Jimmy Thackery Interview – Musician, Inventor, Businessman

Jimmy Thackery had just wrapped up a tour and returned home to Arkansas when I caught up with him by phone. I was fortunate enough to witness his show a few days before and got to say hello in person. Jimmy is affable, honest and amusing. He makes no effort to hide his disgust with record companies and is a musician embracing the brave new world of the internet and digital marketing.

Jimmy has spent the better part of 40 years in the music business and has recently re-launched his own record label, White River Records. In 2010, he released the Jimmy Thackery & The Drivers – Live In Detroit CD and DVD on the label, and on March 10, 2011 he released his new studio album Feel The Heat.

We talked about pedal nerds, white-knuckle guitar players, record company suits-with-ponytails, whammy bars, guitars, and assholes on the highway. Jimmy Thackery is not only a musician. He is an inventor, guitar tech, businessman, journeyman, and music fan. He continues to explore new frontiers sonically and professionally. As he pointed out a few times during our conversation, “you’re only limited by your imagination.”

I read that you were from Pittsburgh originally, then Washington, DC and now Arkansas. Have you been in Arkansas a long time?
Let’s see, I’ve been here about twelve years now. Yeah, that’s a pretty long time.

Was there something when you were traveling through Arkansas that you really liked?
I got hired to play a festival here and I fell in love with this little town right away. It was one of the coolest festivals I’ve ever played. I just had a wonderful feeling about this part of the world and fortunately the promoter was nice enough to hire me back the next year to play her festival again and the subsequent year to play it again. I finally realized that the promoter and I were kinda hittin’ the lick and I eventually just married her and moved here (laughs).

(Laughs) Ah ha! It was a woman! A woman was involved. That’s not your Triple Ex-Wife is it?
No. No. No, that particular tune, you know everyone thinks there’s some sort of deeper hidden meaning to the songs that you write but there really isn’t most of the time. It really has no basis in fact or past history. It’s just kind of a novelty tune I came up with one day. I sit around here in the winter time with my ProTools and all my instruments sitting around and every morning I try to come out and write something. I came out one morning and I was in a bit of a jovial mood and an irreverent frame of mind and that was the song that came out that day.

A lot of your songs seem to have some humor in them.
Well, you try to keep it light-hearted. Sometimes you gotta write that slow, sad ballad that has some basis in fact but not always. Sometimes it’s just writing a song for a lark and it doesn’t have anything to do with anybody and no animals were hurt in the process of writing the song!

Are you writing songs for a specific project now? Do you have a new studio album in the works?
Oh yeah, I’m always doing that. I just take the winter break and try to write something every day. I just stack ‘em all up and I have a library to choose from. I go back into that library and start yanking songs and if something seems like it’s missing I’ll try to fill that gap by writing another song; but I just try to keep a library of original tunes in the computer. I’m in the process of mixing a brand new studio album so I’m gonna be concentrating on that for the time being until that’s finished but as soon as that’s wrapped up, which ought to be pretty soon. I’ll go back into writing mode. I love it. I just love doing it so I’ll hook up all the ProTools stuff again and get out the bass, mandolin, electric guitars, and the acoustic guitars and just see what I can come up with.

Russ Wilson (Jimmy’s drummer) is relatively new to the band right?
Well, he came in around three years ago.

What’s the first record he was on?
This last one. Live In Detroit was his album debut with this outfit.

Your bassist Mark Bumbgarner, he’s been with you about five years?
He’s in five, maybe going on six now.

Did something happen with the others guys or did you just decide you wanted to play some other folks?
Let’s just suffice it to say that it got to the point where our paths were not intersecting. And I felt like we needed to progress. I wanted to get back to be able to play some older style stuff.

Well Russ is very good. I was listening closely to him out at the show the other night. I liked him a lot.
Well, he’s outta the Gene Krupa school. He runs his own 13 piece jazz orchestra doing 20’s & 30’s stuff. He’s either conducting, playing the drum kit, or singing in that band. So he’s really well versed in that genre. If we take that and apply it to what we do, it can be pretty powerful. I’m happy to have him; he’s been a great addition.

Have you known him a long time?
I actually have known Russ for quite some time, he was my first call and he had been doing his jazz band. He’s got a jazz band, a swing quartet and he’s got a Hawaiian band. He’s been keeping busy doing all those things in the state of North Carolina. I basically called him up and said “Look you know I need somebody if you’re ready to go see the world through a bug-spattered windshield again you’ve got the gig.” And he said “yeah, I’m ready.” I said, “I don’t tour that much in the winter so you don’t have to give up what you’re doing, what you’ve been doing just to come play with me. You have a nice window of opportunity where you can do that stuff as well. Augment your income some and keep your jazz band intact so it’s the best of both worlds.”

