Here is an interview I did of Jimmy Thackery , blues guitarist and song writer virtuoso, for the “washington review” in the early nineties. He and Sally have since moved away from Eureka Springs to foreign climes, but he still tours the U.S.A. in the summer. His next tour starts March 21. Check out his site in “Links.”
Interview of Jimmy Thackery
By Jeff Richards
Downbeat magazine describes Jimmy Thackery of Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers as having “the tonal control, the musical thought, expressive sincerity, velocity, and discipline to rank him near the top of the blues-rock heavyweight division.” And no wonder, he’s been at it since 1972 when he and Mark Wenner put together the Nighthawks, a band that is now a local legend, though Jimmy left it in 1987 to go out on his own. He presently lives in Eureka Springs, Arkansas with his wife, Sally, who runs the local blues and folk festival and the restaurant they recently opened, the Blues Dog Café. You can find them at bluesdogcafe.com. Jim Thackery, by the way, is my “cousin” related through my step-grandmother who recently died at the age of 104. Our moms were best friends in Urbana, Ohio where they grew up and continued their friendship when they moved to Washington, D.C. with their husbands. Jim claims that I helped “to plant the bug early on.” He was referring to a night in the sixties when he managed to sneak up to my room and was “looking at [my] pictorial history of the Civil War and listening to the Everly Brothers and thinking that the music matched those pictures so perfectly.” A couple of years ago, I attended his wedding at one of the Victorians that dot the hills around Eureka Springs. We were about to leave for the reception when Sally turned to him and said, “Dear, don’t forget your guitar.” This sums up Jimmy Thackery for me. Between greeting as many guests as he could — it seems that all 2,000 citizens of the town turned up, helping Sally remove the garter, etcetera, Jim jammed with the band, not what you would call an ordinary wedding band but a collection of many of his musician friends that he made through the years. By the time I left at 2 a.m., he was still at it.
JR: How did you get interested in music?
JT: It was in the air, I think. My mom studied music at Hollins College and the radio or the record player was always on in the house. So there was music in the air. My father loved the classics. Beethoven and what not. He tells a story that he was playing a Chopin piece when I was four years old. I was sitting on a workbench listening and suddenly I burst into tears and my father asked me, What in the world is the matter? And I said, Daddy, it is so sad. And I think my father at that point thought, Oh, my God, he’s going to be a musician. So my parents bought a piano and I began to pick out every tune I could think of by ear. They finally insisted on formal lessons, which, of course, I despised. I wanted to play only what I wanted to play. I remember in 7th grade going to the junior high school dance at Alice Deal and seeing a band that called themselves the Minus Four. These guys played electric guitars and the music screamed out of giant amplifiers, at least for that day, and the singer’s veins were popping out of his head. He was screaming into the microphone. The junior high kids were freaking out. They were completely in awe of this, especially the girls I wanted to get next to, and I said, Hey, that’s what I want to do. Part of that was hormonal, I suppose, but I wasn’t going to get next to girls taking piano lessons. I knew I wasn’t going to be a football player. So I wanted to play the electric guitar. I made my case to my folks and like the old Red Ryder bee-bee gun, I was unable to convince them that the electric guitar was the only thing so they gave me a very cheap acoustic for Christmas one year, which didn’t entirely satisfy me. So I saved the allowance and did odd jobs until I raised 35 bucks, enough to purchase a cheap Japanese electric guitar.
JR: But, you weren’t into blues yet?
JT: No, I collected Rolling Stones, Beatles, and surfer records. But, I think, like any blues musician, I knew the moment it hit me over the head like a baseball bat. I was at the playground at school fooling with a transistor radio when Slim Harpo came on with a crossover hit called “Scratch My Back.” That was the moment. Now the first Rolling Stone’s album was all blues covers. I thought these were Stone’s songs but as I looked at the credits I saw names like Ellas Bates and McKinley Morganfield. I went on a search for records by these guys, but I couldn’t find anything until someone told me Daniels and Morganfield were Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters. So I found their records and it was all over. I had it by then.
JR: You were bitten by the blues muse?
JT: Yeah, it was a disease and full-fledged by now. I realized with blues you could head anywhere. You can follow popular songs on the radio. You can follow jazz, anything and you can take it right back to a field holler. You can trace it like a genealogy from blues to those slaves in a cotton field in Mississippi. They brought their music from Africa. They would be in the fields with a leader who called out the lines and all the other workers answered in unison. These slaves, I imagine, were not happy with their condition. And blues were invented to purge themselves of the bad feelings they had. It’s therapy, not a down and out sad music as some people think, but a way of lifting yourself out of that sadness.
