Join the Frederick film community for one of the many kick-off events for the Annual Frederick Film Festival. This is a free, non-ticketed community event to kick-off the Second Annual Frederick Film Festival.
The event will feature live entertainment, a world premiere of the documentary, The Skeptics: In a World of Their Own, and a reunion concert by Frederick legendary garage band– The Skeptics.Schedule of Events:
6:00pm – Happy Hour with music from The Jug Band
7:00pm – Regional short films
7:30pm – World premiere of “The Skeptics: In a World of Their Own” with director Keith Chester
8:45pm – The Skeptics Reunion Concert
The Skeptics, Frederick County’s legendary garage tour-de-force, began in earnest in a basement on Groundhog’s Day, 1984. Andrew McCutcheon (lead vocals and guitar) and Dennis Crolley (bass, keyboards, backing vocals), Middletown High grads and members of The Flood, hijacked Thomas Johnson High grads Ben Steen (guitar and backing vocals) and Stephen Blickenstaff (drums and backing vocals) from the Gelatin Skeletons after a show featuring both bands at the Braddock Heights Roller Rink. Pretty soon they were burning up amps, breaking drum heads, and refi ning their alternately inane and/or profound gestalt, which might best be described as surf-inspired Appalachian psychedelic garage punk. Within a matter of weeks, a remote recorder captured the band live in the Braddock basement which served as their bat-cave and the Skeptics enjoyed a successful run for the rest of the decade.
As the 1980s wound down, so did the band, playing its last gig at the 1989 In The Street festival in downtown Frederick (where some 5 years earlier it had made one of its first public appearances). After a nearly 20 year hiatus, The Skeptics emerged again to play a reunion show to a standing-room-only crowd at the Frederick Cultural Arts Center on August 4th, 2007.
Plans evolved around the future of the band and included mining the archive of recordings, some never before released, and converting them to a digital format for online distribution, as well as recording new material and previously unrecorded songs from The Skeptics’ original repertoire. Recently, several Skeptics songs were featured in indie and major film releases, Grave Mistakes and The 13th Alley, respectively.
Following the reunion show, longtime friend of the band Keith Chester, now a Baltimore area filmmaker, began the documentary film, The Skeptics: In a World of Their Own.
