For more than 40 years, Freddie Bye has been the soundtrack of late night in Marathon. 

He’s worked construction and fished commercially. He’s toured with a band. But for most of his life, he’s played wicked lead guitar in the town where he grew up.

Four nights a week, he takes the stage at 10 p.m. at the Brass Monkey. He straps on a guitar, taps a key or two on a laptop and launches into the first set. 

“When the people are having fun, that’s what’s good about it,” Bye said. “That’s my goal. That’s not my job. No, that’s not my job. That’s what I want. I want people to have fun.”

He’s had some form of that goal since his early teens.

Bye was born April 9, 1951. There was a little drama.

His mother and a friend of hers, Gladys Bass, both pregnant, both went into labor. The thing is, their husbands were both out fishing. 

“And so Captain Andy (the only policeman in town) came around and rounded up my mom and Gladys Bass, and put the light on the roof.” 

At James Archie Smith Hospital in Homestead, Freddie Bye came into the world.

“At 10 at night.”

How perfect is that?

He wound up playing in bands with Allan Bass, whose mother shared the ride to Homestead and who was born four hours after Bye was.

But he didn’t have to leave the house for musical influence. 

“I’d walk into somebody’s house and my mom sits at the piano and it’s like … all this kind of jumping Dixieland funky jazz stuff. … And I’m like floored, and just dumbstruck about how great she was at that, you know? And then she looked at me and she goes, ‘Oh, Freddie, I’ll teach you this if you want me to.’ And I go, ‘no.’ Like a stupid little brat. I could have had such a jump start if I hadn’t been such a brat.”

His first guitar was not a guitar.

“My mom was able to save up and get a ukulele. I was crushed that it was a ukulele instead of a guitar. I didn’t like the damn thing for a few days, but then I picked it up, tuned it like a guitar, and then that became my best buddy. I was on a skateboard around town. I’d take it to church, I’d take it to school. People were very tolerant of me, with my obsession.”

He attended Sue T. Moore School, where he bonded over music with friends. In a scene repeated across the country in those days, they formed a band.

“This band was running before the Beatles,” he said, “but when the Beatles came out, it was like, all the governors are off, we’re running. …  And we were practicing pretty much every day. We were good. I mean, it wasn’t my fault that we were good. It was (classmates) Jimmy and Allan and Walter and the whole unit.”

If guitar was an obsession, so were the drums. 

“I guess one of my first records was ‘Let There Be Drums’ by Sandy Nelson. (He plays the rhythm on the desk with his hands during the interview. It’s on YouTube; he’s playing it exactly the same.) I just lived on that. And so that’s it, I want to be the drummer. And there’s a band in town called the Recoils and … Paul Lindsay was the drummer, and he was fantastic. And I watched him play, and then when I got tired of watching him play, I would go watch the guitar player play, and I would take a notebook and I’d write down things that they were doing. And I was like a little twerp, a little kid that people ignored, writing down how to play those drumbeats and how to do those guitar chords and they’re like 16, 17, 18 and I’m 12 in there watching them play. They would chat with me and say, ‘You like this stuff, huh,’ because I’m like zoomed in.”

An early guitar influence was Verb Freeman. “He had a barbershop here and … we would go listen to him play after school. Every melody had a different chord with it, like those jazz players – stuff that I have no clue about, never will have a clue. But it was awesome watching him.”

In the band – the Ultraviolets – he wanted to be the drummer. 

“We had a drummer, Walter, and he was okay. I was better. They all knew I was better, but the decision was made. … ‘Freddie, you have to play lead guitar.’ I said, ‘Oh no, I’m the drummer.’ And they go, ‘Well, Walter doesn’t know how to play guitar. You know how to play guitar better than all the rest of us.’”

The repertoire initially came mostly from the 1950s – Ritchie Valens, the Ventures. Jimmy Irwin, the lead singer, “knew hundreds of those. He knew all the Jerry Lee Lewis stuff. He knew the Elvis stuff. And he would play rhythm, And we would just watch him. We would just pretty much circle around Jimmy because Jimmy learned from his older brother, Don.”

“I think the first time we played in Marathon, it was at the American Legion. And then we played there again. We’re kids. It wasn’t really about the money then, at all. We would get paid a little bit. A few dollars, a couple of dollars. My mom actually made a chart of how much we made. And she kept that up for quite a long time: ‘$3 each, $4 each,’ whatever it was. And so we played the American Legion a couple of times, then people had been renting the Chamber of Commerce building (across from the Marathon Yacht Club) … That was where people would dance and things like that.

“This is serious. It’s like the Ed Sullivan show. That’s what we wanted. We were practicing all the time. We’re working very hard.”

Ed Sullivan didn’t come calling. But soon enough, the world got a little bigger. The band played on Big Pine and in Islamorada. 

“We’re playing for people that were 60, 65, 70, that would come in and dance,” he said. “In 1963, ’64, we’re playing everywhere. We’re playing all over town.”

High school came and went. Bye enrolled in college in Key West.  

“I would go to Key West, to college down there, and come back and we would play on the weekends and then go back to school. And one day, coming back on the weekend, I guess it was Christmas break. Jimmy goes, Nick Aldacosta has an audition for us at the Pub, and I go, ‘The Pub?’ … I’m not playing any bar.’ 

“And that was my attitude about that. It was about concerts, it was about the ‘Ed Sullivan Show.’ It wasn’t about bars. It’s still a bit of a thorn. And I’ve been doing it since that audition, because we passed the audition, and then we started working in the bar, and that was the end of college.”

Eventually, the lead singer left the band. 

“So that’s when I kind of got thrown into the singing thing,” he said. “Not really my cup of tea. But, you do what you got to do.”

