Tommy Womack: Cockroach After the Bomb

Intro

SPEAKER_03 0:00

But I always like looking at who took time to look at your book and write something nice on the back of the book or inside the uh the cover. And of course the Dust Bunnies in particular has quite a few people of note and are these people that you run with uh over the years?

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Everybody's a friend. I kinda overdid it. I could have trimmed it by about three people, but but I thought, what the hell? They can't put me in jail for name dropping. I mean it's shameless bloody name-dropping is what it is. But yeah, all those people are are people I run with.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

I particularly enjoyed Gary Tallant. Gary Tallant. Yeah, bass car bass guitarist for E Street Band. But all of them had nice things to say, but I think one thing they did for people that aren't familiar with your work, just by looking at the back cover, they'd get a good sense of what they're gonna get into.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

June for a treat, you're about to hear something sweet talking about old grants. He's been lots of places and he's seen many faces. Now he sits around in some birthday. Hey, tell you something funny. He's not asking for your money, just another way to waste your time. You might save your life with a piece of advice, but gramps just to make shit up.

SPEAKER_03 1:23

It wasn't that

How I met Tommy

SPEAKER_03 1:24

long ago, September of 2022, and my Atlanta family drove up to Nashville to meet Joan and I for an ANC McLean field trip. We found ourselves in the backyard of a wonderful hostess and singer-songwriter in Nashville by the name of Irene Kelly. And Irene Kelly was hosting us for a musician that was going to be playing that evening by the name of Tommy Womack. I had never heard of Tommy Womack, but boy, after that evening, I became a fan. The kind of fan that buys all of his CDs and all of his books and a couple of stickers to put on my guitar case. That kind of fan. And when I found out he was coming to California to play a house concert, I immediately got in touch with him and said, Hey, would you be open to playing a house concert at our place? And that's what's happening on June the 23rd. June the 23rd of 2023, we are gonna have Tommy Womack in our backyard singing his amazingly creative, soulful, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes so hilarious you're laughing your ass off, kind of lyrics and music. This podcast is featuring conversation that I had with Tommy just a few weeks

Song: Cockroach After the Bomb

SPEAKER_03 2:29

ago.

SPEAKER_02 2:45

I get real depressed. Tell everybody, that's what makes me need. Most folks stop down to be able to be not spelled at the one, but that's the same.

God Made Tommy a Writer

SPEAKER_01 5:13

You know? I can play guitar, okay, and I can sing okay, but it's learned behavior. I taught myself how to do that. But sitting down at a typewriter, that's my real gift. And I always knew when the when government cheese was going on, I kind of always knew I was gonna write a book about this when it was all said and done. I figured that I would just be a writer from then on. So I I I fulfilled my dream when the cheese broke up. I wrote the book, and um practically the week the book was released, I got a phone call from a producer here in town, Brad Jones. He wanted to produce some demos on me on Spec. And if I got a record deal, then he'd get a piece of it. If I didn't get anything, then um clean slate. So I wound up that and that those demos became my first solo record. So I didn't get a chance really to just be an author from then on, which I figured that's what I was gonna do. Um so suddenly I was back in the music business again after uh being out for a year and a half, two years. And um and I've been here ever since. I've tried to fulfill both kinds of art, they're real different, you know. Lyrics are not the same thing as prose by a long shot, but writing in a way is musical. You know, the way you gotta make things flow on a page, and it's very musical. So there is a relation there. I've always I forgot what the question was.

SPEAKER_03 6:51

The prompt for writing that, and I think you've answered it very eloquently. Did you see yourself as a a writer early on, like in high school? And because you're college, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

I wrote two books in high school.

SPEAKER_03 7:03

No kidding. What were they about?

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Yeah, they were just little comic skits and vignettes and cartoons all put together. Garbage, really. Adolescent attempts at Monty Python. One copy each. I had a friend bind them for me, and I don't know where they are now. They're somewhere in the house. I wouldn't have ever thrown them away.

SPEAKER_03 7:22

That's treasure, man. You need to find that.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

I think it's probably best for my reputation to just keep it under wraps.

