70-year-old music school student releases YouTube video recalling impact of Hurricane Ian

Andy Johnson and his wife Shirley stayed at home in Port Charlotte to ride out Hurricane Ian and ventured out the next day to see how the Category 4 storm had impacted his home of roughly seven years.

The world he encountered spurred the creation of a song “The Storm” that the 70-year-old Air Force veteran and retired quality control supervisor wrote and turned into a music video, along with the help of his teachers at the Rock Box Music School & Stage in North Port.

The video has so far received 20,000 views on YouTube.

Johnson’s house has a blue tarp on the roof, a missing pool cage, broken windows, and a pool now mostly clear of plants of debris.

Earlier: FEMA administrator tours North Port Disaster Recovery Center

Related: North Port retiree community ripped apart by Ian

“It’s slowly getting back to normal – as normal as it can be. The berms on either side of the road keep growing with debris,” Johnson said.

He and Shirley thought about evacuating but as forecasters kept moving the cone of the storm's projected path with every new update.

“We thought about leaving but we thought, 'damned if you run, damned if you don’t,'” he said, echoing a lyric from his song. “Because we don’t know which way it’s going.”

In case you missed it: FEMA administrator tours North Port Disaster Recovery Center

And: Extreme water flow from Ian led to erosion of Cocoplum Waterway

They lost power for nine days – a life-threatening situation since Johnson is a home dialysis patient who had to opt for manual dialysis until it came back.

“We were driving around looking for food and trying to find water and I was telling another guy, it’s kind of like dropping a pebble in the water,” Johnson said. “The first thing you do out of a hurricane is make sure you’re OK and your family’s OK and your house – what’s going on – and then the neighbors.

“And the next ring is street and the next ring is the subdivision and then: how’s the community doing?” he continued, and noted that when they passed the Port Charlotte Town Center mall and “the whole parking lot was nothing but bucket trucks and crews bringing linemen in from different states and it was just awe inspiring.”

Between that and images he saw shared on social media, Johnson wanted to help – but because of his kidney and heart problems, he was limited.

He said he talked to Angel Bartolotta, co-owner of the Rock Box, and said, "I can’t do the stuff that I used to do; I can’t lift stuff, I can’t cut wood but I’d really like to figure out some way to get some help to these guys.”

Inspiration sparked when he was watching TV reports after Ian.

“They were putting the reports up on the river and they said the Peace River was seven-something foot over flood stage – the highest flood stage – and the Myakka was getting ready to be record flood stage and I thought, ‘The Peace River’s at war and the Myakka’s risin’,’ and it’s one of those things that when it happened it just started happening.”

Those two thoughts – reversed as “The Myakka’s risin’, ThePeace River’s at war,” became the opening lines of the song.

Johnson, who wrote “COVID-19 Christmas,” which became an uplifting music video around the school in 2020, pitched the idea to Bartolotta, who then put out a call on social media for people to send in photos for the video.

“I had no idea what he had in mind,” Bartolotta said. “So he came in and played it for me once with the acoustic guitar and me – with the producer brain that I have – just started hearing all this other stuff in my head – 'let me do this, let me do that.'”

After Johnson laid down the basic tracks, Batolotta added bass, piano, cello, shaker samples and backing vocals. One of Johnson’s teachers, Joe Westall added 12-string guitar and background vocals and another teacher, Kelsey Mace, added background vocals too.

“He came in and heard it for the first time and he was crying – it was awesome,” Bartolotta said.

WSRZ, 107.9 FM has used the song to showcase some outreach efforts while at the Rock Box it’s a centerpiece for a fundraising campaign to help students impacted by Ian.

“There are a couple of our students that lost their homes, so we’re raising stuff specifically for them and I know they don’t want to quit their lessons, so a lot of people are pre-paying it forward with lesson vouchers for people,” Bartolotta said.

Johnson is quick to point out that both Westall and Mace helped him refine the lyrics and added that countless people contributed to the video through their digital images.

Bartolotta noted that Johnson is in the recording studio at the Rock Box all the time and the school will likely release a full length album.

Bartolotta and his wife Sally, co-owner of Rock Box Music School, had a booth last week at “Trick or Treat at City Center,” North Port’s safe Halloween celebration at city hall and people stopped by to comment on the song.

“People keep messaging us,” Bartolotta said, “and telling us how much it’s helped them get through it on an emotional level.”

Earle Kimel primarily covers south Sarasota County for the Herald-Tribune and can be reached at earle.kimel@heraldtribune.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription to the Herald-Tribune.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Port Charlotte music student Andy Johnson releases YouTube video about Ian