Grave Expectations

When Stevie Tombstone walks into a bar, people notice. Tattoos crawl up his neck, out of his collar and snake down to his hands. The blues, country and roots rocker is dressed in black or other subdued colors on the dark end of the spectrum, plus he’s got a heavy air about him, burdened, although he’s not unhappy. He carries his art with him all the time: It’s inked in his skin, pressed into his fingers and comes clearly from his mouth when he sings his stripped-down songs of love and loss, devil’s games and loneliness.

Tombstone, 47, who has worked for most of his life in music cities like Atlanta, Ga; Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tenn., now calls Central New York home. He seems to be enjoying the scene—when he’s around enough to explore it. 

“I just now started getting out and making friends beyond my immediate people that I had contact with,” Tombstone says. But he’s getting comfortable quickly, dropping into music hubs like Shifty’s on Burnet Avenue for Wednesday’s open-mike nights. “The other night at Shifty’s, man, that kinda felt like old Austin to me. Just the people. . . I think the Syracuse music scene has got something great going on.” 

That scene will be reflected on Tombstone’s fifth solo disc, Greenwood (Cloverdale Music), recorded at Armory Square’s SubCat Studios over the past seven months. The music video for the album’s first single, “Lucky,” was recorded and produced completely at SubCat. And instead of flying in out-of-town session players, Tombstone dipped into Syracuse’s pool of talent: Loren Barrigar and his guitar partner Mark Mazengarb; Theresa Walsh from the Honkey Tonk Hindooz; Danny Welch, who performs with local musicians Bob Perry and Dusty Pascal; and Tombstone’s wife Melissa, a Central New York native, who plays bass and sings on the record.

“I started meeting all these people. Melissa knows people, Ron {Keck, co-owner of SubCat} knows people, just looking through the paper and seeing what everybody does, watching videos, trying to catch gigs,” Tombstone explains. “The more people I meet, the more cool stuff I’m discovering about the music scene here. It’s neat because there’s a rich talent base, but it’s not overrun like some of the other places.” 

Considering how much of the world Tombstone has already seen, that’s a high compliment. Tombstone was raised in Marietta, Ga., just outside of Atlanta. “It was the country then,” he says in a slight southern drawl that hints at his roots. He was exposed early on to bluegrass, country and gospel and started playing guitar at age 12. Although he initially tried piano, his fingers couldn’t make the spread on the chords, so he switched to guitar instead. 

“My music teacher’s like, ‘Eh, take a guitar!’” he laughs. “I was gonna be a drummer, but it was too much stuff to lug around so I started playing guitar.”

Tombstone’s parents weren’t musicians, but they were music fans and instilled the same love of the art in him. He witnessed a steady dose of live shows and got to meet acts such as Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Don Williams at a young age. “When you’re a little kid, that’s like, ‘Oh my God,’” he says. “I thought that’s what you were supposed to do when you grew up.”

Although Tombstone was something of a troublemaker, music helped keep him on the straight and narrow. He’d cut classes in high school, but as long as he was spending that time in the music room, teachers let it slide. By his teens, he was writing his own tunes and playing “wherever I could fool my way into getting a show,” he says. 

He paid his dues heavily before he ever got paid and remembers his first moneymaking gig as the one where his hungover drummer couldn’t play. They had to find a quick replacement and the only song they could make it through was “Money” by The Beatles. “So we played that for 45 minutes,” he laughs again. “My first experience at wingin’ it.” 

From then on, it was down the rabbit hole: Punk bands, rock outfits, singing, guitar, Tombstone was doing whatever he could to make a living out of music. Within a few years, he learned enough of the ropes to form his own band, The Tombstones, a group that wasn’t looking for a hit record so much as a way to avoid a day job. 

Yet they did achieve enough respect to land a label deal in the mid-1980s. “I was sitting on my front porch one day and a guy came up with a record contract,” he recalls. “Just like in a movie.”

The Tombstones was a mix of psychedelic rockabilly, not quite punk, but the combination was original enough to help them gain significant recognition. Their LP Preachin’, Prayin’, Guitar Playin’ (Twilight Records) shot up the College Music Journal (CMJ) charts, yet the band never made it out of the Southeast. They tried following up with other records and Tombstone did some solo work, but nothing came together just right. And with the rise of Seattle grunge bands like Nirvana, keeping up with the curve became too difficult. “It wasn’t even the same band,” Tombstone says, “and we just weren’t happy.” 

