Local Treasures: Tuning in to Tony Thomas

The keyboard virtuoso has played a pivotal part in local music.

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If you live in Memphis and own a piano, you may already know Tony Thomas. He’s been making house calls to tune pianos for a quarter-century, though he started the practice back in his college years. As I can vouch from his having tuned my own pianos, he loves the process. Thomas’ enthusiasm is contagious, and you might find yourself contemplating learning the trade as well, so lucid are his explanations of the instrument’s inner workings, and so personable is his disposition.

But the best part comes when he’s done. Once he’s turned the last peg on the last troublesome key and deems his work nearly complete, he’ll set aside his socket wrench and pull the bench up to the keyboard like it’s a table set for a luxurious meal. And then he begins to play.

Suddenly a jazz standard — “Stairway to the Stars,” say — is ringing out from your dusty behemoth of wood and wire, Thomas’ right hand playing chords and melody simultaneously, Oscar Peterson-style, while his left hand meanders through the bass lines, until it seems like the black and white keys themselves form a stairway, lifting you to heaven.

“As I often joke with my customers,” he tells me, “I think I got into this business just so I can play freshly tuned pianos.”

All playing aside, it’s clear that Thomas is also drawn to the sheer acoustic majesty of the piano. “Even as a kid,” he says, “the sound of the instrument was my main thing. My father was a very good amateur pianist. He played the music of his day by ear, and he knew the right chords. Not always the right key, but always the right chords. And he had the piano tuned regularly. So by the time I was one, I knew what it sounded like when it was in tune. After that, I almost couldn’t stand playing instruments that weren’t tuned.”

“Mechanically inclined”

Thomas’ father, George, worked for the Bendix Corporation, but sang tenor and had serious vocal instruction in his younger days in New Jersey. He was determined to pass on his ear-training to his son. “My father was showing me stuff,” he says. “And to this day, on most days, I have perfect pitch. I can pull an A or a C or an F sharp out of thin air, because he trained me. It was a fun game! I would stand in front of the piano and he would play a note and ask me to guess what it was. And then after a while, I knew what an F sharp sounded like, or a D. It’s made the pursuit of music as a profession much easier.”

Meanwhile, Thomas’ mother, Helen, “was a music lover of the first order. Up until her teen years, she took piano lessons. She’d had one of those teachers that slapped a child on the wrist when they played a wrong note. As a result, she was very into playing classical pieces accurately. I remember practicing the piano in the rec room in our house. If she knew the piece, she would know if I was faking it [as opposed to sight-reading the music]. I played by ear, and could get it close, but she could tell and would say, ‘Do that again!’ She was remarkable.”

When Thomas was around 4 or 5, at the dawn of the 1950s, Bendix transferred his father from New Jersey to Davenport, Iowa, and that’s where Thomas grew up with his older brother and sister. From a young age, he was a tinkerer. “I was mechanically inclined,” he notes. That, combined with his budding piano talents, played into his growing fascination with another, more modern instrument: the electric organ.

Something about organs struck a chord with him, to the point where he’d claim decades later that “I’ve always been an organ player that plays piano,” despite having first learned to play on the latter. Those childhood piano lessons, in Thomas’ mind, were but a precursor to his true musical love. “Because I had an early knack for it, by the time I was 9, I’d gotten involved with spinet organs and thought they were really cool. My father and mother purchased a Lowrey spinet organ for me, so I had a piano that I was taking lessons on and an organ to play. I got used to playing bass with my foot [on the organ pedals] at a very early age. It was really a great path for me.”

His first gig, he recalls, was playing Easter hymns in the front window of Schmidt Music Store in Davenport, wearing a gown and a surplice. “I looked like a little angel, showing folks that even a 9-year-old could play a Lowrey organ, because a lot of people didn’t want to spend that money. My folks had to finance it. They couldn’t pay cash for this thing, but they bought it for me. My first gig was with that dealership, and then I demonstrated organs for a couple of other dealerships.”

Before long, he was playing the ultimate in electric organs — a Hammond — and fine-tuning his mastery of tempo. “My first steady, paying gig was in a roller rink that had a Hammond, an early model, which was great training, because you had to play with a very, very good metronomic sense. People that dance-skate make their moves, and if you rush the beat, that is not welcome! I was 13 on that gig, and realized I could not deviate. I practiced with a metronome, so when I played at the roller rink I wouldn’t piss anybody off.”