You don’t tour in the winter, so about how many dates a year do you do?
I’m gonna say somewhere between 150 to 175 or so. As you get a little bit older you start realizing that slogging through Fargo in February is not necessarily advisable. It’s for younger guys. When you’re 30 and bulletproof hey no problem but old guys like me, you slip on the ice and your bones break real easy. (laughs)

At the show you told me you’ve never driven or had a drivers’ license.
You know man, I woke up one day 45 years old and realized I had never bothered to get a drivers license. I started young enough that somebody’s Mom always had a station wagon to take the band to the gig. I went on the road at an early age and it’s one of those things that slipped by me. And I woke up one day and thought I’m a full grown man and I’ve never driven a car. No reason to start now. The last thing the world needs is another asshole behind the wheel right?

I think that every morning. So, thank you.
Yeah, see?

You also mentioned that’s why you call the band The Drivers. Is that true?
Yeah. Actually I had a big band before this trio, back in the late 80’s & early 90’s. I realized that economically this isn’t going to fly very well. There were a whole lot of people to pay; too many egos to massage. So basically in order start a trio I fired everybody except the rhythm section. The keyboard player was very disgruntled and he made a sarcastic comment, upon his exit, that I should refer to my next band as The Drivers. He was the guy that was always carting me around and took umbrage to it. I said, you know, that’s not a bad idea, I think I’ll use that and I’ve used it ever since. It’s the most often used trivia question when somebody wants to give away a t-shirt at one of our shows. “Why is the band called The Drivers?”

Will the new album be on Telarc?
No man, I’m off the reservation completely. I went independent with this last release. I am done with record companies. There was a time when if you were going to get your music out there, you were going to need a record company to do it. Those times are gone. There’s so much more going on in the independent world now, the record companies are almost dinosaurs. We’re seeing them drift into the past now, mainly because retail is over. You don’t have mom & pop record stores to distribute to anymore. You have Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Barnes & Noble. They’re probably not going to buy a whole lot of Jimmy Thackery & The Drivers records. They’ll spend their money on the new Keith Urban thing. The fact is, I know where my people live and can get my product out to them. I’m old enough now that I don’t want record company guys in suits and ponytails telling me how to play my guitar so they can count more beans. I’d like to have control artistically, financially and be able to do this the way I want to do it and I think the people appreciate that.

So, I resurrected my own little label that I’ve had for some time (White River Records) and started putting my own records out on my own label. I would never go back to a record company at this point. I think they’re sorta obsolete, cumbersome, and they’re still working from a template they created 50 years ago that may have worked then but does not work now. We’re using the internet and we’re using digital delivery, you know, it’s a whole other ballgame.

Will your new stuff on your label be available on iTunes, eMusic and other digital outlets?
Oh yeah. And we’re trying to get folks involved in the process. That’s another thing you can do with this independent release stuff. In other words, I have a whole database of people that have bought the album and I’ve got a newsletter that goes out to all of them. I’m toying with the idea of somehow getting them involved in the creative process, maybe with a contest or something like that. Record companies have a very myopic vision of how to sell “units.” They see people as sheep they try to sell this stuff to, where I want to get them involved.

It seems the internet has been a lot better for that connection.
It’s changed everything. The only limits are your imagination.

And for the fans, the internet is a great source of information.
Yeah, and the networking thing is very positive. There are a lot of cool programs you can use, and the constant contact has been very helpful. In fact, I just had a contest. I said, I’m going to give away a whole catalog of my stuff and a T-shirt and some other stuff. You put your email address in there and we’ll have a drawing and whoever wins gets the goodie bag but I’ve also captured everyone’s email. So I sent out an email to tell everyone the album is ready now, order it here. The orders come in on my iPhone, I forward them to my wife back at the house, she stuffs the envelopes and in 2 days you get your record. It’s a pretty cool set-up.

Plus you cut out the BS with the record company.
Oh yeah. And the profit margin is huge. I mean, you get to keep the money and that bankrolls your next project.