As the band split in the early 1990s, a friend suggested that Tombstone use some of the money the band earned from their records and put it toward a grave marker for blues godfather Robert Johnson, who didn’t have one. Tombstone took to the idea, as did the band’s manager, and they also received an OK from Johnson’s son, Robert Lockwood Jr. So Tombstone traveled to the site in Greenwood, Miss., accompanied by Johnny Shines, who used to play with Johnson, and Rick Richards from the Georgia Satellites. 

But the kind gesture soon turned into a sour media stunt. “It put a bad taste in my mouth,” Tombstone says. “What started out as a really cool thing turned into a negative experience.” 

But one positive aspect emerged from this fiasco. Tombstone learned that Johnson used to record in San Antonio because of the racial tensions in the Deep South at the time. He went west, where the heavy Latino population helped ease the drama and gave black performers a place to play. They would travel to San Antonio, get a hotel room and record some of the genre’s most famous songs. 

“And when I got reminded of that,” Tombstone says, “it gave me the idea to write the song ‘Greenwood.’ So that’s the title track of the next record, however many years later.” 

Prior to his Syracuse relocation, Tombstone spent years touring and sharing bills with acts including Leon Russell, Gregg Allman, Willie Nelson and Drive By Truckers. And in his own bands, he has featured players from groups including Wilco, Georgia Satellites, Jason and the Scorchers and Circus of Power. 

In 2005, he returned to Austin for a Tombstones anniversary tour, in which they’d also reissue some of their older material. But there was a catch: Former bassist Bobby Daniel had an audition with Dwight Yoakam in the middle of their reunion schedule. So Tombstone auditioned a Central New York bassist named Melissa Riggall, who flew down on two days’ notice and got the gig. Following the tour, Tombstone invited her to stay in Austin with the band. A year and a half later, they were married and in 2007, they had a son, Nova.

They briefly moved to the Syracuse area in 2008 to be closer to Riggall’s family, but Tombstone kept traveling around as musical opportunities popped up, eventually landing in the Arkansas Ozarks with Melissa and Nova, where he bought a little piece of land, a trailer and built his own recording studio. The 18 months he spent playing there turned into the 2011 album, Slow Drunken Waltz (Farmageddon Records), a record that captures mountain musicmakers in their natural habitat.

“I got some of the players from the mountains because I made friends with them,” Tombstone explains. “I lured them. Because a lot of those guys, they don’t want to play for money. They don’t want to get recorded. They’re the real deal. I worked with a lot of those people, hung out with them and I was playing on the street with them. I got them into my studio, recorded the record and once it was done we sold the stuff and came up here.”

Slow Drunken Waltz captures the sound and feel of the Ozarks, a space apart from other Appalachian roots music and different than the more southern Tex-Mex tunes. But Tombstone’s next album Greenwood takes another turn: “It’s still roots music and it’s still stripped down, but the genres that we touch on cover a few more bases. And the songs on this record are probably a little more autobiographical, a little more personal than the others have been.” 

Tombstone was first introduced to the knob-twisters and mixmasters of SubCat Studios in 2008 and played on an XM satellite radio broadcast at a sold-out show at the Redhouse. The downtown studios, now connected to the Redhouse, hadn’t been opened yet, but when Tombstone moved to Marcellus in 2010, SubCat co-owners Scott Allyn and Keck invited him to visit the new facility. 

“I was like, ‘Whoa! This is a candy store,’” Tombstone says. “They were like, ‘You wanna make a record here?’” It was an easy answer.

Although Tombstone still hits the road for brief tours and music opportunities, he’s also been enjoying life as a dad and getting to know the Syracuse scene, one he became aware of while he was still with The Tombstones. “I was a huge fan of Masters of Reality {a hard rock group from Syracuse in the 1980s} back then,” he recalls. “And I knew there was a big blues scene here, too.”

Tombstone’s summer gigs will include an 8 p.m. concert on Saturday, July 14, at Eve Galleria, 6456 Collamer Road, East Syracuse (admission is $10; call 463-0216 for details); a free performance at 8 p.m. on July 25 at Oak and Vine, 6141 West Lake Road, Auburn (252-7247); and free admission to a Greenwood CD release party on Aug. 18 at 8 p.m. at the Redhouse Café (425-0405). For more information, plus a look-see at the music video “Lucky,” check out stevietombstone.net. 

As Tombstone wraps his thoughts, he imparts a little wisdom for younger musicians, “Be nice to everybody you meet because if you’re not nice to ‘em on the way up, you’ll meet ‘em on the way down. . . or back up and back down again,” he says with a laugh. “And it’s great to just jump out there and play, but work on your craft and take yourself out of the picture sometimes. I think the way we perceive ourselves is not the way that people perceive us. That’s a big trick, to get that point of view. It’s not a clear-cut answer, but I think that’ll help.”