This week I sat down with local artists Wolf and Gypsy, also known as James and Carmen Pomeroy, to talk about being original musicians in Peoria and what they've been up to with The Wolf and Gypsy Band, including their newest CD Masters of Music. Read the post, and be sure not to skip the videos! This couple has some great stories and some awesome advice for other artists.
So, let's start at the beginning. How did you first get started with music?
Gypsy: I've been singing my whole life. We always had music in the house. It wasn't Sunday morning if Johnny Cash wasn't singing us gospel songs while mom was putting breakfast on.
I had a couple uncles, one played the 12 string, one played the 6. Every weekend we'd get together, whether we were roofing someone's house or just frying fish and those uncles would get their guitars out and my dad would say, “Come on, get up there Carmen Lee.” My whole family always sang, so I thought it was just something everybody did.
Then in Junior High I got into choir, and Mr Applegate, my choir director, looked at me and said “We're going to State.” So in sixth grade we went and I beat everybody else, and got first in the state, and then the bug hit. He made it exciting and fun. It just kinda came for me.
Wolf: Believe this or not, I grew up in Norwood, going to Norwood Menonite Church. I learned playing guitar in church, that's where I started. I played saxophone in Jr High and High school and was in choir. But I didn't get serious about playing music until after I got into the Air Force. I met a guy named Jimmy Perry. He hooked me up and we went and bought my first electric guitar.
Were either of you in other bands before Wolf and Gypsy?
Wolf: In 1989 or 90 with my aunt – it was a country band. Then I started playing guitar for a band called Southern Exposure. When they went on tour, I had family... a wife and child, I didn't go. So I stopped playing until about 2001. Then was in a band called Reason Ditra Rock, a alternative band. I took another break and in about 2006 I started playing again. Then in 2008 Wolf & Gypsy took shape and kind took off.
Gypsy: I grew up with a lot of people who are still in the music scene: Justin Robbins, Mike Brownfield, Mike Layne, Shane Tassert, and Dan Butke, Don Ward, and we all wanted to be Ozzie Ozborn and Randy Rhoads. We'd all get together and play. My first band was Witchhazel … it never really took off, but that's when we started writing our own songs.
Things kinda fizzled out because we were in that transitional time in our lives. Trying to move out, some getting married and having kids, just a lot going on. I was also in a band called Blitz. We parted ways for a lot of reasons, but one was that there were not a lot of female-led rock songs out for them to play. I kept bringing them Heart and Joan Jett, but it just wasn't working out.
So I started running karaoke instead. I had a lot of great singers coming in and we had fun with it. It was a way I could still sing without being in front of a band. Then he started showing up at karaoke and we became friends.
Wolf: The first couple of albums are actually just under the name Wolf. She started out as my backup singer.
Gypsy: I thought he was just trying to get my number.
Wolf: That too. But then in 2009-2010 when we decided to make it The Wolf & Gypsy Band, I started writing things for her to sing.
Earlier in the conversation, Gypsy had mentioned Grand Nationals. So I asked them more about that. How did a band that had been playing together only a couple years get to open for Ted Nugent?
Wolf: Jay Goldberg had called and said, “I don't think you're quite ready for this, but I like what you're playing and I'm going to give you guys a shot. So make the best of it.”
We were all original.
Gypsy: Which was a requirement to open for Ted Nugent.
Wolf: We were one of the only bands at that time that had and hour and a half of material. It was us and South Side Cindy.
We're up there playing and all of our friends and family were in the front. A couple hundred people. And then all of the sudden, the place was full. They started streaming out of the merch area. The place filled up immediately. I though, well, we must be doing something right.
Gypsy: I'm looking out at my friends and family and I turn around to look at our drummer and when I look back at the crowd there were 10,000 people there all of the sudden. Jay said to us afterwards, “You guys were great but I've never had an opening act pull everyone out of the merch tents. People weren't buying stuff!”
Wolf: Jay has always taken good care of us. He's a great guy.
Gypsy: Oh yeah, Jay Goldberg is awesome.
Wolf: And Jack, his stage manager guy too. Mad Dog. They've been absolutely wonderful. We've gotten to do Grand Nationals two times.
Gypsy: We got to open Uriah Heap and not to many people can say that. They were the first band Jay had booked around here and Jay invited them back and we got to play with them. They did very little touring in the US. So we can definitely thank Jay for that one too.