JR: Does this account for the energetic, driving beat I hear in your music?
JT: Sure. We hotrod our stuff. Ours is a lot more up-tempo blues, not this slow down cry in your beer music. Even the old time blues musicians, when they played at a roadhouse or wherever they congregated on a Saturday night after slavery, went crazy. They played songs about losing their wives or girlfriends or losing all their money and their house. The beat was so infectious. These guys drew down, so it was a whole layer getting those demons out, you know. So we’re trying to do the same thing. We’re up there trying to help people forget whatever happened during the week. It’s no different. Take Charlie Patton. This guy was the ultimate acrobat and clown of the blues. It was from him that Hendrix got the idea of doing the somersaults and playing behind the head. I mean this is entertainment in its purest form.
JR: Playing with your teeth like I’ve seen you do.
JT: All that stuff. He came up with it and the Delta blues musicians tried to copy him because he drove these houses insane with his antics.
JR: To go back to your roots, if you don’t mind. You were in 7th grade when you took up guitar. Were you so infected by the muse, that it infected the rest of your life? School, for instance?
JT: Yes. I was flunking miserably. So the folks decided smartly that private school was the only way out — Georgetown Day School, to be exact. But, I was pretty much of a slacker there though I do remember one accomplishment. I was desperately in love with a girl in my class in a hormonal teenage way. An assignment came up that everyone had to write a Shakespearean sonnet. It is not the easiest kind of poetry to adhere to, but it was probably, as I look back on it, the beginning of the realization that I could write lyrics. I wrote this sonnet and it was in perfect form and it was about how my unrequited love had turned me away. It was very sad and sappy, but perfectly done in Shakespearean English. Up to that point my grades in English were horrible. So the teacher received my sonnet and put two and one together because she knew my father was a writer, a writer of legal briefs and fiction and poetry. So she, in her infinite wisdom, decided that I had plagiarized off of my father’s writing and accused me in front of the whole class, which, of course, made me completely go berserk. I came very close to physical contact with this teacher and ended up in the principal’s office. The principal called my mother and my mother and she drove over to pick me up. I was booted out of school for the day. And was subsequently told that the only way I could redeem myself — and this is interesting because I just saw this in a movie called Finding Forrester — was to write another Shakespearean sonnet at least as good as the other one. I was so emotionally jacked up that I sat down and wrote a sonnet about how much I hated this bitch of a teacher. Well, I got an A for English for the year because they were so embarrassed. They called my father and he said, No, I had not written this though I wish I had. Anyway, they ended up with egg on their face and I graduated from there. Georgetown Day ended in 9th grade or whatever, in those days. Everyone else was going to Exeter and Pomfret and all that stuff. And the best I could get with my grades was Sandy Springs. So I went there for one year and to me it was like a trip to Auschwitz. The facade was that the school was a very liberal Quaker warm and fuzzy educational institution. The reality was quite different. As a distraction, I got involved in a production of Waiting for Godot. I was to play Estragon and the director was to play Vladimir. We ended up in a terrible altercation over how to present the production. I thought certain lines should be said in a certain way. He thought it should be said in another way. I was very much into acting at that point in my life. And besides I knew everything. All you needed to do was ask me. I was full of myself though I was committed to my overview of the production of Godot. It got to the point that we ended up in the principal’s office once again. It was late in the year and they basically told me I either knuckle down and do what this guy says — he was a class ahead of me — or I was going to be asked not to return. I choose not to return much to my parent’s dismay. Hell, I wanted out of that hellhole anyway.
JR: You were boarding there?
JT: Yes, I think my parents had enough of my bullshit. They thought that I would produce better if I was in a constant school environment with no distractions but I managed to thwart all that by turning one of my lunch periods into band practice and another into personal guitar practice. And get credit for it, by God. I spent more time trying to hoodwink the educational system then I actually did studying anything.
JR: Where did you go after Sandy Springs?