SPEAKER_03 7:28

Oh, okay. All right. Well, you know what's gonna happen is that uh, you know, when you're gone, your son or or your lovely wife, they're gonna find it and then they're gonna get rich by publishing that.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Uh well, there's things like, you know, we're we're going back to 1977 here. I wrote a parody of Robin Hood, and the sheriff of Nottingham was made everybody else in the book nervous and made him kind of a villain. And you know, I would things were in that part of Kentucky at that time, at my age, I was 14 or 15 at the time. It was a very homophobic climate, not just where we were. I I think now what I know of the world, it was uh it was very much more homophobic everywhere. Absolutely. And so I wouldn't want it to get out um that I wrote this.

SPEAKER_03 8:17

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

We'll keep it quiet then, keep it under the There's other things like that in the I mean it's just God knows what it is. I I would have to get it and read it and go, oh my god. But that's what I did. I sat at the typewriter before that. I drew pictures all the time. Everybody thought I was going to be a visual artist,

Dad Stole a Typewriter

SPEAKER_01 8:35

and then mom got a typewriter because she was taking her high school GED, and part of it was a typing class. So dad got a typewriter from one of the church offices, just flat out stole the thing, uh, brought it home. And when mom wasn't on it, I got on it and was hooked. And I just started typing and typing, and I wrote my first short story, probably about seventh grade, and I had a couple of college professors write to me, having seen some of the stuff from my older siblings going to college and showing it off to the professors, and um, I didn't really follow up on any of that stuff. By the time they started sending me letters like that, I had discovered rock and roll. And I knew this this was it, this is where I was going with my

Life Went Straight to Hell (But a Good Marriage!)

SPEAKER_01 9:25

life.

SPEAKER_03 9:25

And your life just went straight to hell after that, huh?

SPEAKER_01 9:28

It has gone straight to hell. I mean, I've got a good marriage, I got a wonderful son, and I got some good friends. But other than that, life went straight to hell. I've been broke all my life. I have, you know, there's there's this constant bitterness of having not

Song: 25 Years Ago

SPEAKER_01 9:43

made it big at anything, and I'm far from the only person in Nashville that feels that way about their own situation. I mean it's nothing unique at all.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

He took Highway 31 down from Indiana, Nashville, Tennessee, with a suitcase full of tune. Got a tough job in a factory tonight with a slinger on his left and a picker on its right. Knock on doors, pillars knock on the door every morning, every afternoon. I hear this a man with a voice, a man with a slap, a man with a fiddle and a flow. A man with a stream open as bill 25 years ago, one radio.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Just never. I'm also grateful for a lot of stuff. I don't walk around bitter all the time. I there's a lot I am grateful for. I've gotten to see the world to a s to an extent, you know, and I've gotten to be on stage, which is, you know, probably my favorite thing, even more than writing. Uh when I when I discovered being on stage, I was in every school play. I was the first time I got a I told a joke that was ad-libed, and it got such a laugh that it broke out into applause. And I remember that moment as well like like it happened ten minutes ago. Uh, it totally changed my life. That was seventh grade, which was about the same time that mom got the typewriter.

SPEAKER_03 13:55

Hey, seventh grade, there was a lot of changes going on in your mind, your body, your life. That's a heavy time.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Well,

8th Grade Sucked

SPEAKER_01 14:02

the worst of it started in eighth grade and it sucked. There was something that happened to all the kids between seventh grade and eighth grade, where suddenly it became all peer group related, and I can't associate with you. You only have a one-car garage. My family has a two-car garage, you know. Idiocy like that. That happened like right when eighth grade started. And I was I was considered unique and talented up to seventh grade. And uh starting in eighth grade, I was just a square peg. I was a crazy kid, you know, that was doing Steve Martin routines in in the hallway all the time and you know, imitating Monty Python characters. I was just considered crazy. And I have Tourette's. So I was walking down the hallway at school, blinking my ass off all the time and jerking my head. And uh, you know, that that was just another reason to ostracize me. So uh seventh grade was the last good year of school. After that, it was just uh it was just downhill, downhill fast.

