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Summertime in the City
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by christina wagner
WHO:
Tommy Womack
WHEN:
Saturday, June 23rd
WHERE:
Cafe Eleven, St. Augustine
Tommy Womack is a very interesting guy. Born in Sturgis, Kentucky on November 20, 1962, Womack has been able to pop out 13 albums in his 22-year career, write an autobiography and a novel, produce a life and still have time to search for the "Historical Jesus." You know, the "real guy". His recent work seem to reflect him better than any one project, almost as if each band served as a stepping stone to finding exactly where he needs to be. His most recent album, There I Said It, screams just that. His frank and almost abrasive lyricism screams out anthems of questions and answers every honest musician finds them asking themselves at one point or another. I get it. And I like it.
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If you get a chance, hop over to his website and MySpace pages. Quite amusing. My personal favorite is the You Tube video, "A Day With Tommy Womack," where he quite literally takes you around his world very openly. Much like his music, Womack holds back very little and embellishes on the exciting details, making even a daily routine seem more like an adventure. When I brought up the video during our conversation, I almost heard a smile in his voice. It's his favorite video as well. He watches it from the road when feeling homesick. This once hard-gigging rock veteran has parked his tour van and traded it in for a station wagon. If I had a kid that cute kid of his waiting for me at home, I'd probably do the same.
I had the pleasure of stealing a few moments from Tommy during a family vacation down in South Florida. His answers to my questions were more than I could have anticipated.
EU: We share similar breakfast routines. I never knew cigarettes contained zero carbs. Were you informed of this tasty fact or did you do your own research?
TW: I did entirely my own research, funded by myself. I bought all the cigarettes personally except for the ones I bummed. I've given up my lungs for the dietary benefit of mankind.
EU: Your son is adorable in "A Day with Tommy Womack." Do you hope he follows in your footsteps? Has he shown any interest in picking up a guitar or any other instrument?
TW: He's shown a modicum of interest in the drums and a pathological obsession with video games, which is distressing me. I swore up and down he'd never have one of those contraptions but I broke under the pressure of what your child wants. Someday he's going to get Doom and soon after that start shooting people, is what I'm afraid of. I hate that damn GameCube, whatever it is. I feel like taking a baseball bat to it.
EU: I was quite impressed on the technique you used in your hair-grooming routine. Explain the pros and cons of the "comb back".
TW: The pro of "comb back" is that it is NOT "comb over" which is just the last follicular gasp of a desperate man - the con is that not matter how you slice it, it's a combing technique designed to deal with baldness, which cannot be dealt with by a comb alone, but only with spray and God's help.
EU: You had mentioned that your recent album, There I Said It, was unexpected, and that you had not anticipated doing another album. Why is that?
TW: Because I'd had a nervous breakdown from too many years of drug abuse and I was toast. Out of the business. Done. Stick a fork in me. That was about 2003. The fact that these songs wrote themselves while I was living in hell and the music business kinda "came back to get me," I'm surprised, but grateful as hell, that I've gotten my artist's life back.
EU: Your upcoming tour is setup unconventionally, with lots of holes, and it is usually circled around your hometown of Nashville. Is that because of your work? I also noticed that you have no dates leading to or coming from your St. Augustine date here in Florida. Just really wanted to come down?
TW: I'm at the beach for a week in Panama City with my family. I had a gig Saturday in B'ham, AL, and it just worked out to come down and it's nice to have a gig in Florida to bookend the vacation (and bring in some income) and then I'll grant you, it's a helluva commute back home. Every string of dates is crazy with routing all over the damn place. Nobody "tours" unless they're super-famous. We just do "runs" and "strings of dates." We play weekends, drive all the way home, recuperate, pay the light bill and go out and do it again, if we're diligent and lucky enough to get dates at all. It's a tough world for musicians right now, but then again it's always been that way, I guess. If it was easy, everybody'd do it.
EU: You started out playing with "Government Cheese" from 1985 to 1992. Any highlights and low lights from that experience?
TW: The highlights were every great gig we played and the great parties at somebody's house or apartment afterward. The lowlights were the bad gigs when you saw the writing on the wall about the future, and the long, long, hours spent in the van with four or five guys who'd long since stopped being polite to each other.
