“My particular dream or passion wasn’t to be a weekend warrior, cut up the cash backstage,” says Denny Cook, 62, a founding member and the band’s frontman and treasurer. The gravel-voiced Cook joined the group at 26 after a career as a DJ. This is the only band he’s ever been in. “I wanted it to be some sort of structured business,” he explains. When the band officially incorporated in 1984, “I was very pleased.”
Instead of “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll,” Cook was inspired by “paid workman’s compensation, unemployment insurance and social security and Medicare taken out of the check” — all of which, Cook firmly declares, are provided by the Southern Maryland Band, trading as the Fabulous Hubcaps. Cook adds, “I’d really like to emphasize that we are an American tax-paying organization.”
Drummer Barry Holober, 59, in whose large kitchen we are sitting, joined the band in 1982, and since then, he says, he has “not missed a paycheck going on 30 years.” Like most Washingtonians, the band is paid on the 15th and end of every month.
“It might not be a lot some of the time, but it’s always going to be something all the time,” says Cook.
It’s the fantasy of every kid who picks up a guitar to play music for a living. Which is exactly what the Hubcaps are doing, but the band members are living lives that more closely resemble those of electricians than hotel-room-trashing rock stars. There’s a lesson here for those starry-eyed kids and the gazillion hipster Brooklyn bands vying to be the next big thing: Electricians are always in demand. So, too, are workaday musicians who give the people what they want.
Only two of the Hubcaps have day jobs, and that’s by choice. Singer-keyboardist Tommy Dildy, 65, is a sales manager for an audio-visual rental company in Beltsville. Saxophonist Don Mark, 62, works in marketing for the Baltimore Orioles. Mark says he told owner Peter Angelos that the band comes first. “And he’s cool with that.”
The corporation includes a manager and a four-man crew who drive to gigs in a large company-owned truck filled with many thousands of dollars’ worth of speakers, lights and cables. “We’re self-contained,” says bass player Jan Zukowski, 60, who became a Hubcap eight years ago after spending 29 with the Nighthawks, the only D.C. band older than the Hubcaps (by two years). The spiky-haired Zukowski appreciates stability — his marriage has lasted 39 years, also rare in the music business.
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