Exactly. Why give it to some, as you said, pony-tailed guy in a suit who doesn’t really give a shit.
Yeah, he doesn’t care. He’s got a “job” and he’s worried about keeping his family fed. And in the mean time, the old template is taking money out of your pocket as the artist and when it’s all said and done, the record company owns the rights to your stuff. This way, I own the rights to it. It’s pretty simple, man. Why the record companies can’t figure that out I don’t know, but they’re hanging on to the old way of doing things.

The old way of marketing is gone now.
Yeah, now it’s Apple and iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby, constant contact and all this other stuff. Like I said, the only limits of your marketing ability are he limits of your imagination. What can you come up with that’s going to resonate with your fans, that will get them involved and get them excited about it. I’ll tell you what it comes down to – you’re old enough to remember LPs?

Sure. I have tons of them.
Well, I don’t know about you but everybody I knew, when they would buy an LP, we would scour the back of that thing and read every word hoping it would give some insight into the actual artists we were adoring. You know, what’s Mick Jagger sound like when he talks? What kind of clothes does he wear? What does he do when he’s not with the Rolling Stones? You know, we tried to find some glimpse into the back stage area and see what’s really going on behind the scenes. This is what begat fan magazines. You take that concept – look at CDs these days, you can’t even read the damned things, the print’s so small – we have no way of looking into the inner workings of how the music is written, recorded, produced, what goes on in the studio, all that kinds of stuff. We’re not really privy to it. My concept is to let people become privy to it. One of the things we did recently, when we recorded this album, we video taped it and took clips of those recording moments and put them up on the website. For a five dollar donation to Blues For A Cure you could download the recording of those songs. That gets the audience involved in the process.

Does it bother you when people put videos from your shows on Youtube?
Not at all. Every asshole in the world has a camera phone now. What are you gonna do? Tell people they can’t bring their phones in? And the way I look at it, the record companies don’t want to promote your stuff, might as well let the folks do it. It’s not like you were going to make any money off it.

In a way, it saves you money because it’s like getting free advertising.
The Grateful Dead came up with the idea a long time a go. They encouraged people to bootleg their shows and share them. They were doing their own promotion, using their audience to do it. I thought it was brilliant.

And they never hurt from it. Even their last year of touring they were one of the highest grossing bands.
It only helps the situation. This guarding nickels and dimes crap is something the record companies did because they didn’t want anybody infringing on their piece of the pie.

About your guitars, it looks like you have some different pickups on them.
Yeah, I’ve been using Joe Barden pick-ups. He invented them and they’re fully available. As a matter of fact, Joe Barden and Barden Engineering have just come up with a noiseless P90 design and I’m going to incorporate it in a new signature guitar and I’m pretty psyched about that. I love the sound of the P90s; the only problem is that they’re extremely noisy. And these guys can get that tone and then some, and eliminate the noise.

Aren’t the P90s something you would normally find in a Les Paul or something like that?
Yeah. Actually what we’re doing is developing a three pick-up Firebird design. One of my favorite sounding guitars was always the old Firebirds. The only problem is that the pickups were kinda weak so we’re gonna try to improve on that.

So you’re working with Barden on that?
Yeah I’m working closely with those guys and my guitar builder Gary Brinkly. He’s been my builder for quite a while now and he’s come up with some pretty cool designs and we’re going to incorporate the pickups with his luthier capabilities and see what we can come up with. The good thing about taking the winters off is that it allows me to do other projects like this. I can do stuff like that and do a lot more writing and recording. You know, you can start projects when you’re touring 300 nights a year but you can’t finish them. This way I’ve got enough time to start something and see it come to fruition before we need to go back out on tour and promote an album.

The Firebird design you’re working on, is that going to have a tremolo unit on it?
Well curiously enough, last year I went about designing an invention for a whammy bar system that goes on any Gibson style with a Tune-O-matic and soft-tail piece. It converts on there in such a way that no holes need to be drilled. Nothing has to happen except you remove one part, slap this thing on, put that part back on and the thing just works. So we’ve taken a year to develop this thing and it works like a charm so it is going to have my new invention on it and we’re going to try to roll this out as a new product and we’ll see what happens. But as I said, I wouldn’t be able to come up with this stuff or see it come into fruition if I wasn’t taking a nice chunk of time off. We’re pretty excited about this and I don’t want to jinx it but we’ve got some pretty interesting interest in this thing and we’re going to pursue it and see where it goes.

