The next two Sundays, Nov. 13 and Nov. 20, at Upstairs at the Dino, 246 W. Willow St., are going to be bursting with blues. Seasoned bluesmen Jimmy Thackery and Tommy Castro are both swinging through for long overdue returns to the infamous Yankee barbecue joint, with Thackery on Nov. 13 and Castro on Nov. 20, both at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 for dinner and a show and available at www.dinosaurbarbque.com or at the bar.
Both guitarist/vocalists also just hopped off the Rhythm & Blues Cruise that charters the Caribbean twice every year, a gig that Thackery doesn’t mind being a part of.
“Obviously, being on a cruise ship in the Caribbean doesn’t suck,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Arkansas. “It’s kinda nice just to be out there on the water and going from island to island. But beyond that, it’s an incredible venue…it’s a big, floating blues summit.”
Thackery’s invested nearly 40 years in the business, 15 of which were with the well-known D.C. blues group, The Nighthawks, and released more than 20 albums throughout his career. His latest album, Feel the Heat (White River Records) came out just earlier this year.
Post-Nighthawks, he started an R'n'B band, The Assassins, and later a trio called The Drivers. When he comes to the Dino, he’ll be bringing the Drivers with him, two “really, really hot” players, he says, Mark Bumgarner (also known as Bumpy Rhodes) on bass and George Sheppard on drums…and they’re there to play.
“I can whip off about 2-1/2 hours if I really have a great crowd going,” Thackery says. “Look, once I get there--I wanna play. I didn’t come there to buy furniture. Once I get up there--I wanna get it cranked up and go until everybody’s sick of it. Once I can see that they’re sick of it --I’ll pack it up.
If that's the case, he could be playing until Castro shows up next week.
Thackery was happy to chat with The New Times and talk about what’s good in his world: blues cruises, playing with Muddy Waters and living in the Ozarks with the hillbillies.
Q: How’s the weather down in Arkansas?
A: The weather is spectacular. We’ve got glorious color in
the trees. The Ozark Mountains are one of the prettiest places in America and
when the leaves are really turning the beautiful fall shades--it’s really
spectacular. It’s wonderful. It’s a well-kept secret. Most people go ‘You live where?’ and I tell ‘em and they go,
‘Why?’ and I say, ‘Well…you wouldn’t like it, so don’t come."
Q: You’re originally from Pittsburgh and then moved to Washington, D.C., correct?
A: Yeah, I lived a few other places. Born in Pittsburgh and then my family moved to Atlanta for several years and then up to D.C. and then I lived in England for a little while and went to school at the University of Reading in Berkshire. I moved down to Florida for a while and then I eventually ended up here with the hillbillies.
Q: You started the Nighthawks in D.C. in 1972. How did that happen?
A: I got back from England and finished high school in ‘71 and by ‘72 we had the band at least initially launched. We really didn’t have the proper band until 1974. By 1974 we had the rhythm section that we ended up keeping for…well, those guys stayed for decades. I left in ’87, but they continued on quite a bit longer.
Q: You were 19 when you started with the Nighthawks?
A: Uh huh.
Q: I hear you toured relentlessly with them.
A: We were definitely 300-plus shows a year guys. That went on for years and years and years. I finally got to the point…there wasn’t a whole lot of room for, in my opinion, for writing and progressing musically because we were on tour all the time. And we kinda got stuck in that doughnut hole where you just are constantly chasing your tail. You’re creating so many bills by going out on tour that you have to keep being on tour to pay the bills. At some point I wanted to expand my musical horizons beyond what we had been doing.
Q: How did you do that?
A: I left and started more of an R'n'B band called the Assassins and we went out for about five years. It was a great band full of wonderful players. It was just a little cumbersome because it was a lot bigger. It was a lot harder to move and pay and organize…the cat-herding thing…from time to time that band would be up to 13 pieces. When you got 13 guys on the road and a couple of gals…it’s like, ‘OK. Where did they go?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Where did they go?’ ‘I don’t know!’ I eventually went down to a trio from that and essentially have stuck with that. We did have a quartet for a little while. I always seem to come back to this trio format which I like the best because it gives me the opportunity to play all I wanna play. I have two really, really hot players with me right now and this trio format with these particular guys is pretty much unbeatable.