Not only did the gig improve his chops, it was lucrative. “That would have been around 1959, and I would make 25 to 30 bucks a week,” he says. “One thing about my mother: She would always say, ‘Never give it away.’ She thought that I had a talent, and if I was going to be professional, I should be paid in a professional manner.”

At that age, he surely never guessed that one day he would be playing (and carting, repairing, or selling) Hammonds in Memphis for most of his adult life, and making bank doing it.

“The first time I ever saw him play”

Many adventures awaited him before that, as he came to play in various combos through his teens. Thomas savored the raw power of the Hammond, playing rock-and-roll with a Davenport band, even as his older sister’s boyfriend turned him on to jazz pianist Bill Evans. He ultimately studied with the renowned organist and composer Gerhard Krapf at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, but a couple of fellow students really prefigured his life in jazz, as he continued gigging in the area.

“There was a club up in Cedar Rapids called The Tender Trap,” says Thomas, “and the featured vocalist was Al Jarreau — with David Sanborn on saxophone. Sanborn was a master’s candidate at Iowa, learning orchestration and other things, and Jarreau was a psychology major. So I met those guys and started playing in that band, I would say, for a year and a half. It was way before either of them had record deals.”

He played all kinds of gigs in the region, even a brief hotel residency with a combo in Kearney, Nebraska, all of which helped him develop his organ-hauling skills. “Complaining was the fun part,” he says. “Moving in and out of clubs, not so much.” But when a touring guitarist told Thomas about a band he was forming in Memphis and invited him to play keys, Thomas decided to move south. It was 1972, and Thomas was still in his mid-twenties.

Having been a member of the American Federation of Musicians since he was 13, Thomas duly changed his registration from Davenport’s Local 67 to Memphis’ Local 71 (where he’s now a board member) and began playing around the Bluff City. The band that had lured him here fizzled out after a few gigs, but he soon found work at the William B. Tanner Company, a Memphis studio specializing in jingles. That would not only be his very lucrative primary gig for the next 16 years (continuing after Tanner was bought out by Media General Broadcast Services), it would be a proving ground for the legendary bond he forged with two other Memphis greats: drummer Tom Lonardo and bassist Sam Shoup.

Shoup, now the director of commercial music at the University of Memphis, recalls Thomas’ penchant for playing multiple keyboards, and pioneering the use of synthesizers in the 1970s.

“I remember the first time I ever saw him play,” Shoup says. “I was doing a gig at the Whitehaven Hilton, and he was playing in the band that was in the little bar area. He had a Hammond B3 with a Fender Rhodes [electric piano] stacked on top of that. And a synthesizer on top of that! Just an unbelievable stack of keyboards. He was playing the “Maple Leaf Rag” on all of them. He looked like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.”

Meanwhile, Lonardo and Thomas were performing in a band at the Bombay Bicycle Club, one of the first clubs in Overton Square. Eventually, all three ended up at Tanner. As Lonardo recalls, “it was not just the three of us, but a conductor, rhythm section, guitar, singers, somebody leading the sessions, and they had written out all the music. Tony showed me that reading [music] was an asset. Until I met him and got in that studio, I could read just a little bit. But he showed me that was a valuable skill, and I got to where I could read those jingle charts.”

There was also room for more creative music at Tanner. “We were doing a lot of film service music, what they call ‘needle drops’ in the business,” says Thomas. “Those are songs that sound like something but are not [the hits].” The players would conjure whole genres out of thin air, creating libraries of works that fit specific moods. “They had six or seven different libraries in different styles, all of which were overseen by really well-qualified arrangers. Sam had a library, kind of progressive rock.”

Around that time, the Tony Thomas Trio emerged as a live band, featuring Lonardo, Shoup, and Thomas, and holding court at the Bombay Bicycle Club. “We were there five nights a week,” Lonardo recalls. “Between that and the jingle gig, we were always playing somebody else’s music. So after the Bombay gigs were over, we’d go and record our own stuff.”