JT: Burke. I think they saw that I wasn’t very focused on things like chemistry. All I cared about was playing Negro music. So rather than flunking me, they allowed me to drop classes. I had banker’s hours at Burke. My first class was at 11 in the morning. At noon I had lunch followed by two more classes. I was out of there by 2:30. Of course, they were convinced I was going to apply to college but I knew a long time ago that wasn’t in the stars. I was trying to get by until I graduated and then I’d run away with a blues band. Anyway it came down to one last course I had to pass in order to get my wishes. It was a fluff, film studies class, which I actually enjoyed. But I never did the work. And on my film exam at the end of the year, I came up completely blank. So the day before graduation, they called me into the office and said, Look, we can’t let you graduate with this failing grade in film studies. And I said, Oh, come on, you know damn well that doesn’t mean a darn thing to me. I’m going to pursue a musical career. What I talked them into doing, what they were nice enough to do was send me another exam up in my hovel in Provincetown on Cape Cod where I ran away to with the blues band. I took the exam and in September they sent me the diploma though I can’t remember if they sent me the answers to the exam or just the exam. Something tells me they sent me the answers. Burke understood, God bless them, that I was infected.
JR: How long were you up in your hovel in Provincetown?
JT: Through the fall. Then I wandered home and found a construction job. I woke up at five in the morning, finished at four, showered, ate dinner, and wandered off to band rehearsal until midnight or one in the morning. Sometimes, we had gigs and stayed out later.
JR: That’s grueling. How long did that last?
JT: Not long. I was subsequently terminated from that band for the great expertise of another guitarist and it was at that point that Mark Wenner and I started the Nighthawks. That was 1972.
JR: I’m more interested in recent history, but I would like some background on the Nighthawks. How many albums did you cut together?
JT: I lost count at about 35. Of course, this involved records where we backed someone such as John Hammond or the great and all-powerful king of yellow blues in Japan, Toro Oki. We did a couple with the Muddy Waters band. So you start counting up all those, all the studio albums, all the live ones, and all that stuff and it adds up. In addition, there are the albums where you’re invited to play on a cut or two. So maybe, I’ll revise that to fifty all together.
JR: Why after such a long and successful run did you decide to leave the Nighthawks?
JT: I needed a change. The touring was relentless. It was 300 nights a year or more. Plus I started to think that I put 17 years in the same project while a lot of other bands that hadn’t been around as long as us became incredibly famous overnight doing the same damn thing we were. Maybe we were on the wrong track. Maybe I needed to try a different approach. So we put together the Assassins and this lasted for five years but it was a failed project. The band was too big and not a whole lot of people associated me with it. Plus it turned into a bust, economically speaking. We toured only as far as Chicago. These guys were hotshot session players and made better money on other projects. So we tried to tear the whole thing down by firing everyone except the bass player and drummer. That went on for six months or so and we were going back to real blues again but these guys weren’t really good blues players. Hum, so what could we do about that? One by one we replaced the two original players and I came up with a great blues rhythm section and everything took off like a rocket.
JR: And what took off was Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers?
JT: Yeah.
JR: How did you come up with that name for your band?
JT: Well, it’s pretty easy. I don’t drive.
JR: When you turned 16, you didn’t get a driver’s license like every other boy in America?
JT: No. No, I didn’t.
JR: What were you doing when it was time to drive?
JT: I was playing that damn guitar. And somebody’s mom always had a station wagon. So I never needed to drive, then or now. But the real story is the curmudgeon keyboard player in the Assassins who was stuck with the duty of picking me up and dropping me off after tours and gigs. He was militant about the fact I didn’t drive. And when he left the band, he made another one of his usual snide comments, which was, Yeah, you ought to call the band Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers. And I went, Hey, not a bad idea. I guess he went, Yowl, oh no, wrong name. I should have kept my mouth shut. And that’s what it’s been ever since.
JR: It’s a perfect band name because a lot of the Drivers music has to do with cars, which is one of the reasons that it’s so enticing. There’s a flow, a theme both musically and lyrically, that connects all your recent work.
JT: Well, I guess that’s natural since we’re driving around all the time from one gig to another. Though it’s not me who’s behind the wheel. But the name sort of suits itself to that kind of lyricism. It taps into an American theme and it’s something that most everyone else on the planet can relate to. Blues guys have been writing about cars ever since cars existed. Robert Johnson did “Terraplane Blues.” Terraplane was a metaphor for a woman. In this case, the car was a woman. So when you mash down on the starter, you know what happens next.
JR: The engine starts.
JT: Yeah. So obviously these driving songs have some sort of Freudian sexual connotation, I suppose. You know, there’s a reason people call their cars “she.”
