I’d like to introduce you to three men of distinction, skill and faultless disposition who deserve your business should you need what they provide. One is a designer/artist, one is a mastering engineer and one can take my wife Bruce and put her neck back on her body like there was never any problem with it to begin with – in the time it takes me to make spaghetti sauce.

Brad Talbott’s artwork is probably already familiar to you whether you realize it or not. He did the cover of ‘Cheese Chronicles’ and for that alone should be canonized. He’s a terrific caricaturist and has designed about four or five million record covers. The ‘look’ of indie rock records and swag, especially T-shirts all over the world, is, in part, Brad Talbott’s look. He takes equal parts ‘60s/’70s cartoon aesthetics, a great eye for color, and the Quisp cereal box, and whips them all into a froth that’s fun to look at and good for you too. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also one of the sunniest, most optimistic, unruffled and good-hearted people I’ve ever met. (www.bradtalbott.com)

Now as far as nice guys go, Michael Romanowski makes Brad look like Richard Speck. He’s lived in San Francisco for 12 years or so, having come from Nashville where he was the much-loved bass-player and bartender known as Romo to most and Romulus to me. Bartenders can make a lot of money, and they generally spend it on hookers and cocaine, but not Romo – he bought gear with his money, and saved the rest, and then he moved to San Francisco to make it in the big city like That Girl or something. And he did it! He’s a very well-respected and successful mastering engineer now, turning lots of knobs on myriad stacks and racks of doohickeys and thingamabobs, while working with deliriously opaque software programs that take a recorded final mix of a song and make it sound like the heavens are opening up and Charlton Heston is spreading his arms wide in front of the Red Sea. (www.michaelromanowski.com)

I’ve known Romo since he was a college student playing in a band in Bowling Green 23 years ago. I’ve known Brad since 1991 I think. Will Kimbrough, my DADDY partner, has known them both a comparable amount of time. Will and Brad live on the same street and their kids play together.

Here’s where it gets good.

It’s a natural artistic tendency to – when you have something special you’ve created – to push and push to get everything not merely right, but exactly damn well right. It can drive the people around you crazy. For instance, I stopped the presses on ‘Cheese Chronicles’ twice, the second time to change one word. I thought people were going to have heart attacks, but I was like a man possessed and not to be deterred. In the end, it was worth it.

So DADDY has arrived at a similar apogee. We’ve known amongst ourselves for a while that this time out we have a special record, and we drove Brad and Romo like only old friends can. We decided on a sequence for the record, then Brad did the cover, then we changed the sequence at the last minute and Brad had to re-do the cover. Meanwhile we had Romo master the record, which he did in short order. Then we decided to re-mix everything, which meant he had to do his job over again too. We were being just LOVELY to deal with, basically.

If we had been clients off the street, they’d have both been overjoyed and billing us triple scale, but that’s not the case. They helped us every step of the way because we’re all old friends and they know if they don’t help us, we’ll kill ourselves – Will and I will just wrap dynamite around our heads and vaporize from the knees up with a big bang and a pink mist. So to keep us from doing that, they help us. It’s a bit manipulative on our part, I’ll grant, but that’s life when you’re a wet, cold emperor penguin of a musician, clambering over wet rocks of ardor to escape the ravenous bull seals of ennui feeding in the pounding surf of overwrought metaphor.

And now to Viva Las Vegas. He just saved Bruce’s life. As you might know, Bruce is my ’83 Fender Telecaster, modified to the teeth and beat to hell, my baby. At SXSW, right before we played, I discovered Bruce in his gig bag with the neck having been wantonly ripped right out if it’s screw holes and quite separate from the body, its six strings all sticking out at angles suggesting they’d lost their focus in life. Who knows how it happened but it happened and I brought my injured second wife home to Viva, who I predict will have a guitar shop someday. In the time it takes – like I said – to make spaghetti sauce, he had the neck back on, he had it strung up, he had it intonated, tuned and back in fighting form. I’ve been playing it the last 24 hours and the darn thing hasn’t even come out of tune yet!

