Too Slim at Burnside's 10th Anniversary Party
Too Slim at Burnside's 10th Anniversary Party
By Joey Scruggs
Article Reprint from the April 1999 BluesNotes
Photos by Valerie K. Davis
It's a Friday night at The Cascade Tavern in Vancouver, Washington. Me and my friend,
Alex Sierra, rode along with the band to help them set up their gear for what would be the first of two nights. The club seemed a little slow, but by show time, every table was taken and people were lined up against the wall.
Tim "Too Slim " Langford, with cowboy hat and boots, guitar slung over his shoulder and a slide bar on his finger, kicked out the beat to start off a smokin', rompin' low down and dirty Blues song. It lasted a good 10 minutes or so. As soon as that song was over, the band launched right into another song. Right after that, they tore into another.
Tim had the tips of his cowboy boots over the front of the stage, shakin' his head back and forth, just wallowing in this greasy Blues feeling. Thirty minutes after he started playing,
Too Slim finally said hello to the crowd! Needless to say, the crowd was ecstatic. This is a typical gig from the band, and the reason
Too Slim & The Taildraggers have such a strong following: they flat out kick butt!
The day after this show, Tim Langford agreed to be interviewed for the BluesNotes.
BN. (BluesNotes) Why did you get involved in music?
TL: (Tim "Too Slim" Langford) The same reason as everyone else, girls! I was really turned on by The Beatles, and when I went to my first concert (ZZ Top), God called me up and said "YOU MUST PLAY!" (laugh).
I started my first band when I was 18, and we called it The Wing Biscuits. That was 1976. We were doing Blues and Rock 'N' Roll. We'd get together one or two times a week, at my friend Gary Jensen's house, and play and drink beer. We did some old Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Lynyrd Skynyrd, stuff like that. We didn't play for money. We didn't even have any gigs. We'd play parties for the fun of it.
My first paid gigs were with The Hombres. I saw an ad in the paper that said they were looking for a lead guitar player. I went down to audition and got the job. The Hombres were Bert and Jim. Bert was the drummer and he was about 55. Jim was about 45. 1 might have been 19 or 20, and I was in college at the time. It was country to a "T"! They played this really old country music. We had a gig at The Swinging Doors Tavern for a couple of years, every Friday and Saturday nights.
After that, I started playing with The Jazz Society Orchestra, in Spokane. It was a big band. They had, like, a 20 piece horn section, guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. We'd rehearse twice a month and play maybe two shows.
After that, I started working down at The Red Lion Motor Inn. They wanted to start a "50's Night", so I got a band together. It was a "greaser" band. I got some guys from college and put together this corny, stupid greaser band. We did stuff like "Rockin' Robin" and "I Only Have Eyes For You". Remember Johnny Limbo and The Lugnuts? The manager had seen them play, and wanted us to be a band like that.
After about nine months of doing that, I started slipping some Blues stuff in there ... doing some T-Birds tunes and stuff. The manager got kind of pissed at me. You know, "I've never heard those songs before. What is this stuff you're doing?"
We had this kinda sorta manager that kept trying to tell us what to play. I'm, like, f*** that! I didn't want to play that crap. They ended
up firing us. A couple of the guys were disappointed, they wanted to take the act to Las Vegas. I told them "Man, I'm just doing this on Sunday night." No big deal.
After that, we turned it into a Rockabilly band. That was The Studebakers.
That band stayed together for five years. John Cage, my drummer in The Taildraggers, was in that band. He joined in 1982 or 1983. By that time, the band had been together for a couple of years. We were playing hard core Rockabilly and some original tunes. We'd come to play The Last Hurrah in Portland, and go to Seattle and play The Central Tavern.
The problem was, our agent at the time would book us into a bunch of these "Top 40" clubs. Well, they didn't like us. We'd get fired for not playing top 40 tunes. Back then, most of the clubs hired those kind of bands, playing songs off the radio. Nobody does that stuff now, unless you're playing at The Red Lion (laugh)! But, we had a lot of problems with club owners back then. They just couldn't understand where we were coming from.
The Studebakers evolved from playing 50's tunes to playing mostly original music. Me and the singer went off in different directions, and the band broke up.