One little-known album of those recordings, 1979’s LST, self-released by the Tony Thomas Trio, documents their originals and the remarkable chemistry they’d developed. Delving into rock-inflected jazz instrumentals, it marks some of the most inventive synth work happening in Memphis at the time, and, of course, some of Thomas’ trademark work on the Hammond.

“That was recorded in my house over on Jefferson,” says Lonardo, “and there are some organ parts where Tony just pulled his truck up with the organ in it, we ran the cables inside, and he sat and played organ in the truck while we recorded!”

Lonardo still marvels at the chemistry between his more harmonic band mates. “Tony and Shoup really hit it off,” he says. “They both hear things when I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I keep a beat going. We all do that. But he has the ability to — if Sam changes the bass note, Tony immediately changes the chord to fit, and it happens in real time.”

“Cool and gracious and kind”

By 1981, Thomas had met Tonda, his wife to this day, and together they would raise two kids. Then, not long after, the trio reached the zenith of their fame. Thomas’ gift for invention and genre studies played a major role in the trio’s one hit single, a novelty number cooked up on the spot in one of those freewheeling, after-hours recording sessions.

“Sam and I just made up the dumbest shit we could,” says Lonardo, “put a beat to it, and then Tony would come along and put the magic on it and make it sound like something that we’d studied.”

Thus was the legendary “Dog Police” born, a goofy pop tale of romantic allure and mysterious canine law enforcement that blended techno synth licks, barking sounds, and a pseudo-operatic chorus. Once a suitably ridiculous video was filmed to illustrate the song, starring Lonardo, it became something of a hit on the then-fledgling MTV in 1983. To this day, it’s a celebrated slice of ’80s kitsch, much beloved in Memphis’ underground music scene.

The trio tried to run with it, taking the song title as their new band name and releasing other comically demented videos like “1-800.” But their hearts weren’t really in it, preferring their more swinging or jazz fusion-leaning material, and they have carried on as the Tony Thomas Trio to this day. Indeed, only last month they made their usual musical contribution to the Presbyterian Day School’s Christmas pageant, an annual tradition for the trio.

The three are used to diverting to individual projects, then regrouping, and can be heard as in-demand session men on hundreds of recordings, both individually and together, even backing the legendary George Coleman at one point. As for Thomas, perhaps some of the finest jazz this city has produced were the recordings made by Herman Green, Calvin Newborn, Samarai Celestial, and Thomas in the ’90s, released under Green’s name.

And many a festive fan has thrilled to Thomas’ inventive solo arrangements for the century-old Wurlitzer theater organ in the Orpheum Theatre. Seeing him seated on the huge instrument, dwarfed by its dimensions, while he elicits entire orchestral arrangements from the beast’s three keyboards, has become an annual tradition, recently captured on the album, A Very Mighty Christmas — Tony Thomas Plays the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ.

Finally, just last year, in a move that surprised many, Thomas emerged with an album in the classic organ trio tradition, Get With This!, working with an entirely new set of players, the Tony Thomas Three. Oddly enough, the album had its origins in his piano-tuning work a quarter-century ago.

Matt Ross-Spang, a Grammy-winning engineer and producer with his own Southern Grooves imprint and studio, where he produced Get With This!, got his start working as a teenager at the Sun Studio tourist destination, which he steadfastly helped transform into a functioning studio again, replete with vintage gear.

“I’ve known Tony since I was about 16,” he says. “He’d always tune the piano at Sun, and we’d have to meet early, early in the morning, before the studio opened up for tours, to tune it. You know, it’s hard to tune and talk, but I would bug him the whole time, to pick his brain. He was always so cool and gracious and kind. And then he’d always play a little bit.”

“All Things Good”

Though he’ll turn 80 this year, Thomas shows no signs of slowing. Perhaps his youthful knack for improvisation comes down to his rather holistic view of music, ranging from being “mechanically inclined” to his deep sensitivity to the sheer sound of the instruments he plays. He’s delighted at every turn, if not a little awestruck, and that inspires him to new, playful heights.

As he puts it, “We don’t have to get into a bunch of metaphysics, but as a Christian, we credit all things good to God. And really, if you take a closer look at how things are made, how they’re designed, how things are in nature, how things are in the world, and you start looking at the elegance of nature and sound, for people who are audio artists — and that’s what a musician is — wow, there is so much to appreciate as godly gifts.”