Viva went to work as a Government Cheese roadie in 1989 and now plays bass for Ned Van Go. Buy him a beer next time you see him and say ‘Thank you for helping Bruce to walk again!’ (www.nedvango.com) (www.myspace.com/nedvango)

DADDY (Will Kimbrough, Tommy Womack, John Deaderick, Dave Jacques & Special Guest Brad Pemberton), MERCY LOUNGE, Nashville, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1st. 10 PM. As part of the Tin Pan South Festival. Hope to see you there.

That’s all for now. I hope you’re well and I hope you’ll give my friends some business if you should ever have the need for what they feed. Dyslexics untie! Death to all extremists!

Love,

Tommy Womack
3/29/09

(PS, Bruce turned 26 years old March 21st. At least his neck did.)

PRAY FOR TOMORROW FUND

A medical care relief fund for Duane Jarvis.

As many of you know, our wonderful friend Duane has been waging a battle against colon cancer over the course of the past 16 months. It’s been a tough fight, but Duane has faced it with tremendous grace, never losing his sense of humor or his positive outlook on life. His music has kept him going, and us entertained. In the past five months alone Duane has endured two major surgeries, three rounds of chemo, numerous trips to the ER, and many weeks in the hospital. Unfortunately, Duane’s cancer has now reached terminal status and he will no longer be seeking curative treatment. He has recently moved into an apartment near his beloved ocean in Marina Del Rey where he is under the care of loved ones and Providence TrinityCare Hospice.

PRAY FOR TOMORROW FUND has been created to help offset recent and upcoming costs related to Duane’s care and living expenses. Medi-Cal covers the bulk of his hospice care, however it doesn’t cover all of his medical needs, nor his recent trips to the ER. Some of Duane’s expenses include: rent, utilities, groceries, home health aides, medical supplies, and previous ER visits.

Over the course of Duane’s cancer challenge, he has received much love and many contributions from friends and colleagues such as yourselves. This is an urgent call for help in this critical stage of his battle. The love surrounding Duane grows stronger with each contribution, good wish, prayer, song… and Duane is grateful beyond words.

Please send checks (however small) made payable to:
Pray For Tomorrow Fund
2554 Lincoln Blvd., #1010
Venice, CA 90291

or

PayPal link:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4033370

* Feel free to send cards/notes to Duane in care of the Fund or online via the CaringBridge website dedicated to Duane http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/duanejarvis. Duane has specifically requested pictures of you, his loved ones, for his bulletin board. The Pray For Tomorrow Fund is not a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. Donations are not tax deductible. All contributions will go directly to offset Duane’s expenses. Thank you!

Please forward this letter so it gets to Duane’s many friends!

And for those of you new to Duane Jarvis:
This gypsy songwriter, guitar player, and singer has followed where the music has taken him. Strong roots in Portland, Los Angeles, Nashville and back to L.A. He’s worked an eclectic bag with some of his heroes — a short list includes Lucinda Williams, Frank Black, The Divinyls, and John Prine. In addition to his remarkable resume as a supporting player, Duane has released a number of critically acclaimed solo recordings. “Live For Today, Pray For Tomorrow” is a song from his upcoming album.

Another SXSW has come and gone, and that sympathetic headache you’re feeling is the collective sunburned hangover of 30,000 music professionals who are now back home trying to figure out what happened after Wednesday.

DADDY had three great gigs: at Opal Divine’s, Jovita’s and Mother Egan’s. I’d say that – apart from the ultimate coolness that is home and family – there isn’t much of anything cooler in life than to be onstage playing with DADDY. To not only hear that sound but to be in the middle of it… it doesn’t get much better.

One slight bummer. We were onstage getting set up to play Mother Egan’s, and I noticed that the gig bag that holds Bruce (my Fender Telecaster/second wife of 26 years) was leaning against a speaker with an angle to it that just couldn’t be right. Well, it wasn’t right. (A V-shaped gig bag never is!) I unzipped the bag to find Bruce in two pieces: neck and body. I won’t say what I said next except that the first word was ‘holy’ followed by two more words and a few exclamation points.

