar/club in Wilmington.
Yet we weren’t the average bar band - quite the exception - we wanted people to think and dance, not just drink and dance, although drinking and dancing was what usually happened now that i think about it.
I have always felt that the times I experienced during the Squirrel days were exceptional beyond comparison to what I might have experienced in a “normal life”. This SQ2 Re-Construction project has been fun for me, re-uniting in a project with Peter and re-visiting the golden years through our rose colored glasses. I’m dreaming here… I hope this all goes down good and people have fun.
Love,
Danny Love
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