Squawk 7700 — Clingy Bear Music

The band

Five people who learned the same lesson in different emergencies.

June “Junie” Calloway

Lead vocals / rhythm guitar

Six years as an ER triage nurse at Sacred Heart before she quit the quiet way — by simply not renewing her contract and feeling guilty about the relief. She started singing because the night-shift nurses in the break room at 4 AM needed something that wasn’t the vending machine hum. Warm the way a trauma blanket is warm: functional, not decorative. She keeps a list on her phone of every patient she couldn’t save and has never shown it to anyone, including the band.

Theo Marchetti

Lead guitar / backing vocals / principal lyricist

A high school physics teacher for four years who quit the week a student asked whether anything he’d taught would matter if the world ended — and he couldn’t answer. He writes the band’s lyrics in bulk-bought black Moleskines, forty-one filled so far, and plays a battered Telecaster with a cracked pickguard he refuses to replace because “the crack is load-bearing.” The band’s overthinker and secret romantic: every song needs one line that could be carved on something.

Marcus Webb

Bass / backing vocals

Eight seasons as a wildland firefighter, three as crew boss, retired from the line with a knee that predicts weather. He is the reason the band exists and the reason it still exists — he has twice driven to every member’s house individually and not left until a breakup was fixed. He plays bass the way he did everything on the line: no flash, no missed cues, the part you only notice when it’s gone. The 7700 story is his family’s: his flight-instructor father, calm as tap water over the Cascades, keying the mic with one engine windmilling.

Ren Okafor

Drums

A former D1 400-meter sprinter whose hamstring ended the scholarship dream sophomore year. Drumming was rehab that became identity — she plays like a sprinter, all explosive precision and held breath, with the best internal clock the local scene has produced in a decade. Fiercely competitive, secretly sentimental: she keeps every setlist, ticket stub, and broken stick in labeled boxes. She wants to be taken seriously as a musician and not as “the young one,” which makes her the hardest worker in the room.

Silas “Sly” Brandt

Keys / samples / noise / whatever’s broken

An EMT for two years who washed out, by his own cheerful admission, because he “cared too much and slept too little, which it turns out is the whole job.” Now he scores the band’s emergencies from the other side: analog synths, field recordings, radio static, the hold music of crisis. He builds his own pedals and names them after failed relationships, and he has 400+ hours of van audio he’ll “edit someday.” Chaos with a heart condition — metaphorical; Junie checked.

The story so far

It started with a Craigslist ad in 2017. It’s still going because nobody quits over a song.

2017 — The ad. Marcus answers a Craigslist post: “Bassist wanted. Must have own gear, own transportation, and no opinions about my lyrics. — T.” The audition is in a storage unit off Trent Avenue with no heat. Marcus plays three notes and Theo hires him mid-song.
2018 — The encore incident. Junie heckles Theo’s between-song banter from the crowd (“play the song, professor”), then gets on stage during the encore when the singer no-shows, sings harmonies she learned from the audience, and never leaves. The no-show is fired by group text before the gear is loaded out.
2019 — Ren joins. First breakup. A flyer at the bike shop — “Drummer wanted. Must be louder than our problems” — brings nineteen-year-old Ren. Later that year a $600 guarantee in Seattle splits the band over money; Marcus does the first of his legendary house-to-house diplomacy tours, and the makeup show, played for free, is the best set they’ve ever played.
2020 — Silas climbs on stage in Boise. The band’s laptop dies mid-set; Silas, there to heckle a friend’s band, climbs up with a synth and a field recorder and improvises the rest of the set. They pay him in gas money and keep him. That October they demo eleven songs in six days in a rented cabin near Priest Lake — no cell service, one generator.
2021 — The Knitting Factory break. A touring act’s opener loses a van in Missoula; Squawk 7700 plays to 400 people, sells every shirt they own, and Marcus fixes the headliner’s bass rig during soundcheck. Over diner pancakes in Boise they decide, explicitly: this is the job now.
2023 — They turn down the deal. A label offers a contract on one condition: replace Silas’s noise with “cleaner production.” They walk away. Silas cries. Nobody mentions it again. The trilogy writing sessions begin at the Priest Lake cabin, with Priya — Marcus’s wife — cooking for eleven days and credited on the album as “morale.”

Three-act journey

One trilogy. Crisis, then the long middle, then the weight of the second chance.

MaydayOut now

Debut album · 12 tracks

Twelve tracks, one long night. Mayday is the moment the gauges go red — the 3 AM phone call, the engine quitting over the Cascades, the marriage hitting the wall. It moves from the first sign of trouble through denial and the failed workarounds to the declaration itself, and ends not with resolution but with the bravest sentence in the English language, said calmly: I need help.

DeadstickComing soon

Album two

A deadstick landing is what pilots train for and pray never to do: no thrust, just altitude, airspeed, and judgment. Deadstick is the long middle of every emergency — the hospital waiting room, the months after the divorce papers, the 4 AM break-room conversations. Quieter, spacier, Marcus’s bass carrying entire songs: from “how do we survive this” to “oh — like this. Together. One decision at a time.”

