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Business Office: 800-447-4509
(8 a.m. - 5 p.m. • Monday - Friday)
Power Outage Reporting
(Day, Night, Weekends & Holidays)
800-752-0025
SERVING THE SUWANNEE VALLEY OWNED BY THOSE WE SERVE 11340 100th Street • Live Oak, FL 32060
CEO’S CORNER
Michael S. McWaters Executive V.P./CEO
(8 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. • Monday - Friday, Lobby Hours)
Few things illustrate what it means to be a community like the start of a new school year. We see school bus drivers ferrying kids across town, police officers assisting with traffic and teachers working to educate students who will one day grow up to fill those roles themselves.
Back-to-school season is a reminder of just how much we have to pull together to make even the most routine events a reality. At SVEC, we’re proud to be part of a community filled with people who work hard for each other, and we strive to serve you with the same dedication every day.
Sometimes that commitment means doing our part to educate future generations about how cooperatives work and the role they play in our country. One way we’re able to do that is through the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association Youth Tour in our nation’s capital.
This year, SVEC sponsored two local students, giving them the opportunity to meet with lawmakers and other Youth Tour representatives from across the country. You can read more about their experience and what they learned in this newsletter.
At other times, building a stronger community is simply about bringing our members together and allowing them to share their stories.
This month, we took the opportunity to speak with one of our members, Bobby Barth, about his career as a guitar player for bands like Axe and Blackfoot. We think you’ll enjoy reading about his unique background and why he loves the Suwannee Valley.
I hope all of our members who are going back to school have a strong start to the academic year. As always, it’s an honor for all of us at SVEC to serve you.
Riley Boss saw the sponsor signs for Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative at sporting events and at functions around town.
But it wasn’t until she and Bryce Puckett, both high school seniors, attended the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association Youth Tour in Washington, D.C., that she realized the vital role their cooperative plays. They learned it’s about much more than providing electricity. It’s about serving the community.
Boss, of Branford, and Puckett, of Live Oak, participated in the Florida Electric Cooperatives Youth Tour of Tallahassee, earning the trip to Washington by scoring the highest on a written test on their knowledge of electric cooperatives and SVEC.
One of the speakers during the sevenday tour explained details about a cooperative’s function in a community, Puckett says. “I just thought they provided power, but they have such a big role in our community,” he says.
Cooperatives work for the sustainable development of their communities through policies supported by the membership. “They want to grow and become better, and it’s because they want to give back to our community,” Boss says. “We learned about the principles of the electric cooperative and how they relate to everyday life.”
While the 17-year-olds gained new knowledge about the cooperative model, they also learned about the government, including its connection with electricity regulations.
The teens met members of Congress and visited the Capitol, museums, monuments and memorials. “It was my first time in an art museum, and I loved seeing all the famous paintings I’d only seen before in pictures,” Puckett says.
An unexpected treat was a visit to the World War II Memorial on a day when a large number of veterans also visited, Boss says. “We were able to talk to them, and that was really cool,” she says.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Holocaust Memorial Museum were on the tour. “It was really interesting to learn about the history,” Puckett says. “We learned things we didn’t learn in school.”
The friendships made with teens from 46 states were unexpected, as well as the breadth of the learning opportunity. “It opened my eyes and gave me more respect for our country than I had before,” Boss says.
Bobby Barth’s first band would lose gigs when club owners found out he was playing.
It wasn’t that the young frontman had garnered a bad reputation — his talent as a lead guitarist and singer had already impressed other members of the Colorado-based band Wakefield — but at only 16 years old, some venues weren’t willing to risk their liquor license by letting him in the door.
“Usually I had to promise not to leave the stage. They’d put a chair up there at breaks, and I had to wait until the rest of the band came back,” Barth says. “When I turned 18 — that was when the drinking age was lower — I was pretty happy I no longer had to sit behind the PA system all night long.”
Barth would go on to tour the world with bands like Axe and Blackfoot. But despite his prowess with the guitar, his introduction to music came on the drums at just 8 years old while growing up in Florida.
When he met the other members of Wakefield after moving to Boulder in 1969, it was with the intention of auditioning to be their drummer. But with the spot already filled, he drew on the guitar basics he had learned from his stepfather. “My stepdad played with a lot of gusto,” Barth says. “It might not have been good, but it had a lot of heart.”
That foundation wasn’t much, but it was the beginnings of the high-energy guitar style that would become his signature.
By the time Wakefield disbanded in 1973, Barth already knew he wanted the same liveliness he had learned from his stepfather to define his
music. He started his own band, called Babyface, which recorded their first and only album in 1976 with the nowdefunct ASI Records.
The experience wasn’t a good one. The studio removed the band’s heavy rhythm guitars in post-production and replaced them with a symphonic string section. To make matters worse, they sped the songs up to make them shorter and more palatable for commercial radio.