SPEAKER_03 15:09

Well, changing schools is difficult, but that time where we we go through a little at least us guys go through a little testosterone poisoning, that doesn't help the situation with the chemical mix that goes through our brain, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Yeah, I didn't know what to do with it either. I'd started I started a little later than other kids, I think. By about tenth grade, the testosterone was flowing and I didn't know what to do with it. Girls were not even an option. You know, there was no girl in school that would, you know, piss on me if I was on fire. I was just you know, I was an outcast. And and and I was, you know, the only time I got to be on stage was like a week per semester, you know, when the school play ran. Yeah. I was always on stage all the time. People I didn't have much of a sense of humanity. People were cardboard to me. They existed just to try out comedy routines on. And I was writing my own routines by a certain point, you know, hence the books that I was writing. Now I'm on stage a lot, so I'm able to be just sort of a fairly well-reasoned, you know, settled down personality. But then I didn't have it, and I was having three bowls of cereal every morning before I went to catch the school bus, and each bowl of Cheerios had about four spoonfuls of sugar on it. So that's 12 spoonfuls of sugar before I leave the house. I was bouncing off the walls, you know. So I I was very much the crazy kid in high school. Everybody who signed my yearbook, it seems like everybody said to the craziest person I know, and they didn't mean fun, loving, life of the party, whatever, they meant crazy. They were looking at your clinical condition, huh? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

A lot of those experiences uh have shown up and have have formed your lyrics and and your music. The skinny kid song where you know you're looking for revenge. That had to be part of what your real life experience was, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:15

There's probably not a note I've ever played that doesn't trace right back to high school. And what was going on during you know, at home during high school. You know. There's not a note that I play that doesn't go straight back to that, probably. I mean, and you I would need a psychoanalyst to tell for sure, I guess, but but that's um oh yeah, formative years, and I and I think of high school every day. I've I run into people who say they can't remember a thing about it, and I'm like, how is that even possible? Formed me from the ground up, you know, and it gave me a lot of anger, it get which I purged most of by now because I was, you know, Government Cheese was a punk rock band. I purged a lot of anger treading the stages with with that band. You know, yeah, yeah, high school was very formative, junior high, even more so probably. Because you're right, the puberty happened and the the girls happened, and my relationship with my parents was not the greatest. Mom and I were okay with each other, but me and dad weren't. And we were we were button heads a lot. And and you have an older brother, but he was considerably older, right? I got two older brothers. One of them would have turned eighty-one yesterday. Wayman, Carlton Wayman Walmack, and he was uh born in Arkansas in 42. He was the firstborn, and then there was thirteen years. For some reason, I don't know, I've never heard anybody in the family mention anything about a miscarriage or anything, but it was thirteen years before Jerry was born, who's my middle brother. He's alive and well, lives in our old hometown of Madisonville, which was the town in which all this formative crap happened, was Madisonville. And then I have an older sister who was born three years, four months, and seven days after Jerry. And then I was born three years, four months, and seven days after her.