BN. How did the Blues seed get planted in you?
TL: Way before that! When I first started playing guitar, I played Blues right from the git-go. A buddy of mine had a brother who was a Marine, and he had a huge record collection. He had everything!
We started jamming out at his house. He turned us on to a lot of stuff, Elmore James, Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers and B.B. King. We were, like, "Wow, Man!" It was new to us, and we were really jacked.
That's when I first started playing slide. I bought me a slide guitar book, and learned how to tune my guitar. I was way into The Allman Brothers, and Duane Allman was a huge influence. So was Elmore James. He had Robert Johnson records, too.
I couldn't figure out Robert Johnson for nothing! I had no idea what he was even doing. It took me years to figure out he was playing in different tunings! When I first started out, I didn't know you could do that.
BN: You know, Robert Cray used to play those tunes in a standard tuning. That was the only way he knew how.
TL: Me too! Actually, The Robert Cray Band was one of the first bands I ever saw in a bar. He was a huge influence on me.
At the time I was going to college, playing with The Jazz Society Band, right? The bass player knew I liked Blues, and he'd went and seen Robert Cray down at this club called Washboard Willie's the night before. He goes "You've got to go down and see this band! You're going to shit!"
I had a fake ID, so I went down there the next night, praying that I could in. I got in and stood right in front of Robert. I loved it! I was there every night. I was all excited, you know?
I had just come from rehearsal, and had my guitar in my car. He had a guitar just like mine, a Gibson 345 or something. Curtis Salgado was in the band, Dave (D.K.) Stewart was on piano, Dave Olson was on the drums and Richard Cousins was the bass player. Anyway, outside the club, I was all excited and in Robert's face. I brought my guitar out and showed it to him. He was real nice, like "Yeah, great!"
They used to come to Spokane and do, like, four nights a week, every six weeks. I got to know them all. I stole tons of shit from Robert Cray, you know, all his licks, everything he did.
At the time, I was into Albert Collins and the T-Birds. I'd just bought the T-Birds first record and was way into them! This was, like, 1980, before I got The Studebakers going. That was when I seriously got into Blues.
The Studebakers had management down in L.A., and they didn't understand what we were trying to do. We went down to L.A. and recorded and hung out down there for six months. (laugh) Just about starved to death! We recorded at El Dorado Studios, on Hollywood and Vine. The record never got released. We'd get kicked out of all these little towns for being vagrants... we didn't have any money! We were desperately wondering how we were going to get out of there. We finally got some money and headed back home to Spokane.
I'm not kidding you- we were living hand-to-mouth.
The management we had was misleading us. We owed a bunch of money for the recording session, and he'd leverage us into taking these gigs we had no business doing. The last straw for me was this gig in Alaska. He got us five weeks for a shitload of money. Flew us up there and everything. Luckily, we had round trip tickets. Sure enough, after a week and a half, they fired us. It was in the middle of winter, around Christmas time. I'd canceled a bunch of pretty good gigs I'd booked to go on that trip.
I just got sick of it! If we kept doing things his way, we'd just keep getting fired. I wanted to start playing Blues anyway. That's when we started Too Slim & The Taildraggers, in 1986.
Tom Brimm, my bass player, was an original player in the band. We hired John Cage as our drummer a couple of years later, after he'd moved back up from Hollywood.
At that time, I was determined to do things my way. I didn't trust any agents or management groups. I had absolutely no faith in that. I thought, "I'm going to do this and I'm going to do it myself!"
I did all the bookings and everything. I wanted to know where I'd be playing. I knew all the clubs, you know? My friend, Wayne, loaned me some money and we made our first record. We dedicated our last record, "Blues For EB", to him- he'd just passed away.
BN: One of the hallmarks of your band is your merchandise. You've always had stuff for sale at your gigs, T-shirts, tapes, and well ... even panties!
TL: We did all that by ourselves. Made the calls and found out how to get it done. I tell ya, the merchandise pulled us through a lot of otherwise hard times. We would have starved without it. It paid a lot of our expenses. When we first went to the Midwest, all the gigs lost money. It'd pay for gas and hotel rooms. Somehow, I was able to pay everybody okay.