Q: Are you all pumped to come to the Dinosaur?
A: Yeah, we have been back to the old Dino in a while so it’s gonna be fun to get back there.
Q: A couple years?
A: I dunno. Ya know, when you do what we do for a living, years…that becomes a nebulous term. Everything’s a blur when you’re out on the highway all the time.
Q: Tommy Castro said the same thing when I interviewed him.
A: Yeah, we were just on the cruise together down in Mexico and yeah, it gets a little blurry and you start trying to do chronological research on stuff. You start going back and you can’t remember if it was five years ago or 10 years ago or what. I find myself having to literally go back through calendars to figure out what the hell I was doing.
Q: What’s the Blues Cruise?
A: Well, it’s been going on for some time now. And if you want my opinion, it is probably the best gig that the people in our genre can aspire to right now. There are other cruises that mix the shuffle boarders with the blues people and I’ve done some of those and they’re OK, but the whole vibe is a little different. You get on this one and everybody there is there for the same reason. The venues are actually really well done, they have wonderful production. They take over the whole ship and they’ve got bands on the pool deck and in the auditorium up front and bands in all the little bars in between. There’s all kinds of little extra curricular activities like Chubby Carrier’s out there cookin’ crawfish and Tommy Castro’s set. My wife and I did a cooking presentation at one point in front of about 300 people…the other thing is we all get to network with all of these fans and not just the fans, but other promoters and other industry people from all over the world. They all go on this thing. It’s a big, floating blues summit.
Q: It must be nice to get to see everyone.
A: Yeah, keep in mind that our booking agents do their damnedest to keep us as far apart as they possibly can by design, so when we all actually end up on the same boat together it gives new meaning to the expression, "We’re all in the same boat." We’re all in the same boat, but we’re all doing the same thing so all of a sudden I get to catch up Coco Montoya and Tommy {Castro} who’s been a friend for many years and blah, blah, blah. It just goes on and on.
Q: It sounds like fun! I gotta get on that.
A: Well, mortgage the house and get on this thing.
Q: It sounds totally worth it.
A: I look at it as a reward for working my butt off for however many years. Every now and then I get a treat which is to go work on that thing. Ya know…it’s just about as cool as it gets.
Q: I read that you got to play with Muddy Waters.
A: Yeah! Sure! He was just one of many, I mean, at the time {with the Nighthawks} we were in kind of a cool situation because there was a great blues resurgence going on that was pretty vibrant. That second generation of blues artists, they were all still alive and they were all still out playing so we were really fortunate in that we ended up on bills with so many of these guys. We’d be with Muddy Waters or James Cotton or whoever. We just were in a good position, timing-wise, to get to play with all of our heroes. All of the guys we grew up aspiring to, we were in a position to not just be on bills with them, but actually get up there and jam with them, play with them. We learned a lot from that and later we had a series where we brought all these guys from Chicago into D.C. and we would back them up. So by virtue of that we were able to play with all the rest of our heroes. It was a pretty good time for guys like us.
Q: You’re very lucky.
A: Just happened to be the right age at the right time. Things were happening just in a certain way. Very fortunate.
Q: You’re a prolific songwriter. What inspires your writing?
A: Anything from a phrase somebody says to a situation or a lot of times it really just happens to be something you hear in conversation. Somebody will drop a line on ya and it’ll sound like a cliché, but it’s not one you’ve heard before. I think a lot of it has to do with having your ears on and radar up to be able to catch those little phrases. Here’s an example: I was on the ship the other day and I ran into Charlie Musselwhite, who I haven’t seen in a while. We were exchanging pleasantries and of course remarking on the fact that we had aged some and that nowadays we’re all complaining about what hurts. And I said, "Oh yeah, every morning something else hurts." And Charlie, his eyes got real big and he said, "Now there’s a song right there!" And I said, "Ya know, you’re right." It’s about recognizing situations or phrases or sentences. Or sometimes you could just turn on a drum machine in your studio and a drum beat will set up a cadence in your head and the next thing you know you got a lick to go with it and then you go back in your head and you start thinking, "OK well, what was that clever little line somebody said and can I fit it into this cadence here?" And then once you do that you go, OK, now I got something rolling. Then you’re basically filling in the blanks. The point is not to limit yourself to anything as an inspiration. It can be a riff, it can be a drum beat. It can be something somebody says. It can be just a feeling you have from watching a tear-jerker movie or something.