SPEAKER_03 19:28

That's an interesting statistic. Yeah. I have a younger brother, seventeen years younger, half brother. Our relationship I mean it we're two different generations, so I would imagine you had a similar experience, you know, with your elder siblings, where there really wasn't a a solid relationship just because you know, you were just a punk kid and they were they were young men.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Well, the the household dynamic was really screwed up. Uh it was not a happy home. Um mom had a serious depression problem, but I don't think he ever realized it. These were simple people that grew up in Arkansas in the 1920s and 30s, and dad became a preacher uh because he wanted to be on stage, I think. I think that's what turned him on to the ministry. And uh this is true of a lot of preachers. I've been, you know, from growing up in the church, I've been around a lot of preachers, and they're like comedians. They're one person on stage or behind the pulpit, however you want to say it, and they're a total other person off stage, uh, usually much uh glummer, much darker. Dad was a dark guy. He was either the um deepest person I've ever met or the shallowest. I don't know. He was inscrutable, and it was between mom and dad, uh there wasn't a whole lot of talking that went on, there wasn't a whole lot of uh happiness. I mean, it wasn't psycho, it wasn't like we got locked in the closet or anything, it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't happy. And uh that contributed to the anger problems I had too. And my brother had the anger problems too. Because, you know, you had the Brady Bunch on television on Friday night, and there was and you're looking at that going, why can't my family be this happy? Why can't my parents be this uh act this concerned about my well being? So that played that between that and high school, you know, I had my first suicidal ideation around the age of sixteen. Got sent off to see a psychologist about it. I wouldn't want to go through it again. There's probably not a day. I might like to go back to that day in seventh grade when I adlib that joke that got the applause. I might like to go back and relive that day. And I would like to really relive some of the sixties that I lived through because that was a magical time. And not just because I was a really young kid. And every little kid's life is magical, you know, as they remember it. But the 60s, I'm convinced it was not just that I was a little kid, it was a magical time, period. So I would like to go back to some of that, see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, which I probably did see, but I was too young to pay attention to it or remember.

SPEAKER_03 22:38

Yeah, well, I'm ten years your senior, and uh I do remember that, and it was pretty cool. Yeah.

The Fires

SPEAKER_03 22:45

So I don't know if you know this, but I used to be a firefighter. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, that's that was my job in Atlanta. And uh I read with much interest your experience with having a fire in your home and the experience. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 23:01

It's happened twice. The first one, my wife had gotten a good job in Nashville as the morning anchor on a television station, morning news anchor. It was gonna be a real step up for us. And government cheese was just playing our last few gigs before we broke up. So I was free to move to Nashville with her, and the moving guys came and they boxed up everything, and they left a couple of big heavy boxes on top of a heating grate that had a gas pilot light flaming underneath the rack, uh, underneath the floor. We had gas heat, gas cooking, everything was gas. And um we heard some glass shattering around six in the morning and jumped up and the the boxes on top of the heating grate were on fire. Everything in the house was boxed up. It was nothing but this forest of corrugated cardboard. So the fire spread like crazy, and we were in this house that was subdivided into four apartments. So in my bare feet and my pajama pants and a t-shirt without my glasses on, ran to everybody's front door, you know, banging like crazy. Fire, fire, get up, fire, fire. And uh everybody got out. But by the time I had done that and Beth had run out the front door, the entire apartment was on fire. Wow, it had gone from being over a heating grate next to the dining table to flames coming through the front windows of the living room part of the apartment. Um, and we neither one of us grabbed our glasses. So we're both sitting across the street watching all our stuff burn up in cardboard boxes, uh barely able to see it, you know, just this astigmatic vision of orange coming out of these blurry windows that we were seeing going. This this is this doesn't bode well for a trip to Nashville to live, does it? This this just uh seems like this might not be the thing to do, which turned out entirely not to be true. Nashville's been very good to both of us. Uh but at the time you think things like that, and we went from having a moving vans full of stuff moving vans worth full of stuff once they would load it on there. We went from having that much stuff to moving to Nashville later that evening uh in two cars and a friend's pickup truck. That's quite a reduction in inventory. Yeah, yeah. Um my guitars survived uh because most of them were in the government cheese van. I hadn't taken them out of the van. My amp survived one of my amps survived because it was in a road case in the living room. Another amp got fricasseed, uh, the stairs opened up in smoke, and uh it was it was this incredible feeling when we were opening up boxes that didn't seem to be as burned as others. They might be black on the outside, but they were still together as boxes, and opened them up and went, Oh my god, the records, the records made it, and the videotapes made it. But a whole lot of stuff, all our clothes, we had no clothes. We had to get entirely new wardrobes. Uh a lot of the books went up in flames, and uh um of course a lot of the furniture and um almost to this day, I mean it's been 31 years, over 31 years since that happened, and you still occasionally find yourself walking around the house looking for something, and you go, Oh well, have I seen that since the fire? No, I guess I haven't. Lost a lot of photographs, things like that, keepsakes, lost B.B. King's autograph, things like that.