You’ve obviously made prototypes of it. Do you have it on any of the guitars you’re touring with now?
JT: Oh yeah

What’s on that main Strat you were using the other night?
That’s an old style Floyd Rose that is machined out for a 7 ¼ lathe. Most are machined out for a 9.5 and they don’t work very well on vintage Strats or Teles but back in the old days when Floyd first started coming out with their invention they were milling those things so that they worked on vintage guitars. So you have to be careful. When you get one you have to make sure that the radius conforms to the radius of that vintage neck.

I thought it looked like a Floyd Rose but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t get a good look at it. You got a lot of good use out it and I was surprised it didn’t go out of tune.
Well it locks the strings down pretty good. When I first got it I did not know as much as I know now. If you do it correctly and you do it right, and most guys usually don’t know how to do it right – a lot of it has to do with mainly perfect intonation, setting the plate up at the proper height; there’s a lot of little things. Lubricating all the moving parts has a lot to do with it. I’ve got a stock Strat that I can use that whammy bar on and it will come backing tune almost as good as the Floyd Rose that is locked down. In retrospect I might not have had to carve a big old hole in my ’64 Strat to put that thing on there just to stay in tune. You just live and learn and I know a lot more about it now. The Floyd Rose is a great machine. I like it and it has always served me well but you can in fact set a good vintage Stratocaster up so that it works almost as well, you just have to be very careful about how you set them up.

Do you do a lot of the work on your guitars yourself?
I do all of it. Gary Brinkly from GNB, he helps me on the designs and a lot of the woodworking part of it. I’m not very good on the wood part but I am pretty good on the setup part. So I think setup is a very, very important part of your ability to play properly and if you don’t pay enough attention to that you’ll be pushing a box of rocks uphill from now till the end of time. I’ve taken many, many years with trial & error to figure out all of the nuances of the perfect set up and I’m pretty darn good at it if I do say so myself.

Well it sounds like it. And your playing, too, is very precise. You make it look effortless and the sounds coming out of the guitar sometimes don’t even match what it seems like you’re trying to do.
You know, I’ve heard that a lot and obviously it’s not a conscious thing. I just play the way I play and I don’t think about it but I get a lot of people saying it looks like you’re not even working up there and I say, well, Believe me. I am! (laughs)

I’m sure you are but you make it look pretty easy and it’s very deceptive.
I’m just up there swingin’ and missin’ just like everybody else, man.

The sounds coming out of your guitar can get pretty outrageous and without seeing it, you’re thinking “that must be somebody playing with total wild abandon,” then you look and it’s not. It’s a relatively calm guy up there playing.
(Laughs) Well I’m doing what I can. I don’t know. Whatever your perception of it is your perception. I’m working pretty hard on it up there but it’s just something that happens. It’s just my particular style. I see a lot of guys get up there and they look like they’re just strangling the damned thing. I call them white knuckle players. And that’s okay too – nothing wrong with that. Audiences like to see guys that are intense players. I like to think my sound is intense.

Well you achieve that.
Well thank you, it’s very nice of you.

I was looking at your foot pedal board. What kind of effects do you use? The sound is really full even though you’ve got the trio. Personally I love a trio…
Well, good!

…and you make it sound full. Of course we talked about the importance of a drummer and if you’re in a trio you can’t have a drummer that rides the snare all night long, but your trio sounds really full.
Well, look, this is what I tell all the guys – I call them pedal nerds – and they’re the guys that are obviously all in a band together and you see them when the doors open and everybody starts coming in, more often than not you’ll see 3 or 4 guys standing at the lip of the stage and they’re all staring at this pedal board. And they’re pointing at all these pedals and all that stuff trying to figure out what all this crap is doing and why. The fact is, the tone is already there and these things are just the enhancements. I switch them out all the time. There is no silver bullet here. These things are to be used sparingly. The tone comes from you. Now, granted, I’ve taken some of this stuff and used it to my advantage in that I play with two amps in stereo that makes it sound a lot bigger than obviously one amp. It spreads the sound out, makes it a little bigger. But, you know, I’m not using anything special. I’m using a Tube Screamer, a delay, a Vox wah-wah pedal – there’s nothing exotic.

It didn’t sound like you were just using them all strung together. They were definitely for accent. It seemed like a lot of the fullness comes from the open strings you play.
That’s a big part it, yeah. I read many, many, many years ago that Hendrix had the ability to use the open strings as a drone and play all the other stuff on top of it. That was a novel concept to me. Up until he came on the scene everybody played closed-handedly but I began to listen with that in mind began to realize that was true, Jimi was banging open strings, letting them ring and then play on top of them and I do some of that. Basically what you’re trying to do if you’re up there as a single guitar player in a trio is you’re trying to play rhythm guitar and lead at the same time which is what Hendrix was doing. So you utilize that. If you’re playing in the key of E, man you bang that E chord and then let those outer strings ring and play all that stuff in the middle.