Q: You’ve done a lot of performing as well. How many do you play a year now?
A: I’m doing about 150. I take the winters off now. Traveling has become so inconvenient thanks to our friends in the airlines business. So I take those months off, come home and crank the studio up and write and try to make use of that time. Then when spring comes and the festivals all start again, we go back out on the highway.
Q: That’s a pretty good schedule.
A: I think it is. I didn’t do that for so many years and I began to realize--it’d probably be a good idea if I started to have a life.
Q: What inspired your trip to Nashville to record, Healin’ Ground (Telarc Records, 2005)?
A: Well, for a long time I had wanted to do something with my old friend Gary Nicholson, who is a fantastic producer, writer, arranger, guitar-player, singer. He writes most of the material and produces all the stuff for Delbert McClinton and lots of other people. He’s very well-respected in Nashville. He’s part of that Nashville scene but he’s on the grittier blues side of it. He’s not the formula country side of it. Anyway, I had wanted to do something with him for a really long time and we finally got the opportunity. And I wanted to see how those guys in Nashville did all this stuff. So basically I went down there with nothing but a few ideas for songs and I sat down with Nicholson and for a week he would bring in a different writer every day and have the three of us, whoever the other guy was, we’d sit down until we had at least one song. And in a week’s time we had written all the material for that record, which was a very interesting process because everybody writes a little differently.
Q: Who actually played on the album?
A: Nicholson wanted to spend as little money as possible on the actual recording time/studio part of it so we brought in the A Team: we’re talkin’ about Kevin McKendree he plays with Delbert and Brian Setzer and Lynn Williams who plays with everybody. And Steve Mackey on bass…We’re just talkin’ some real a players here…Jimmy Hall from Wet Willie, Hank Williams Jr. came in and did some vocals and harmonica work. It was an incredible project and it was a very interesting way to see how that Nashville machine worked.
Q: How did it work out for you?
A: It didn’t work out very well for me at all. The record didn’t sell very well. I think people wanted to hear what I do as an artist with my own group and writing my own songs. I think that there is some great material on that record and it was executed very, very well and has a great sound to it. Nobody gave a rat’s ass. No one was more shocked than I. I really thought when the thing came out well, this one’s gonna knock it out of the park and it had the opposite effect. And the next record I put out with just my trio, it was great. You may think the public is a dumb animal. They’re not. They know what they want to hear and they know what the honest thing is and they know when you’re tryin’ to do something outside of that. Soon as I went back to doing what I do best, which is playing with my guys in the studio and writing my songs, people went out and bought it. It was a learning experience. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Q: You usually come with four guitars?
A: Well…I’ve got about four or five on the road and they change out from time to time depending on my whim. There’s only so much you can throw in a 15-passenger van. Right now I’ve got five out on the road and switching a few of them out. Variety is the spice of life.
Q: How many do you own?
A: Oh God, I lost count back in the 25 to 28…somewhere back in there. My wife says I suffer from G.A.S. which is Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. Actually we just created a Jimmy Thackery signature guitar. It’s based on the old Gibson Firebird. It’s got some real hot pickups and an invention I came up with--a tremolo system that retrofits on any vintage instrument without putting holes in it and ruining it. It’s a whammy bar that you can put on a ’59 Sunburst Les Paul that’s worth a $150,000 and not put a mark on it and it will come off in about 30 seconds and go back to the original setup. So literally, you could play that ’59 Sunburst Les Paul as a hard tail for the first set, take a break, put my invention on and come out and play surf music the rest of the night. it’s kind of a cool invention. That’s another little project of mine.
Q: Well, we’re excited to have you. Are you ready for some Dinosaur barbecue?
A: I happen to like the Dinosaur. For a bunch of Yankees ya’ll do pretty good up there (laughs). I just hope everybody comes out. It’s been too long for us being up there. I hope everyone comes out and says, “Hi.” It’s kinda the holiday season so everybody should be in a festive mood and hope everybody comes and has some fun and buys the new disc because lord knows we’ll need the gas money.