SPEAKER_03 27:20

You were still in Kentucky at that time, though, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Yeah, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

SPEAKER_03 27:25

Did they have a paid or volunteer fire department that showed up for you?

SPEAKER_01 27:28

Yeah, it's a town of 60,000 people. Yeah, it's a municipal fire department. And their firehouse wasn't far from our apartment. So that was that was a good thing. But we yeah, we lost almost everything. Almost. Like I said, the records and the videotape survived. Um none of the cassettes survived. The stereo we had a stereo and we had a jam box, and both of those were melted over when we saw them next. But Beth had made sure we had renter's insurance. God bless her. We were able to uh replace everything except the keepsakes, the stuff you can't replace. And I understand you lost your pet as well. Yeah, yeah. Um, Chelsea, our cat, the first pet I'd ever had. Mom didn't like the idea of dogs and cats in the house. So we never had a pet growing up. So Chelsea was our cat. They found her body in the apartment and brought it out to the street, and I went over and looked at her. You know, her lips were all red, her eyes were red, her nose was red, you know, smoke inhalation, I guess, is what killed her. And that's when I lost it. I I I'd been freaking out some, but not really crying a lot. And then when I saw Chelsea, I I broke out in tears. That's that's what brought me down. But the move to Nashville, you said turned out to be ultimately a good experience for your family? Oh, yeah, yeah. I fell backwards into a great band. There's a guy out here who runs a record store now in a couple of nightclubs. His name's Grimy, Michael Grimes. And uh he was an old friend of mine who had lived in Bowling Green, and he'd already moved down to Nashville and he was playing in bands. He got me to come over to a jam session with him and Will Kimbrough, who has gone on to play with Emmy Lou Harris and Jimmy Buffett and Todd Snyder and Rodney Crowell. He's a terrific guitar player. And the jam was me, Will Grimy, and Tommy Meyer on drums, and it just became this incredible band just right away. Uh, we called ourselves the Biscuits, and John Prime's oh boy label signed us. And we were only together two years, but it was two of the best years of my life. You know, practically within weeks of living in Nashville, we had this band together.

unknown 29:56

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

And it stayed together for two years, and we broke up in '94. There was a lot of infighting in the band. Me and Will were kind of the reasonable guys in the band. And then Grimy and Tommy just fought like cats and dogs all the time. So Will split in '94, September of '94. So, and there was no thought of carrying on the band without him or without any of us, you know, because there was a real chemistry to the music we did. And I really understood after being in the biscuits, how come the who never broke up? You read about the who story, how much infighting they had, but then you find out on on your own that you get into this room with these fellas you've been fighting with, and suddenly from the first note you play, it's incredible. And

Cheese Broke Up in '94

SPEAKER_01 30:46

nobody has to tell anybody what to do in order to make this incredible noise. It just happens. The who must have been the same way, you know. So we broke up in '94, and I got a job at a bookstore and finished Cheese Chronicles. I finished it about a year later. And like I told you, the producer Brad Jones calls me up wanting to cut some demos on me in September of 95 when Cheese Chronicles came out. And that bookstore period was kind of fun. I did enjoy myself then. It was sort of, I I look back on it and I realized I enjoyed myself more than I thought I did at the time, because suddenly I'd gone to be from being the next big thing yet again, to being a store clerk, you know, wearing a tie and saying, May I help you. But I also got to read a lot of books while I was there. It was a nice decompression after being on the road in bands for nine years at that point. I have fond memories of it now, too. My book signing was at that bookstore, the launch party, and here at the house, everybody was here. You couldn't move. Uh, I'm

Marshall Crenshaw Walks In

SPEAKER_01 31:56

getting a beer out of the fridge, and Marshall Crenshaw walks into my kitchen, and I'm just looking at him going, Marshall Crenshaw? Where the how'd you come from? And Brad Jones, the same guy, the producer, had brought Marshall over to the house. So I said,

Baja Burrito with Alice Cooper - That's Nashville

SPEAKER_01 32:14

you know, and that's Nashville. You run into people like that, it happens, you know. Uh I was at Baja Burrito with Alice Cooper a while back in a restaurant with Reba McIntyre a little bit before that. You know, things like that happen in in Nashville. It's it's not that big a deal, except Marshall Crenshaw, who would expect to run into him. He's not exactly hoe down country or anything. And in your kitchen, right?