“I sound like Mickey Mouse on that record,” Barth says. “We were furious about it and were going to sue the producer. But then one of the songs, a number in the vibe of ‘Blackbird’ called ‘Never in My Life,’ went to number 17 on the Cashbox music charts. So we were doomed.”
The band toured for another two years, playing to theaters full of people expecting the Carpenters who instead got music more akin to Pink Floyd. But out of the ashes of Babyface, Barth and two of the band’s other members formed what would later become Axe.
Characterized as a hard rock group, Axe originated in Gainesville and went on to sign deals with major labels MCA and Atlantic. But after recording four albums and a new hit song “Rock and Roll Party in the Streets,” Barth still felt the band’s studio recordings were lacking. “Here’s this incredibly heavy band that’s out touring with Judas Priest, and the album didn’t have any energy to it,” he says of Axe’s self-titled debut.
In 1983, the band released its last major label record, “Nemesis,” and completed a tour with Mötley Crüe. At that point, Barth began to reconsider his longstanding aversion to producing. Doing it himself seemed like the only way to shed the burdens of a
major label contract.
“When you’re a young player and you’re signed to a major label, there’s an incredible amount of pressure on you,” Barth says. “If you have a hit, then you have to have another one and another one. You have to tour, and you have to be writing while you’re touring.”
It was more than a decade before he was able to break out of that pattern with the recording of “V,” Axe’s fifth studio album. Released in 1997, the album was produced by Barth himself at his own Satellite Sound Recording studio in Burbank, California. The record proved to be a jumping-off point for a parallel career in the music industry.
Throughout the ’90s and until his retirement from the road in 2010, Barth continued to tour with acts like Angry Anderson and Blackfoot. But he worked just as hard in the production booth, making records for labels like MTM, Toshiba-EMI and Japan’s Zero Corporation at NEH Records in Denver, as well as his own studio in New Orleans.
A different path
In another life, Barth could have been a military man. He is proud of the nearly three years of his youth spent at St. John’s Military School in Salina, Kansas, and the heritage of his father, Navy Chief Warrant Officer Robert A. Barth.
But these days, Barth looks back on his music career without any regrets. Having spent a few years of his retirement recording guitar tracks remotely for various projects, he and his wife are now more than content to let bladesmithing and American Indian jewelry making take the place music once held in their lives.
In 2015, when they began considering where to settle down after a lifetime of globetrotting, it was north Florida that called them. Barth had fond memories of growing up in Chiefland before attending St. John’s, and he had often visited brothers and sisters living in the area. One of Barth’s former Blackfoot band members even lives down the road from his current home.
“We’ve lived everywhere, so all we wanted was to go somewhere very quiet where the people are nice and trustworthy,” he says.
After 48 years of making music, Barth is comfortable leaving his days of shredding guitar or engineering the perfect sound in the past. But he still finds himself coming across neighbors with hidden talents and wondering what might have been for them.
“You run into people in almost every town who are wonderful drummers, guitar players, bass players, singers. They just took a different path with their lives,” Barth says. “You have to respect that. Maybe that’s what I should have done, but I can’t say I regret my path.”
Weather radios, first-aid kits and lanterns can be ordered through links on SVEC’s webpage svec-coop.com/storm-supplies. Four percent of the purchase price will be donated to the United Way of Suwannee Valley.
Our SmartHub app gives you a convenient way to report an outage, monitor your electricity usage and manage your SVEC account from your smartphone or other mobile device.
the SmartHub app for an Android device at Google Play or simply scan this QR code.
Service Supervisor James Black retired on July 28 after serving SVEC’s members for 44 years. James is looking forward to spending more time with his family and catching up on home projects. He also hopes to do some traveling with his wife, Marolyn.
Journeyman Lineman Lawrence “Butch” Bradley retired on May 31 after nearly 28 years at SVEC. Butch plans to travel with his wife, Dorothy, take care of projects around the house, spend a lot of time with his grandchildren and take up fishing.
Welcome to Member Service Representative Maria Suarez. Maria comes to SVEC from Glades Electric Cooperative in Moore Haven, Florida.
Search our list of members who have unclaimed capital credits at svec-coop.com/unclaimed-credits
Do you have an interesting photo taken in the Suwannee Valley in the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s? If you do, please email an electronic file and caption to communications@ svec-coop.com or send a printed copy to SVEC Communications, P.O. Box 160, Live Oak, FL 32064. If you email a file, please make it the highest quality possible. Selected photos will be included in an upcoming newsletter and Facebook post, and submitters will receive an 80th anniversary travel drinking tumbler.
Young ladies attend a social event at Suwannee Valley’s headquarters in summer 1955.
SVEC invites all members to shred their unwanted confidential personal or business documents at our office (11340 100th St., Live Oak) on Saturday, Sept. 23, 10:00 a.m.-Noon.
During the free event, SVEC’s document security vendor, Shred-it, will have a shredding truck on -site to properly destroy documents.