Tim Avram Stretches Out and Finds His Voice

                                                        

Tim Avram’s Elastic Fantastic, Auto-erotic, Folk-Roots & Roll Vision

Modern Spirituals with One Foot in Hell

Tim Avram is a tattooed and spanked “take me home and make me like it” punk rocker disguised as an under the radar country roots musician, a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. For the last nine years, Avram has fronted various incarnations of the last great punk band - The Mongrels. It may be surprising to some but to me it makes perfect sense that Avram grew up learning the mandolin from Zydeco Ziggie while grandma played the banjo as she spit chew tobacco and drooled a gooey stream of unseemly profanity. Yep country punk was born. 

 Avram has modestly big plans that zoom in close yet back up to a safe wide angle distance. Hell he just wants to get his damn CD released. It’s not too much to ask if you have nothing else to do. He’s been working on it for a few months with the help of James Ross from JAR Music and his posse of Sean Drysdale , Charlie Klein  and Don Zuzula.  Avram plays the guitars, banjo, mandolin, lap steel, and drums and sings like Tom Waits channeling Johnny Cash .

For the newest CD Avram wrote several originals but his first release was a remarkable remake of Solitary Man. It gives the song a gravitas that Neil Diamond never imagined when speed dialed this formulaic Brill Building pop song. Avram gave it a realism that colors the heartache more accurately in plain sepia tones. One of the best overhauled pop songs I’ve ever heard

This is new millennium soul music that is in stark contrast to the business controlled Living Dead music business that is connected to life supports by flash drives that control and disseminate bread and circuses to a public quaking with eternal ennui while being spoon fed pharmaceutical solutions to problems that don’t exist… or not.

Pick it up and Pass it on

The Tim Avram Interview follows:

What led you to an interest in music?

Oh, that’s a hard question. I think it was my dad.. He had a collection of all these great records, and they were more fun to play with and I liked to put them on the record player and just listen and put other records on the turntable just to change something. I liked music.

Do you recall the type of music your dad was playing?

Oh, lots of Credence and Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens and Zeppelin.  

When did you first realize you had a facility for playing music, for singing and playing?

You know, it must have been when I was in elementary school I tried playing all kinds of things when I was six years old until I was in middle school. I tried piano, and I tried violin, and I took all these different lessons and you know, just because I thought it was cool. I remember taking lessons at Whitehead Music way back.

What was the first instrument that you used, that you really had a facility for?

I think it was probably the guitar.  I got a Harmony guitar for Christmas. By the time I was 15 or 16 I  was playing the mandolin. Most of the instruments I played when I was a teenager were because we needed it for the band, and nobody else played it, so I learned them. In my first band, we had four guitar players and a drummer. We figured we needed a bass so I just stopped playing guitar for a few years and just played bass.

What was the name of the band?

Bluefield Daisies. The band consisted of Tom Rafferty, Ray Torres, Hymie Torres,Todd Patrick and me.  It was a pretty good band. We played school dances and we played at coffee shops and one bar in Midland.  It was at the Midland Lounge and Lanes. Essentially it was a bar in a bowling alley. We were 15, so we had to play and leave right away. The patrons  thought it was great. They thought we were the next Led Zeppelin when we were kids. (Laughter). Tom and Ray sang most of the stuff. I wasn’t singing at that point

So, were you staring to play a lot. Were people starting to know and support the band?

 

Yeah, yeah. We played this open mike night at this coffee shop like every week or whatever. They started paying us to be at the open mike and play because people would come out. We didn’t even have to book shows. We just knew we would show up there.We did at the Coffee Factory a lot. It was right on the corner by White’s. The Bluefield Daisies also played at Jamestown a few times, it felt like it was really taking off

 

 

Well, what happened next?

 

You’re a kid and you have stars in your eyes. Actually I stopped playing in the band, and they went on to play whatever shows they were doing. I was still close with all the guys in the band, so we all started listening to bluegrass a lot and we created a bluegrass band called the Haly Quartet.  We thought it was great because there were five of us, and we called it a quartet. We thought it was hilarious.

 

What was the lineup?

 

Tom Rafferty and Ray Torres both played guitars, Nick Young played bass, Brian Hartland played banjo, and I was on mandolin. I took lessons from Zydeco Ziggy for about a year and then jumped in this band.

 

What was your first real successful band?

 

The Mongrels. It had to be.  We formed that band in 2002 with me, Chris Phillips, Matt Nyquist, and Patrick Shell played drums. We got Patrick out of necessity because we didn’t have a drummer, but we had shows booked. On his first show - and he was in the band for two years - every show we played  he said, “This is going to be my last show, guys.” He hung on for two years, and then that’s when Shane Swank joined the band around 2004..

 

Who were some of the members that flew through your band?

 

Oh, Josh Jeckel was in the band and Dan Castrava was in the band. Jeckel played guitar and then he played bass for a little while. Castrava played second guitar and then Scott Saxton played a little bit with us. He played lead guitar for a couple of shows, I think. Later he was in Astra and the Flash Mob. And then we had Marx on bass. Marx split and now Don Zuzula (of the Tosspints) is playing bass. We’re still around once every six months.