SPEAKER_03 32:40

That has to be some some fun experiences that, you know, get you through some tough days when you think about the fun stuff, too.

SPEAKER_01 32:47

Oh, yeah, yeah. Um, the fun stuff is mainly what lingers in your memory. I'm sure that's true with everybody. I wrote down all the nightmarish stuff about the cheese in the book, and that purged a lot of it. I was a lot more bitter over. See, the cheese kind of got screwed over on some business deals that condemned us to never going to be able to make it big after we'd signed a couple of dodgy contracts. And I was really angry about that after the band broke up, and then I wrote it all down, put it out in a book, and other people read it, the bitterness largely went away, mostly, which is one reason I wrote Dust Bunnies too, to cover all the stuff that happened before then.

SPEAKER_03 33:29

Your catalog of music that I've had the experience with takes me all over the place. I was listening to some more of your stuff when I was walking the dog this morning. And uh, and but the first

The Replacements - Best Song Award

SPEAKER_03 33:39

song that came on, every time I listened to it, the replacement, and your experience with these fellas, and uh but I was curious about the feel of the music is completely different. A ballad, I guess. How did that come about? Was that something you had been mulling over, or did it come to you in a dream? How'd you experience that? Because it's it's just a wonderful piece of music.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

Well, here's a weird thing. I don't always remember writing the songs. It's weird. It's like one day I had I didn't have the song, and the next day I did. I do remember writing the replacements in so much as I wrote all the words first, uh, and it was to a fast rock beat. I could hear this rock song in my head, and the first demo of it, God knows where that is, on a cassette somewhere, was uh really rock and roll. The replacements, play rock and roll, and but the lyrics were so long that that you know started sounding monotonous, and I don't know how I found the chord progression that I settled on for it. It turned into sounding something more like something you'd hear in a 1930s movie or something, exactly, and it's it it's kind of a talking blues in a way, it's not a blues tune, and it's not a talking blues like in the traditional sense, but basically I'm talking it. It's a spoken word piece with a little bit of song to it, not a whole lot. I got the best song award in the Nashville scene critics poll for that one back in 2002. I think it was well deserved. I got another song that won Best Song 2. I I think I'm the only writer to ever win Best Song twice in the Nashville scene polls.

SPEAKER_03 35:26

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 35:27

What's the second one? A good day?

SPEAKER_03 35:29

Nice day.

Song: A Nice Day

SPEAKER_03 35:30

Nice day, I'm sorry. Yeah, I love that song. Thank you. Yeah, you were privileged us when I met you last September at Irene Kelly's home. It's just beautiful in its simplicity and how your son made you choose to leave the uh chords exactly the way they were. You sounded like you had planned something larger.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

Something bigger than me, and I wish I could write more songs like that. I've never written a song as affecting before that or since. I've written some good stuff, but truly I've written some crap too, but I've never uh I went deep in the well for that one, and I almost didn't put it on the record that it was gonna go on because I thought, well, this is too personal, this is uh me whining, nobody's gonna want to hear a middle-aged man whine like that. And it turns out that's exactly what they wanted. Um, that was one of the first songs I ever wrote that was really personal. Before that, all my stuff had been like Ray Davis, Randy Newman-esque character sketches, amusing situations, and whatnot. And then with Night's Day, I wrote about myself, it's and I was scared to death.

SPEAKER_02 36:54

Me and my sweetheart and our boy. It's been a nice day. We had a good time, so much time and a laugh, what joy It was got a friend, we got involved, we came off our beds on bills, we got a shell I got a shape. That's my boy's play. We all and sweet, we're not sweet, and a boy.

