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Pipes & Drums' Youngest Shows Major Talent

Tribune photo by correspondent KEVIN HOWE.

The kilt-clad band delights in keeping Celtic music alive by performing at venues from golf courses to churches across the Bay area.

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By JANIS D. FROELICH | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 5, 2008

SEMINOLE HEIGHTS - The first time Michael Lo Bue played the haunting "Amazing Grace" on bagpipes for an audience, he recalled people were reduced to tears.

Not because the repentant tune — usually played at funerals — touched emotions that day in the early 1990s.

"It was because I was so horrible," said Lo Bue, a self-taught musician with a keen brand of self-effacing humor.

Lo Bue, 44, has depended on his ability to laugh at life's challenges along with his natural musical ability as one of the younger members of the St. Andrew's Pipes & Drums of Tampa Bay.

Lo Bue has been a member of the kilt-clad band since 1993, about two years after he bought bagpipes from a newspaper classified ad.

"I begged for bagpipes when I was growing up," he said. "My parents bought me an organ and headphones instead."

The Seminole Heights resident not only plays the bagpipes for the band, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary, but is pipe major, meaning he performs solos.

Because of his technology skills — he's a producer at the St. Petersburg city-owned TV channel — he also compiled a CD. "St. Andrew's Pipes & Drums of Tampa Bay: Take To The Field" was released in 1999 after Lo Bue spent four years working on it in his spare time. The disc ($18 with shipping and handling) contains 20 tracks, ranging from "Murdo's Wedding" to "Comin' Through the Rye." The entire band participated in the performances, often accompanied by brass and woodwind instruments plus a pipe organ.

Lo Bue said he wants to update the CD to commemorate the band's anniversary.

Lo Bue also has created an entertaining Web site for the band, www.standrewsband.com. Along with categories to hear and see the band, visitors to the site can "smell the band." Click on the link and there's a "Band" brand of deodorant.

St. Andrew's is one of the largest, oldest bands of drummers and pipers in the Southeast. Fitting in to this legendary band was fun for Lo Bue. On his first bus trip with the musicians to Atlanta, they offered him shots of Scotch. He's not a Scotch drinker but had some anyway.

"I slept all the way to Valdosta," he said.

Lo Bue said the band books about two or three engagements a month. The pipers and drummers practice weekly but take the summer off.

Among his most thrilling performances are when he has opened golf tournaments at 7 a.m. by strolling across the misty greens playing bagpipes. He's also heard on an album by heavy metal group Iced Earth in a spirited rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner."

The kirkin' o' the tartans, a call to Scots to remember their roots, is another ceremony Lo Bue enjoys performing with the band, which has marched the aisles of several Bay area churches. During the services, church members bear plaid banners denoting different Scottish families. "People think of Scots as curmudgeons," said Bunny Pearce, a bass drum player. "But with this group that couldn't be further from the truth. They're the funniest people I know."

Pearce, who joined an earlier version of the band in 1975 when it was known as the Bay Area Pipes & Drums, said she, too, had a childhood dream to play drums. But with a mother who suffered migraines, that didn't seem possible. When she reached her 20s, Pearce brought a drum home before signing up for the band.

"The band is the best thing that ever happened to me," said Pearce, 59. "I would have never traveled the way I've done."

The Odessa resident said she also has made lasting friendships. She praised Lo Bue for putting together the CD.

"Michael engineers everything. And it's a good mix," she said.

"I didn't know we sounded so good," said South Tampa resident Jim Hargan. He supplied the CD cover's photograph of Craigievar Castle in Scotland.

Hargan, who plays bagpipes, said he learned the instrument after a few years of attending a military tattoo, an evening of pageantry in Dunedin, a city known for its Celtic heritage.

On his 50th birthday, the now 82-year-old told himself, "You're over the hill. If you don't start doing the things you've always wanted to do, it will be too late."

The 40 band members are trying to learn new songs for the CD.

"It's been a slow process," Hargan said.

"It's not so difficult for me being a drummer," Pearce said, "but the pipers really struggle."

She said what she likes best about the band is that it's not competitive.

"We don't have great pressure where you have to play your brains out," she said. "It's a good, sociable group."

Reporter Janis D. Froelich can be reached at (813) 835-2104 or jfroelich@tampatrib.com.

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