The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page D004

4D pagelabeltag 4D THE PALM BEACH POST SATURDAY MARCH 28, 2009 Depp 'just another guy' back then MAGENTA BLACK 1 was getting to be 35 years old, and I didn't want to be that guy at the Publix with the long hair giving guitar lessons to everybody on the CHARLIE PICKETT Frustration led him to quit music, do law The Kids, one of the bands that were Charlie Pickett and the Eggs' contemporaries on the South Florida music scene, featured a guy named Johnny Depp. Pickett remembers Depp as lives in France, which didn't stop him from returning to the area in 2007 and 2008 to play memorial concerts for the late Sheila Witkin, a local band manager and den mother of the music scene. Pickett, who played both shows, says that the reaction to Depp was anything but normal "There were 200 people hanging around the gate with posters, screaming he says. "But he seems the same. It was just 'Hey how ya 'Hey, it's been a I had to say 'Great career, and he said Leslie Gray Streeter Depp "just another guy a good-looking guy who was just normal." Depp, is, of course, now a very good-looking Oscar-nominated movie star who Final Concerts of the Season! PICKETT from ID discs through their OPEN Records label in Miami.

"Why stop just because you didn't quote-unquote make it?" David Fricke, an admirer who reviewed the anthology in his "Fricke's Picks" column in Rolling Stone, says he wrote the review because "people deserve to know he's still there. What makes him special is that he did it, regardless." Pickett moved with his family from Ohio to Hollywood, Fla. when he was 2 years old. He picked up the guitar at age 18 when a friend showed him how to play three chords. After "10 days of struggle, it was like 'Wow, this is he says.

For a while, fun was all music was. Pickett went to the University of Florida to study political science, but quit school in his senior year to get married. The marriage didn't last, and "too depressed to go back to school," Pickett took a job running a front-end loader at a construction site. During that time, he played what he thought was just one show with some guys he knew, but was soon on a scene that included The Eat, the Cichlids, Z- Cars and The Kids, featuring a young guitar-slinger named Johnny Depp. Pickett played his brand of rock in dive bars.

He stood out. "Everybody else was in bondage pants and safety pins and spiked hair, and here Charlie was, clean cut with short hair and a completely white suit. And we were like says Wim-mer, who with Gottfried owned Open Books and Records. "Then he started playing, and it was full-tilt rock and roll. We looked at each other and went 'Yeah, we gotta do something with "Nobody breaks through at 35.

1 had enough." Guitarist Saltan, now with Florida band the Psycho Daisies, thinks "Charlie just stopped too soon. We were on the cusp of making it. We were ahead of that whole alt-country thing," he says. "I really believe that if we had stayed together another six months, we would have been signed. But Charlie couldn't take it anymore." Pickett hung up the guitar and went back to school, eventually getting a law degree at Thomas M.

Cooley Law School in Lansing, where he met his wife, Penny. Their son Ty is now 14. Pickett still played gigs sometimes, and says he was never bitter about how close he got to national fame. "You've got your memories. I mean, some part of you regrets that you didn't make it, but we went further than 99 percent of bands," he says.

Pickett also got a very loyal following of fans, including Bloodshot co-founder Miller, whose label is the home of Ryan Adams and punk legend Exene Cer-venka. Miller credits Pickett for inspiring him to enter the music business "This guy throws a pebble in a pond and 20 years later some dork running a label remembers him (and) wants to pay him back," Miller says. Bar Band Americanus includes a retrospective of Pickett's work and two new songs, including the song Penny Instead. The album's got him back on the road and momentarily in the spotlight. And while he's not quitting his day job, Pickett can once again, for 45 minutes, own a room.

"People say their glass is half empty?" he says. "My glass is nearly at the top! We got everything but the money." lesliestreeterpbpost.com What they did with Pickett was two singles, including 1979's Feelin', and the album Live At The Button. "He was salt of the earth, working class," Wimmer says. "By day, front end loader, by night, rock 'n' roller." For a minute there, it seemed like that workaday existence might morph into a more gloriously full-time rock and roll one. In July 1982, Live At The Button got a great review in Britain's famed music publication The Melody Maker.

Pickett and his band, the Eggs, were sure that stardom was just around the corner, not realizing that "we should have spent every penny we had to go over there to England and tour. We thought it would come to us." Pickett and the Eggs did know enough to hit the road domestically, hoping that they would be the band to break out of the South Florida scene "Everyone was like 'OK, Charlie will be he remembers. At the height of their touring, they were out 110 days in one year "I was known by thousands, unknown by millions," Pickett cracks. From 1984 to 1988, Pickett and The Eggs originally guitarist Johnny Saltan, bassist Dave Froshnider, and drummer Johnny "Sticks" Galway stuck it out. Pickett made Route 33 for Minneapolis' Twin Tone Records, home of the Replacements and Husker Du, and The Wilderness, released by local label Safety Net and produced by REM's Buck.

Both were critically beloved but commercially ignored. Frustrated and feeling that things were never going to break, Pickett called it quits. "I was getting to be 35 years old, and I didn't want to be that guy at the Publix with the long hair giving guitar lessons to everybody on the corner," he says. BOOHOO 'Haunting' not scary, but may leave you crying family members. Scared family members go to the library and find out all sorts of creepy things.

Family eventually runs screaming out of house. Yeah, so? Been there, done that. Or at least seen that. This family is run by Mom Sara (Virginia Madsen), whose teen son Matt (Kyle Gallner) is dying from some sort of vague cancer. To keep Matt near the hospital where he's being treated, Sara moves her family into a house that used to be a funeral parlor.

Now, how smart is that? Many gotcha-lite moments ensue as mysterious images pop up in mirrors and Matt starts seeing weird torture scenes from the past. Again, pretty typical stuff. The Haunting in Connecticut should have stayed in Connecticut. Rated: PG-13. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

Grade: C- ghost laundry? These sorts of questions can pop up while watching The Haunting in Connecticut. It's such a thoroughly typical ghost story. Family moves into house. Ghosts come out of the woodwork and scare By TOM LONG Detroit News Why do you never see a ghost in a bikini? Or an astronaut ghost? Or a naked ghost, for that matter? Where do ghosts shop for clothes? Who does their "I like the investigative reporting." Andy Bouchlas West Palm Beach "I am amazed how many stories have come out because of the investigative reporters," Andy says. "You can read The Post and feel like you've really gotten the complete story about what's happening." ok sitVe mom didn't have Foster i LOCAL.