JR: There’s also an underlying humor in your music that I’ve noticed. Is that common with blues or is it just something you enjoy doing?
JT: Well, I was class cut-up in school because I didn’t do my homework so I had to distract the teacher. I was just a bit of a mouth-off. I think it was subconscious. Lyrically, I like to take irony and work it into the lyrics of the song. A lot of inspiration for these tunes comes from the quirky twist of words that somebody says that just becomes a hook line.
JR: You have an ear for that.
JT: Yeah. I guess you train yourself to keep your ears open for this. Like, for example, my bass player at the time. He was another curmudgeon. We pull up to the tollbooth and he’d pay the toll and the lady at the tollbooth would say, Have a nice day. And he’d turn to her and say, No thanks, I’ve got other plans. And that just hit me. So I wrote a song about that.
JR: And which song was that?
JT: Ah-h-h, what the hell was that name? Of course, “I’ve Got Other Plans.” It’s on Switchin’ Gears, two albums back.
JR: What was your first album with the Drivers?
JT: Empty Arms Motel.
JR: The title song of that seemed like an allusion to Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
JT: It’s not what I intended. We were going into the studio the next day and I hadn’t done any writing for that record. It was going to be a demo so we were doing the covers that we were doing on stage live with the same live arrangement so I thought, Well, I ought to try to put one original tune on it, you know. So I was in a hotel room waiting to go and I was sitting all alone in the hotel down in Florida. You know, just kind of doom-dee-doom-doom-doom. And, bang, that song came to me. I wrote it down and by the time we reached the studio I had an arrangement together.
JR: Just from the idea of the hotel. And all the connections that people make when they listen to music like my connection to “Heartbreak Hotel” have to do more with those people’s ideas rather than your own, at least, in this case.
JT: Right.
JR: So in a lot of your original stuff, you do both the lyrics and the arrangement by yourself or do you get help from other people?
JT: Up until this current line-up I did pretty much all of it myself. I’m fortunate now to have a very musical sax and bass player. They tend to step up to the plate and contribute a lot musically. The lyrics are all mine. Like Sinner Street, our latest, is a very good example. That’s much more of a collaborative effort. There’s a lot of sax all over it and those guys contributed to the middle eights which are the bridges, the arrangements, and vocals. Things like that. So yeah, to put it mildly that was much more of a collaborative effort and that was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it.
JR: So what you actually do is sit down, you have this song, this arrangement…
JT: I actually do this backwards from about everyone else. I do all the lyrics first. I write them in such a way that they can be conducive to a lot of different styles, a lot of different progressions, and a lot of different chord changes. Then when we come into rehearse we take those lyrics and we try to throw a lick at them. And see, you know, if the lick sits with the hook. And, if it does, kind of take it and build it from there. Most people come up with a little musical hook line and they come up with an arrangement for a song and then they write lyrics for it. I’ve never done it that way. I’ve always done the opposite.
JR: One of the songs I like on Sinner Street is “Never Enough” because it has to do with all the unreasonable demands that are put upon people that are in responsible positions. Could you give me an idea where this one came from?
JT: That was a direct result of my wife Sally who does a blues festival in our hometown of Eureka Springs, Arkansas where we found that around festival time there are a lot of greedy people. The merchants and hoteliers don’t really want to get involved with the festival itself. But they really can’t wait for all those people to come to town to spend money at their establishments. And Sally said at one point that, You do all these things for these people and it’s never enough. And another friend of ours who was on the board, one of the politicians in town said, Sally could stand out on the street and hand out gold bricks and these guys would complain about how heavy they were. From the catch line that Sally said and working in the politicians line that song just wrote itself. To me, it’s that catch line, the hook line, the twist that makes the song happen. You can come up with a great piece of music but then you’re forcing yourself to fit this twist into something you’ve already invented. It may not go with that. For me, the hook, the twist line, if you say it over and over in your head enough times, will write the music for you. You can hear the music in the sound of the words. Just say it over and over again, “never enough, never enough, never enough,” and you can see what I mean.