 

How many Mongrels CDs did you release?

 

Oh gosh. I think, I honestly think there were just like two just self-titled ones and then there was one that Scott and I  had together that was Old Ship, New Ship, Live Ship.

 

What were your favorite Mongrel songs?

 

I think, if any of them, it would…a lot of the old stuff I liked. I liked Mafia at least. When the band started, I didn’t know how to write a song, so I just kind of made words that rhymed. I don’t actually have favorites, but some of them mean things to me. You know, One Last Day, was kind of a sad suicide song. A lot of friends that year decided they couldn’t handle it anymore, so then I wrote a song about that. The songs, none of them are favorites, but some of them are important to me. One of them was Try Everything.  I liked that one.

 

My memory of the Mongrels is that you were gigging a lot. You were huge at Wise Guy, Pete Crawford’s Bar. Then you came into White’s Bar and kicked it in high gear. You were really popular. So you gigged a lot. Where did you perform? I mean, what other states did you perform in?

 

Oh, we played in Chicago, we did a lot in Detroit, and Kalamazoo. We did some Lansing. We did Cleveland, and other parts of Ohio, New York. I think those were the big places.

 

You were really getting out there. Why do you think you didn’t have more success, because I thought you were going in that direction. You had some managers, as I recall, or people that thought they might be. …There was a dude that wanted to be your manager. I forget his name and ended up not doing a whole lot. Remember that?

 

Yeah, I can’t remember his name. He was the tour manager for, oh what was the name of that group? He was kind of a washed-up tour manager. You know, he wanted me to say I was 19 years old and not drink. He wasn’t doing anything right. I think things like that kind of took a lot of thunder out of our drive. You get so many people saying, “This is what you have to do.”  It’s like after a while you don’t believe it, and you’re just like, “Screw it.” We had a booking agent who got us into some of our big out-of-state shows. I was never the business man. Shane knew all that stuff.

 

Do you recall a particular performance that you thought was just great, that was notable, that you kicked ass, and all cylinders were firing?

 

You know, I think one show. We were tired for this show. We’d just gotten back from New York, and we had done a couple of shows in Michigan, and we went down to Chicago. We were all exhausted, but we chilled this club in Chicago. It was like 2005 or something like that, but that was one of my favorite shows. I think we just thought of something. It was just one of those doldrum days and as soon as we plugged in, we were all just high.

 

 

What was it like to play CBGBs?

 

Well, that was great. That was great. Other than that, that week it was really boring. You know, as exciting and hustle-and bustle New York is, when you’re waiting to play at a club you’ve been wanting to play at since you knew who the Sex Pistols were, nothing’s magic until you do that. That was an act. That was great. There were opening acts. I think one of them was Call Of The Road and the Or Us. We were the last band on that Saturday night. The band that played right before us, as soon as they finished playing, an A&R guy came and signed ‘em and left and didn’t listen to us.

 

 

How was the crowd for you at CBGB’s?

 

It’s not as, you know it’s not as glamorous and outstanding as you might think. We weren’t a big signed national act. It was just like a random show and a random club. There’s regulars that hang out there.

 

 You and Shane talked about trading off shows with other bands

 

Yeah, we did that a lot with the Whiskey Diaries in Detroit. We’d go down there, and they’d come up here. We did that with Johnny Mohawk and the Assassins. We would swap shows in Ohio with them, and they’d come up here.  We did that a lot, I mean like every weekend, one or the other. We’d be in Ohio or we’d be in Detroit or they’d be up here. That was those two bands. We did a lot more than once or twice.

 

I thought that you were connected to Cash O’Riley and the DownRight Daddies.

 

We did a lot of shows with Cash O’ Riley. Festivals around here like  the Back-to-Schoo Punk Fest and the Cash O’Riley’s Secret Stash Fest, things like that. We didn’t fit well on the venue, but we enjoyed each other’s music, so we just kind of … Who cares if we fit? I like listening to you, and you like listening to me.

 

You started a solo career a few years back…

 

I feel that when the atmosphere is just right, you know, yeah you start, you become a singing comedian sometimes or even more than that. It’s like when you start getting comfortable and it starts being hanging out in the living room with your friends, but they’re all strangers, you know.

 

Tell me about  Eric Summer. You know, he’s really cool, a great singer, picker and all that. How did you connect with him?

 

I’d been doing Tuesday nights, the acoustic shows, for six years by the time I met Eric. Somebody had said, “There’s somebody else on the marquee. You should go look into it.” So I went, and I met this weirdo, this old guy, you know, in his 50s. I was like, “Oh, okay,” you know. This was in the afternoon. I said, “Well, I’ll be back in a few hours and we’ll play a show. No big deal.” I get back to the bar, and there’s 10 amps and 7 guitars on stage for this one guy. I’m like, “What the hell’s this guy going to do?” I saw him, and I was blown away. I still play that guitar. That night I was like, “You’ve got to sign my guitar.” I still play that. We’ve been, you know, that was years ago. We’ve been friends since and swapped shows.