We didn't want to just play locally. We kept touring out of town. We'd try to stretch it out a little further every time. At first, we just did the Northwest and the West Coast. We did that for five or six years. We'd network with the different Blues societies and musicians we'd meet. Little Charlie Baty was a big help, so was Dave Gonzales, from The Paladins. We were taking out merchandise ads in the different Blues magazines, and we'd check them out for contacts.
Three or four years ago, we hooked up with an agent, Jeff Shibley, at Ozark Talent. He took us even further East. It's been hard. At first, he'd book us these gigs where we'd have to drive 500 miles to the next club! I told him we couldn't put up with that anymore and he'd have to improve the routing.
He was getting us into some good rooms. Some of the gigs sucked, and still do. When you're that far away from home, you try to work every night. He'd try to get us into the major Blues clubs, and in between, we'd play wherever we could. Sometimes you'd get rooms, sometimes you'd get just one room.
BN: Have you got anything new up your sleeve?
TL: We're always trying to find a way to do it better. What we really need is more promotion. Burnside Records has been real good to us, and each record's gotten a better response. I think we're one of the few bands on their label that tours nationally. It's expanded our fan base. They have a little bigger staff now and that helps.
BN. Tell us about song writing.
TL: I've always done that. Since the beginning, I've always written songs. I always wanted to do it. I wrote a song just last week. I have a dozen songs we're not even playing right now. I'm saving them for the next record. I don't write all the songs for the band, but I will tell you that I don't just write Blues songs. I write in all kinds of styles.
BN: Do you perform much outside of The Taildraggers?
TL: Yes. When I'm in Spokane, I do a solo acoustic thing. I've done that for a few years now. When we're home, the other guys in the band prefer to hang out with their families. Me? I work as much as I can. I try to challenge myself musically, trying to do stuff I haven't done before.
I'm going to do a show with The Jazz Society Orchestra. It's going to be The Taildraggers, with the Jazz Society band backing us up. They'll do a few tunes of their stuff- you know, Duke Ellington, Count Basie. Then, a female vocalist will do some tunes, and then we'll play, backed by the Jazz Society guys. I gave the director a tape of our tunes, and he's writing charts for them.
I'd like to do something with them on an annual basis, you know? Once the charts are done, I mean, why not?
BN. What kind of gear do you use? Are you a gear junkie?
TL: You know, I didn't even own a guitar amp until I was 21! I don't have a bunch of money to spend on instruments. If I find a guitar I really, really like, I'll buy it. And, I'll keep it!
I have a dozen guitars, but I've been playing for 25 years, you know?
When I go out on the road, I take an '81 Fender Strat, a Gibson ES 295 '91 reissue, a cheapo Danelectro that cost me $230, and I have a Jerry Jones I use for slide guitar. I retired my custom made, world famous "Groovalator" guitar that I used to use for slide. I keep that one at home. For acoustic guitars, I have a 1934 Dobro and a Gibson L-00 1936 reissue. I've got a Gibson '54 ES 125 at home. I've got a Teisco Del Rey, a bunch of funky guitars. I've got another Strat. The '81 Strat I bought new, and it's been on the road ever since.
BN: What about amps?
TL: I've got a Fender Super Reverb I'm using right now. There's a guy in Spokane, Randy Fencl, who is an amp guru. He's modified my super. It's a good sounding rig!
I own four amps. I have a '59 Fender Bassman that I keep at home. I used to run that through a reverb unit, until I got the Super. The Super is such a great road amp because it's got everything in one unit. It's got reverb and tremelo plus the four-ten inch speakers, which I like. I also have a '65 Deluxe Reverb. And, I have a 30-watt Marshal I that just kicks butt! It's got a different tone than the Fenders.
The only two effects I use are a Tube Screamer and a Crybaby Wah Wah pedal.
BN: You've got a lot of loyal fans, and you always seem to enjoy talking to them between sets and after the show.
TL: I love to travel! I got that from both of my Grandfathers ... they were both kind of hobos. I like being in different towns, meeting new people-it's fun!
I've met some musicians that are not sociable; I hate that attitude! It's not just about the music, it's about the fans, too! If it wasn't for the fans, you wouldn't be able to play music for a living. I like connecting with them!
© 1999 Cascade Blues Association