JR: There are three songs out of Drive to Survive that always interested me because I like their sound but also I was interested in where you got them from. “Cool Guitars,” I love that song…
JT: Well, that is not mine. “Cool Guitars” was written by a friend in Minneapolis who is a stand-up comic. He does musical portions in his routine and I never met this guy up to the point where he turned in a tape to my then manager who turned me onto it. I’d been searching for material for this record and I’d been going through cassette tape after cassette tape and I’d just had it. There was just so much hokey stuff. Some really amateur song writing. And that’s unfortunate and all I can say to them is keep at it because it’s a skill like anything else. It’s something you’ve got to work hard at. But this guy came up with this tape and I put it on and it blew me away. It was my kind of humor. And it was in the right context musically. It sounded like, you know, it came from an old blues singer and it had a great twist, a great hook, “My baby threw me out because I drank too much./ She offered me her car so I could move my stuff./ I’m gonna sell the bitches car./ I’m gonna sell the bitches car./ And buy myself a cool guitar.” You know the guy gets back at her for throwing him out. And, of course, I thought either this will be a big hit or I am going to be in big trouble with the National Organization of Women because women will hear the word bitch and that will be all they hear. And the real idea, when you listen to the lyrics, you realize that the guy singing the song is the asshole and he admits it at the end. And fortunately people get this. I think more women then even men.
JR: Women relate to that situation where some man tries to get revenge for being rejected. Sounds just like what a man would do. Can’t even deal with his feelings.
JT: Just like a man.
JR: The second song that raised my curiosity was the title one, “Drive to Survive.”
JT: That’s one of mine and it came from the curmudgeon keyboard player who inadvertently named the band. He said at one point as we were driving along, Yeah, we just drive to survive. It was an off-hand remark. And I said, hum, I like that. So I waited until he was gone and I wrote the song.
JR: The final song I was thinking about was “Mercury Blues.”
JT: That is an old traditional song that actually is public domain, which means it’s older than dirt. It’s probably Mississippi Delta blues. I heard a version of it on a Canned Heat record I particularly liked and stored it in the back of my head until our drummer, who can sing his ass off, came along. We couldn’t find any material for him. He came from a rock band background. So he was intimidated about what to bring to the table until I remembered “Mercury Blues.” I said, Let’s try this. And he got hold of it immediately. But, you know, Alan Jackson did a real white bread bad version of the song at about the time Drive to Survive was released and country was king then so, of course, he had a hit with it, which infuriated me because our version was so much cooler.
JR: The locals describe Eureka Springs, Arkansas as “The hole in the Bible Belt where the buckle goes through.” What do you think of your new home?
JT: I love it. It’s in the northwest corner of the state in the Ozarks, a turn of the century town full of Victorians on the historical register. It’s called little Switzerland because it’s very hilly. The people used to come here for the healing waters. We have the Basin Park Hotel in town, that’s in the Guinness Book of World Records because all eight floors are on ground level. That’s because it’s built against a cliff with many ledges. We also have the oldest neon sign in America at the Palace Bath House. It’s in the shape of a pecker, which is a fun in-joke. There’s a large gay population there so, of course, everyone makes fun of that. I mean the phallus. It’s a quirky town, very progressive, an artist colony with a lot of sixties throwbacks, if you want to put it that way. I always call it Mayberry on acid. Take the names of some of the folks in town, Coyote, Fuzzy, Weird, and Crescent Dragon Wagon. Our mayor’s name is Beau Satori. It’s a cast of characters like none I’ve ever seen.
JR: And also the town is very musical, I understand.
JT: It’s getting more musical all the time. A guitar-playing friend of mine moved down from Lincoln to start a core band, which is great for me because they’re playing in a bar below our restaurant. So when I’m in town, I’ve got myself a gig. Plus they are able to bring in other single artists that normally travel with a band. They can bring the front guys in and back them up. It saves them money, you know, so yeah, they’re starting to have an influx of musicians. There’s everything from bluegrass to jazz to blues.
JR: One final question? What would you advise any young up and coming guitarist musician?
JT: Get a job. It’s hard to break into this business right now. People who are established for a long time are not having as much trouble, but up and coming ones, they need to practice, play with other people. And then practice some more. Practice, practice practice. Still I wouldn’t want to be them. It was easier in my day. The economy was different for us before the big monster on the horizon, the changes in the drunk driving laws. DWI was one of the single biggest factors that started the clubs closing. People grew afraid to go out for a couple of beers, watch a boogie band, and drive home because cops were hauling them off to jail and they were losing their jobs, their houses, and their reputations.
JR: So the more straight lace the country becomes, the harder it becomes for musicians?
JT: Absolutely. I believe it is an over-correction, which is something we are very famous for in this country. Every time we have a social problem we declare war on it, then it becomes tied up in litigation. We’re feeding these fat lawyers more money than they can spend.