SPEAKER_01 39:46

I'm gonna screw this up. My parents screwed it up, I'm gonna screw it up. It's gonna, you know, you're scared to death, and that found its way into that song, and uh that whole album turned out to be really personal. It's the first time I'd ever sang personal confessional material like that, and I've been the confessional open book guy ever since. Because once you take that stopper out of the genie bottle, uh there's no way to put the genie back in. You're confessional and personal from then on, which I have been.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

But don't you find that that attracts the rest of the humans to you?

SPEAKER_01 40:31

Totally. Yeah, I've I finally said something art artistically worthwhile. I'd done it in the book already. I'd done it in Cheese Chronicles, and people had responded to it very well. And it hadn't entered my thick head that maybe if I got this personal in my lyrics that it would affect people that way too. And it did. You know, because all I was doing was expressing feelings that everybody else was feeling, but nobody says anything about it, nobody admits it because they don't want to come off looking weak or insecure or but everybody's comparing their own insides to everybody else's outsides all the time and thinking they're the losers in every group of people they're in with. And I just said it. I just happen to write a song about it, and especially about parenting with a cute little kid in the song. Whenever somebody tells me they like that song, I say, Well, how old's your kid? Because I know right away.

SPEAKER_03 41:34

Yeah, it touched my heart. So, Tommy, is there anything else you'd like to say before we close this conversation out?

SPEAKER_01 41:40

Come see me. I don't get to California that often, so let's make the most of it. I appreciate it, man.

SPEAKER_03 41:47

Well, there you have it. My conversation with Tommy

tommywomack.com

SPEAKER_03 41:50

Wolmack. You can find more of Tommy Womack's music and stories at Tommywomack.com. And Womack is spelled W-O-M-A-C-K. And I encourage you to go check that out because all of his music and his books can be found on that location. Of course, they can be found on Amazon and some of the other large organization outlets, but I encourage everybody to go to the artist's website if at all possible. Let's help get these artists their due.

Joe Peters Music

SPEAKER_03 42:20

And speaking of giving the artist their due, the haunting music that is in the background right now was created by prolific singer, songwriter, and good friend of mine, Joe Peters. Joe Peters PhD, actually. Joe was featured on an earlier episode of Gramps Just Make Shit Up, and I recommend that you check that one out as well if you're not familiar with his music. It's pretty amazing.

unknown 42:44

Don't you know?

SPEAKER_03 42:45

Oh, one more thing. In this episode, I'm starting

Gramps Really Appreciates You -Rondalyn @ Warm Springs Veterinary

SPEAKER_03 42:49

something new. I'm starting a segment called Gramps Really Appreciate You, or Gray for short. Why would I want to shorten that? Anyway, I'm gonna mention the very nice people that I meet at businesses where I've had a good experience or a great service. You can just tell that these people really enjoy what they do and they make you leave with the best possible memory of your visit. So with that, I'd like to thank you, Rondolyn, the Veterinary Tech, that provides excellent service on behalf of Warm Springs Veterinary Clinic, right here in Fremont, California. Recently, Rondolin patiently listened to a concern that I had about peaches. You may have heard about peaches on a previous episode. She tends to express herself when I'm trying to interview someone. But anyway, just so you know, this segment is not, and I repeat, not, on behalf of any paid sponsors, of which there are, let me count. Well, turns out there's none. I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to pay to be mentioned on this podcast anyway. So thank you, Rondolyn, and the Warm Springs Veterinary Clinic. Gramps really appreciate

The Ladles Outro

SPEAKER_03 43:50

you. Well, that cool intro jingle that you heard at the beginning of this episode, plus this outro music was written, recorded, produced by the Ladles. Write that down. L A D L E S. I met Lucia, who plays fiddle, Katie on the guitar, and Caroline on the banjo at the mud puddle. Now that's a local music venue here in Niles, California. Their harmonies were just mesmerizing, and I had to ask if they might consider doing a jingle for me. And here's what they said.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

You gotta be kidding me.

SPEAKER_03 44:18

I'm gonna share more about them on the next episode, so thanks for listening. I have to go now. It's time for my nap.