The LandingComing soon

Album three

Every emergency ends one of two ways, and the final act is about the harder one: you lived. Now what? The Landing is the weight of the second chance — survivor’s guilt, the list on Junie’s phone, the marriage renegotiated. The warmest record: from “why did I get to land” to “here’s what the landing is for.” The final track is the only love song the band has ever written without flinching, and it’s about a van with 300,000 miles on it.

We cite our emergencies

Theo’s whiteboard rule: “No invented pain. Find the real thing, then find the song inside it.” Every album starts with research — articles, interviews, data, ride-alongs — before a single lyric is written. The liner notes cite every source.

Near-miss reporting. Thousands of pilots filing anonymous “I almost died and here’s why” reports. The professionalism of admitting you almost failed — nobody’s a hero, everybody’s one checklist away from a headline.
The calm voice. The phenomenon of pilots going flat and procedural in extremis. Composure as a love language: the people who go quiet and careful when everything is loud are telling you they love you.
Triage and moral injury. Not burnout — moral injury: being unable to give the care you know someone needs. Junie’s territory; she vets every lyric. The list on the phone, and the guilt of eventually putting it down.
Wildland fire psychology. Crew cohesion, the “watch out” culture, what it does to befriend a landscape that can kill you. Marcus’s territory: loving something dangerous and staying anyway.
The 3 AM phone call. Sleep research, on-call workers, parents of teenagers, adult children of aging parents. Everyone knows what a 3 AM call means before they answer — and answers anyway.
The voices in the dark. 911 dispatchers: the first first responders, the ones who never get to see the ending. Talking a stranger through the worst minutes of their life, then taking the next call.

Fresh from the research sweep — October 2026

The voices in the dark are getting the law. A 2026 study found ~half of 911 dispatchers screen positive for a post-traumatic stress injury — the highest suicidal-ideation rate of any first-responder group (21%). In January, Florida finally recognized dispatchers as first responders for workers’ comp mental-health coverage. KevinMD
The bedside exodus, by the numbers. The 2026 State of Nursing Survey: 43% of nurses likely to leave the bedside within a year, 23% likely to leave the profession entirely — and the recurring line from working nurses: “there is no nursing shortage, there is a shortage of nurses willing to work under these conditions.” LinkedIn / Nurse.org
When the crew loses someone. CU Boulder researcher Robert Scott interviewed 37 wildland firefighters on colleagues’ deaths — documenting grief, survivor guilt, and chronic suffering that stretches years past the incident, worst for those who knew the deceased or felt implicated. CU Boulder
The crew gets a bill. H.R. 10492, the bipartisan Wildland Firefighter Health and Safety Act introduced September 2026, would set OSHA smoke-exposure standards, fund respirator pilots, and expand cancer and mental-health care for wildland crews. Meanwhile the Forest Service now offers 16 free therapy sessions a year to seasonal and permanent firefighters alike. The emergency, finally declared for them. Firehouse / FUSEE
7700, for real. On Oct 18, an Austrian Airlines crew over Romania transmitted the actual code — bomb threat, fighter escort, a textbook diversion to Sofia, everyone home. The same weekend, a student pilot in the U.S. belly-landed a gear-up airplane on nothing but her instructor’s calm voice. The name isn’t a metaphor this week; it’s a log entry. The Business Standard
7700, again — five times in five days. PlaneTrack logged five separate 7700 declarations Oct 22–26 — Paris, Philadelphia, Lyon, Lordsburg, Dublin — most precautionary, all handled. Declaring early is not drama; it’s the system working. PlaneTrack
Moral injury is not burnout. New research separates them: burnout is overload; moral injury is being prevented from giving the care you know someone needs — and it erodes trust, then resilience, then everything else. Health at Work
7700 over Spokane, and the words versus the code. Nov 2026: SKW3857 squawked 7700 near Spokane at 2,300 feet; BA295 dropped 28,000 feet with masks out and landed safely back at Heathrow; UA1023 called Mayday three times for fuel and landed safely — then the airline disputed the declaration because the squawk never changed. Say it early. Argue about what to call it later. Aviation Geeks

This is for…

The night-shift nurses coming off at 7 AM, still hearing the monitors in the shower.
The wildland crews in the off-season, discovering that rest feels like falling.
The dispatchers who talk strangers through the worst minutes of their lives and drive home to an empty apartment.
The eldest daughters running a household, a medical schedule, and a sibling’s homework before their own shift — love as logistics.
Anyone who has ever keyed the mic on their own life — at the kitchen table, in the car, at 3 AM — and said it out loud: I need help.

The kids aren’t alright, but they’re declaring it. Saying it out loud doesn’t make it worse. Saying it out loud is the first thing that makes it better.

The Log

As in the flight log. The patient log. The record of everyone who declared their emergency and kept going.

The Log opens when Mayday lands. Bring your emergency — we’ll bring the chorus. Coming soon