Recently he  got us pretty much a headlining show at the Johnson City Folk Festival in Tennessee.

We went down there, and that’s a story in itself with how the band became a band, you know with that Johnson City show. He and I would swap gigs,  he’d play in Saginaw, and I’d go down to Kalamazoo and stuff like that.  I didn’t have a group until I found out about Johnson City. He said, “You’ve got to come down. You’ve got to play this folk festival.” I said, “I should put a band together for it.” He said, “That’s cool.” That’s when I got a hold of Charlie Klein and Sean Drysdale and said, “Do you guys want to be a band and play this show? “ They said, “Sure,” so we practiced for months, went down to Tennessee and got an awesome response from everybody, came back, and we’ve been a band two years now. We were supposed to be for just one week. We became the Tim Avram Band.

We’ve been recording. We’ve, you know, kind of as a band. You know we play as a band, but in the studio we just, we’re our own little entities. We just play our thing. Like me and Sean have put together the first Tim Avram CD. That went pretty well. Right now Charlie Klein and I are working on the second CD which has a lot of our new songs…that’s why we started the second one and then that’s when the record label JAR Music came along and has been representing me since. James Ross is the CEO he has a couple guys, hip hop guys out of New York on this label, and then he’s got one of the guys from PM Dawn which was  pretty big name in the ‘90s for R&B, hip hop. He said, “Look, I’ve got this label. I want you to be on it, you know, because you’re good.” I said, “All right, let’s do it.”  Now next month I’m touring out towards that way and I’ll  be doing a bunch of New York shows.

 

Solo or with your band?

 

I’m still a solo show. I’m going to promote this new CD we have and a lot of it, it’s not going to be totally done by the time I go out there. I hope it will be done, but it probably won’t. A lot of the songs will be on iTunes and on the label’s website and stuff like that. They’re out there right now. Yeah, everything that we record, I pass it on and it goes right on iTunes, and you can download and we can wait until the new CD comes out. We just got permission from Neil Diamond and Sony music to record Solitary Man. 

 

I was going to mention that. I loved your rendition of it. It gives the song a deeper sense of something, like loss. You’re devastated, but you’re also pissed. It’s a different feel that Neil Diamond’s rendition of it. What do you think?

 

Yeah, I think Neil Diamond’s rendition kind of has a silver lining in that dark cloud of a song, and I think it’s just the way we recorded it and then the way that I sang it, it turned out to be hopeless. (Laughter)

 

Your voice has changed through the years. You had this really nuance, kind of raspy voice, you know deeper, and I think it’s just a great voice. So your voice has changed. Is that because of age, cigarettes, or are you just trying a different style out?

 

I think all of those things really. I can’t sing in the voice I could sing in years ago. I crack now, and I hold notes differently, and it has been working because it wasn’t working. When you’re singing out of key and so on, trying to, you know…I smoked a lot of cigarettes, and I drank a lot, and I got older.

 

 You have this facility to mix humor and pathos. You know, it’s like a modern reality. It’s dark, but there’s hope there too. Is that kind of the aim of your new music?

 

Yeah, yeah. I think that happens. You have ups and downs. I do a lot of stuff in minor chords so a lot of it’s down, but there are ups involved. Love songs, things like that.

Love songs, yeah. You know I started focusing on writing songs instead of music, and I look for one clever line and I put it in there, and then I base a song around it. Just whatever. Depending on what line that was, it’s either a sweet love song or a song about robbing banks or, you know, hurting somebody. Well, I think I just wanted to stop making rhymes and start telling stories.

I like to be able to listen to the whole song and not just, “Oh, listen to this part.” It’s, you know, you really have to listen to the words, like “What’s going to happen next?” I like, even if they stop rhyming and it just turns into whatever. I want a story with some music behind it.

 

What’s next for you?

 

Next? Finish this CD and we’re going, well I am, I’m going to promote the upcoming album at the end of April on the east coast. Then sit back for a little bit and go at it again.

 

He and I are doing another show together in Rochester, New York on April 26. It’s going to be wild. It’s kind of a hip hop club. I’m going to do my show, and he’s going to do his show.  Hopefully we can get together and do a couple of tunes together

 

Any advice you can give to budding musicians, some young man or woman that aspires to get involved and they’d ask you about it? What would you say to them?

 

I would say, “Call me because I’m always looking for people to play with.” (Laughter)

 

What do you think of open mic nights?

 

I am intrigued by open mic. I’m glad you brought that up. It seems to me that there are times when there is a lot of interest in younger and even older people coming in and playing and singing their songs and all that, but it’s variable. I think like any business, the weather has something to do with it. For two weeks I might have one night a 30-minute set to play and the next night I’ll have a 45-minute set to play because there are musicians there, and they’re taking up the rest of the night, and then the next week I could play for four hours straight. It’s rolling dice every week.

 

 Any last comments?

 

Not really. I guess not other than thanks to you for 100 years of support and doing things like this for me. Yeah, it’s fun and sober. It’s better. You know as much as I thought I was creative and being creative and like that, it was nowhere near what it is now. You know, with a clear head you can do way more physically and mentally.