“I know that I sure liked playing music better than fishing. And better than construction work. But that was not an inspiration to grind into it. Grinding into it was natural. It’s still natural. I go home and it’s what I do. If I’m not eating, sleeping or playing tennis, it’s it. People probably can’t tell because I’m playing quite a few of the same songs for the past forever. But I’m working on the drums. The drums, the drums, all the time.” 

He is the first to admit he’s been hard on drummers during his career.  Maybe, he said, that’s because he is still that frustrated drummer who had to play guitar in that early band. 

And now, he is the drummer. 

The drum track that plays along with him? With the exception of a half-dozen or so songs by Marathon native Brendan Miller, that’s Freddie Bye. 

“Everybody, if they come to the Brass Monkey, they’re going to hear my drumming. And a lot of people don’t know that. They probably figure I bought it from some computer person or it’s computer-generated. It’s not computer-generated.”

If he has been a fairly constant presence in Marathon for decades, he’s seen changes – including in what is his workplace, especially from before it was his workplace.

“The Monkey was posh. Like, really, really, really posh. Like, upscale, upscale. Same size, same building. There wasn’t a stage. … There were small, round tables with massive chairs that you would sit in.” 

It was a bar. There was no food. 

“And they were not going to have any (live music). Time went on and the whole upscaleness of it wore thin after a while. The hoity-toity snooty part. (It got) old to people, even if they were a bit hoity-toity, I think. They ended up going there, then going back to listen to us play in Duck Key or wherever we were at the time. 

“So they started a little … calypso band called the Islanders. They played folk songs in the folk era. And they had a pretty little girl singing there. So they were having this background folk thing going, and they were really good. I went and heard them. They were great. They were good at what they did.”

He said that made a path for other musicians, as the country’s taste shifted from folk. 

“It’s turning into a rock ’n’ roll place,” he said. “I didn’t play there for a few years. I was playing other places. We would skip around a little bit, three weeks here, three weeks there. That became part of that rotation. There was a place called the Idle Hour (in Marathon) I played at. Ended up playing there for like seven years straight, pretty much.”

“I started playing … steady at the Brass Monkey when my daughter was 3. So that would be like about ’83. And I’ve kind of been walking around saying, ‘Well, I’ve been there 42 straight years,’ but that’s not true. I had a little beer and wine bar in between. It was a disaster. Across from Herbie’s. It was called Freddie’s Music Bar or something like that. I played there. I tended bar there. Cleaned the place and did everything.”

Still, he almost certainly has played longer at one venue than any other musician in Marathon, and would be near the top in the Keys.

Along the way, he picked up another obsession: tennis.

“John Bartus asked me to play. I said, ‘I don’t know how to play.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I’ll teach you, I’ll show you.’ And so we went out and he beat me really bad, and pissed me off, so I went and bought a couple of tennis racquets.” Bye is still a regular at the Marathon Community Park courts.

Occasionally, musicians who are on vacation have stopped by. Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys joined Bye onstage. So did Clarence Clemons, the late saxophone player for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

“He was a big old guy. Oh, it was amazing. He sat down and we got a microphone for him. The place was fairly busy and I go, ‘Are there any keys that you like to play in more than other keys?’ I want to make this pleasant for him and make it work for him. And he goes, ‘No, just do what you do.’ And so I started playing and it was like the most beautiful thing ever. The sound. I don’t know how people usually feel about their voices. I’m not even going to say how I feel about my voice, but I am going to say that when he was playing the saxophone behind my voice, it’s the first time I ever really loved my voice, ever. He was so, so good. So I could see why Bruce kept him around. He was magical. It really was magical.”

These days, when he takes the stage, he doesn’t have a prepared set list. He operates on instinct, watching the audience. He can draw from a deep pool of songs by musicians including Stevie Ray Vaughn, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

All those songs’ drum tracks are on the laptop. “But something usually will pop in my head and go, ‘okay, try this’ or whatever. For the dancing girls, ‘Play That Funky Music, White Boy’ would be one of them. Sometimes ‘Satisfaction’ is a good song. The girls like ‘Brown-Eyed Girl.’ 

“If they’re talking, I feel like they’re having fun because they’re in conversation with somebody that they obviously want to have a chat with. So, that’s good. It’s not about me, really. It’s about whatever works for them. If there’s some pretty girls out there dancing and there’s a lot of people watching the girls dancing, we’re good. It doesn’t have to be about me, or the music or whatever.

“I’m just trying to figure out ways to make them have fun, that’s all. Just put the most joyous moments that I can put together, that’s the goal.”

Freddie’s favorites

Male singer: Jimmy Barnes is from Australia. He has a band called Cold Chisel. Yeah, he’s got my favorite male voice ever.

Female singer: Allie Sherlock (Irish busker): I like a lot of female singers, but the one I like that stuck out for me mostly in the past few years is Allie Sherlock.

Song to play: True Love (written by Freddie Bye). It’s gone through periods where it’s some big, big hit, and people want to hear it every night, over and over again, and then it’ll kind of fade into oblivion for a few months. I haven’t played it much in a while, but it kind of comes in and out of favor with people. 

Favorite guitar: A Gibson SG with the initials FB on it. I can’t play it any more because it’s been too many years on it, I guess. I played it every night for work about 15 or more years.

Guitarist, dead or alive, he’d like to meet: Django Reinhardt (one of the first major jazz guitarists to emerge from Europe). Listen to “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Most underrated guitarist: Kenny Wayne Shepherd. You don’t hear it on YouTube. You don’t hear it on records. If you get a chance to hear him live, yeah, he’s the guy.

Musician, non-guitarist, dead or alive, you’d like to see: Leon Russell. I’ve seen him three times. Without a doubt, the most wonderful thing. 

Male tennis player: Roger Federer.Female tennis player: Monica Seles. She’s, to me, the best tennis player, period.