Yeah, E and A give you a lot of open strings that you can use for drone.
When you get in to the swing and the blues stuff you can go into the B flats and A flats and play a little more closed and stylistically it works a little better.

You mentioned Hendrix, is there any one else that influenced you, not necessarily technique-wise but gave you sonic ideas or different approaches to the instrument?
You know, man, I’m influenced by everybody I ever heard, if not for stealing something positive, then for looking at something and realizing what not to do. I think if you don’t take your influence from every source then you’re selling yourself short. I have lots of influences. I started in the mid to late 60’s and of course music was king so there was a lot of that. I grew up in the 50’s and the music on TV was so much better then than it is now (laughs) The theme songs from TV shows were really good. Henry Mancini was doing soundtracks like Peter Gunn. I just think there was better music on TV back then. Anyway that had an influence on me. Of course there were the Beatles and Stones then you got into Hendrix and Chuck Berry then Muddy Waters. You know, I’ve listened to everything and anything that got me off, I incorporated into what I play. I think the real trick is you take all those influences and you try to distill them down into something that sounds like you. I might be playing a Chuck Berry lick but I’m trying to play it the way Jimmy Thackery would play it. I try to tell the younger guys that are coming up, and a lot of interviewers that I talk to will say “what’s your advice for the young guys?” well, advice is quit trying to sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Joe Satriani or whoever the Hell. It’s good to have your heroes and you’ve got to start somewhere and if you have to emulate them to begin with that’s fine but somewhere along the line you have to start sounding like you. My perfect example of course is Keith Richards. You know within the first three notes who is playing the intro to this song. You know it’s going to be the Rolling Stones. As soon as you hear Keith bang the first chord – he sounds like Keith! Well, he’s just doing everything he learned from Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin and Chuck Berry yet it still comes out like Keith. So at some point you’ve got to figure out who you are and who you want to sound like. Do you want to sound like Stevie or do you want to sound like you? I’m betting you want to sound like you.

Well, hopefully. If you don’t want to sound like you, you probably shouldn’t bother.
Yeah. Discover your own identity. You can play all the licks you want to but play them to sound like you and there’s no doubt of that I think you’re hitting on something.

In your travels, you’ve played with a lot of those guys you mentioned.
You know, I’m so lucky. I’ve played with 90% of my heroes coming up. I was in the right place at the right time. The Nighthawks was a great vehicle at that moment in time to be able to play on stage with Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy and Johnny Winter and Hubert Sumlin and Otis Rush and Willie Dixon and all of those people. It’s just doesn’t get any better than that. It’s really a matter of the planets lining up in a way so that we could be in a position to take advantage of that situation. I’m just really fortunate and most of them are gone now which is awful but hey man, I was able to play with John Lee Hooker on stage. It was pretty cool.

Is there anybody you had wanted to play with but never got the chance?
I really wanted to play with Albert King. When Stevie introduced me to him I began to realize that Albert was a very disagreeable man. I mean, he loved Stevie but Stevie was making him money because he had recorded some of his songs and you know Albert was receiving some pretty heavy royalties from that so naturally of course he treated Stevie with a lot of respect. I got the impression that he wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire which kinda broke my heart because he had always been one of my favorites. And I began to realize that this was never going to happen. I was not going to be able to ever be in a position to become friends with him or play with him. I just kinda had to let it go.

Well that answers another question I was going to ask but I wasn’t sure if you’d want to answer. I was going to ask if you’d ever met one of your heroes or influences and the experience was a bit of a let down.
Yeah, well, you know, in the end after Albert died we had been playing in Memphis a lot and there was a drive to do a benefit for buying a head stone for Albert. Apparently after all his relatives came in and raided the estate there was no money left over for a marker for his grave. So I was part of the groups that put on a benefit show to raise the money so Albert would be properly marked. And I felt like that was a fitting thing to do, whether I liked him or he liked me was beside the point; out of respect for a guy that you emulated all those years the right thing to do was do that benefit and make that money and give it to the proper people so that Albert was remembered. I figure all’s well that ends well.

You can get a preview of the new CD Feel The Heat at Jimmy’s official website and also check out his official Youtube channel.

Thank you to Jimmy Thackery for taking the time to speak with us.