EU: Your writing style has been described as " tiptoe the lines between punk and poet - crazy-man and genius - heart-on-the-sleeve issues are influenced by many things - a strict Bible upbringing, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, the Kinks and the crazy world we live in - to name but a few." The crazy man and genius comparison is something I can understand, considering all the articles I have been mulling over, but what interests me is the strict Bible upbringing and Rolling Stones comment. Any clue to why that was brought up? How was your upbringing strict?
TW: It wasn't that strict, but it was rigid. I grew up a preacher's son and we either become star pupils and clean-cut leaders or we rebel. I had a lot to rebel against. It wasn't a normal home growing up. Pictures of Jesus hung on every wall, but dad was a sociopath who preached a whale of a sermon on Sunday, came home to his recliner and you didn't get between him and the television the next six days if the house wasn't on fire. He went to his office daily, but otherwise was watching that TV and shutting out all of us. Mom was clinically depressed, I turned out that way. It wasn't a happy home, but it was the most religious home you could imagine. But were we happy? Content? Spiritually at peace? Not in the least bit. And that sticks under my saddle to this day and always will. The Rolling Stones? They're the world's greatest rock and roll band. When I'm playing acoustic, I imagine what would Dylan do? When I'm playing electric, I'm always wondering what would Keith do? Archetypes are archetypes.
EU: On your website you mention "Skot Willis once said I was the craziest person he'd ever met who had his life together. Todd Snider says I'm the only person he's ever met in Nashville who's crazier than he is." Please explain.
TW: I'm crazy. I'm on three different meds. I was, we have concluded in retrospect, a case of undiagnosed childhood ADHD. It didn't exist in Kentucky in the '60s and '70s. You just "weren't right," and I wasn't, and haven't been ever since. It became who I am. If I weren't gifted I would be in jail or some institution now. My whole life is saved by the fact that I can make up lyrics like 'Alpha Male & the Canine Mystery Blood' and remember them all, night after night. I seem to be able to do a few entertaining (sometimes) things rather well, one of which is I can write and another of which is I can deliver lyrics well, and often scads of them at a time, and after all this time I can play pretty good guitar and at least sing the best I've ever sang in my life, because maybe I've learned what I can and can't do - but underlying it all is that I'm crazy, and I write outrageous songs and say outrageous things onstage and it lets that crazy guy in me out of the cage for a while. When it's over, I'm a little more at peace and the crazy guy's had his say. I never TRY to be nuts. I try very hard NOT to be. I always have. And people still keep coming around saying how crazy I am. So I must be. Best I can figure is that - though I don't notice why myself most of the time - the world tends to think I'm crazy for some reason and I'm just... going with it! Trying to turn a nickel with what gifts and curses God laid on me.
EU: You have been involved in the music scene for twenty-two years. Do you believe technology has ruined the scene today?
TW: Well, yes and no. cyber technology is where the whole thriving scene is at. Music is digitized now and we live in a digitized world. Does digitized music sound worse than analog recordings from the '50s thru the '70s. Hell yes it does. Music is not defining to youth now like it was before the computer revolution. Does it's more soulless-sounding digital recording that they hear a part of that? Yes, I think it is. I don't think music goes to peoples' souls like it used to in generations hence largely because we're not hearing iron-oxide tape making magnetic impressions of sound that are amplified by a power board working on warm-sounding power tubes that then later the sounds get pressed onto vinyl, totally analog process. It doesn't exist now. There's no magnetic warmth on a hard-disc, or a CD or any mp3, it's just a series of ones and zeros and anyone with ears to hear it knows that it doesn't hold a candle to what music sounded (and felt like) in another time that's gone with the wind. So no, the scene is thriving in ways it's never done before because of the internet revolution, the power is out of the hands of record companies and into the hands of the artists. In other words, punk finally won. But yes, the scene is poisoned because digitized music just doesn't sound as good as it's analog ancestor and I doubt it ever will.
EU: I think we should talk to Tom about alphabetizing MySpace so that we can find faces more easily. Are you with me?
TW: I want Tom to create a mini-me who can answer all my MySpace mail so I can PLAY MY GUITAR!
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