How it happened, who knows? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s fixable. The neck separated from the body at the screw holes. Nothing’s broken, just separated. I’ll call Viva and he’ll fix it for his usual price I bet. (A case of Pabst.) But I tell ya, seeing Bruce in that condition was like that scene in E.T. when you see the poor little title character lying in the mud all dehydrated and near death.

Pro that I am, I zipped the case back up, turned around and played the show with my Strat on my torso and a smile on my face. Somebody said “Good thing it’s not a Gibson; it would have broken for good.” I already knew that, having broken two Gibsons back in my Government Cheese days, although those were intentional breaks in the midst of the shows. I had an attitude back then.

Right now Bruce is in his gig bag leaning against the living room wall. I haven’t looked at him since we left. That’s my way. Even though I know it’s loony to think so, I still feel like if I leave him alone, he’ll fix himself. It worked for the driver’s side window. And it works for the computer all the time!

Lisa Gray, my harmony singer and sister from a different mom, drove us all the way there and back, for fun! She didn’t want anything out of it; she just went to SXSW to sing with me last year and had such a good time, she wanted to go back. And she likes to drive long distances! She actually enjoys it! (Molly Thomas is that way too. Must be a chick thing.) Anyway, Lisa rules. It doesn’t hurt that she’s my favorite female voice in Nashville too. We’re going to have to get her making a record one of these days.

I’ve got to sign off now and help Nathan more with his social studies project – a scrapbook on the life of Lincoln.

By the way, the U.S. Mint is putting out four new Lincoln pennies. I think they should abolish the penny and put Lincoln together on the dollar coin with Susan B. Anthony, both of them naked, like that picture of John and Yoko. That’s what I’d do if I were in charge, not that I like to be in charge of anything.

DADDY is appearing next at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville April 1st. Be there or be oblong!

God bless,

Tommy Womack

http://www.tommywomack.com
http://www.reverbnation.com/tommywomack
http://www.twitter.com/tommywomack
http://ping.fm/1qNwW?ref=ts (the DADDY Facebook page)
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=feed&id=667737095 (my Facebook page)
http://www.myspace.com/tommywomack
http://www.reverbnation.com/daddytheband
http://www.myspace.com/daddytheband
http://www.youtube.com/daddytheband
http://www.twitter.com/daddytheband
http://www.willkimbrough.com
http://www.myspace.com/willkimbrough
http://www.areyoustillreadingthis.com

Good morning!

Today is the day to pack all the gear and get ready to go to Austin tomorrow. DADDY will be playing Jovita’s at 5 (Will Kimbrough and me acoustically as a duo) and Mother Egan’s at 10 Thursday night (our official SXSW showcase with the full band).

Will and I have been working on a second promotional CD to offer in April to you. We aim to make it an extra special treat. We have quite a few songs that have never seen the light of day: “Just Like Rain”, “K Street”, “River Of Shite” and others to offer, as well as quite a few unreleased demos, including some from the first ever DADDY recording sessions in 2003!

You can now follow our SXSW adventures on Twitter, where you might read such luminary revelations as “I’m having gingerbread pancakes at the Magonolia Café!”, “My butt itches!” and other fascinating tidbits I might feel worthy of passing on, as they happen! We also have a Facebook fan page now too. Ain’t technology great! The websites to sign up on are at the bottom of this epistle. We have so many websites now that you can literally blow your whole workday doing nothing but surfing us! (Don’t tell your boss.)

My phone’s buzzing. Let me see, here… Jeez, Barack AGAIN! Can’t he write a speech by himself? I’ve got to go serve my country. Have a wonderful day.

God bless,

Tommy Womack

http://www.tommywomack.com
http://www.reverbnation.com/tommywomack
http://www.twitter.com/tommywomack
http://ping.fm/1qNwW?ref=ts (the DADDY Facebook page)
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=feed&id=667737095 (my Facebook page)
http://www.myspace.com/tommywomack
http://www.reverbnation.com/daddytheband
http://www.myspace.com/daddytheband
http://www.youtube.com/daddytheband
http://www.twitter.com/daddytheband
http://www.willkimbrough.com
http://www.myspace.com/willkimbrough
http://www.areyoustillreadingthis.com