That sounds fantastic. So what was your favorite performance?
Gypsy: He writes military songs, He's military. His whole family is military. His son graduated from West Point. His brother was a Marine, his niece was a Marine. His father was a POW in Vietnam. So veterans just hold a very special place in our hearts. We get called to play for events, like for the Gold Star families.
Wolf: The Gathering Guard. We got to play for 400 Gold Star family members. These were all parents who had lost their soldiers, their kids, in Afghanistan and Iraq. We were there to honor them and their soldiers.
Gypsy: That was the most breathtaking, emotional performance. They had displays for the soldiers, many with photos on them... showing them as happy young men and women with full lives. It charges the soul and exhausts the soul at the same time. That was the biggest privilege, in my eyes that we've gotten asked to do.
Wolf: We've been asked to play with probably 50-60 national acts since we started in 2009, but that was probably the most meaningful show that I ever had to perform. I don't think anything else has come close to comparing to that.
One of the songs I did for them was one I wrote called Soldier’s Promise, about a boy going off to war and promising his mother he'd come home. There was an oration at the end of the song that says,
“There'll always be wars to send our children to fight, and there'll always be mothers who worry and cry,
and there will always be promises, but not all of them kept,
for those who have fallen we must never forget.”
It was just an honor to be able to perform that for them.
One of the things that came up a couple of times during our conversation was the difficulty Gypsy had over the years finding music to sing.
Gypsy: As a female singer in the 80's and 90's it was very hard to find a band that wanted you to be the lead singer. Most of them didn't know four hours worth of female music. I reached out at one point and was trying to get some chicas together to maybe do the all girl thing, but it never panned out.
Wolf: That's one of the things that still happens today. She sings a lot of male songs when we sing cover songs. Doobie Brothers, and Jerry Doucette.
Gypsy: I don't sing high. I can't do a Pat Benatar anymore.
Wolf: Wolf and Gypsy is mainly a Southern Rock band. And if you look, you will see there are no Southern Rock female lead singers. We started out primarily as a biker band, and we're still primarily known as that. But I had to start writing songs for her to sing.
One of the things I've been saying since I started learning more about the battle between musicans and some bar owners about originals vs covers is that bar owners can help make customers more comfortable with those originals if they make a point to play those originals during the times that live music isn't going on at the venue. Scat Grub told me you actually helped get his band on Touchtunes to help with that?
Wolf: I was able to help 5 or 6 local artists with that. Touchtunes has gone a different way with that, so we don't have that contract anymore. But when I started doing music I was so green, and there were some great musicians who would give me advice. Jeff Schmidgall, Tim Fiers, Danny Gruder, Brian Larson, they would give me advice and I was a quick study. I listened and did what they told me.
So, during the time I had to opportunity to submit artists to Touchtunes, I looked at it as my way of paying back all that advice I received. I think Scat Grub, Brian Dennison, Highway 61, were a few that I helped that way...
Gypsy: And telling them about sponsorship.
Wolf: I'll always try to help. We're all artists. We may all have our different styles, but we're all artists.
Gypsy: It's all us against the record companies! (Everyone laughs.)
We're all about the music. At the end of the day, if I can help someone else get their message out, maybe it's not my genre, maybe it's not anybody I know's genre, but somebody out there needs to hear that music in order to get through their day.
That's great. So you don't have the capability to put artists on Touchtunes any longer?
Wolf: Back when Touchtunes came out, they were ahead of the times. They caught the music companies flat footed. The record companies weren't prepared for the digital jukeboxes. Touchtunes wanted to give independent artists a way to get their music heard. I got in early, under my indie label. The problem was they didn't realize how many Indie labels there were and they were overwhelmed.
Now, I tell artists to spend the $55 through CD Baby to get their music distributed everywhere including Touchtunes. Youtube, Spotify... In fact, we've been on Spotify since before Spotify came to the US. It started in Europe. Now we have a following there. Once I retire, there may be a Wolf and Gypsy European Tour.
You've mentioned going through several different producers over the years. Why is that?
Gypsy: Finding the producer with the right sound for you is important. We’re a biker band. I don’t need a church choir in the background. It’s important to me that whatever we record we can replicate on stage.
If the producer is doing things to the song that make it so we can’t perform it on stage and make it sound the same, then that’s not the producer for us.
For example, our producer for Changing Lanes, Johnny Neil, worked because he has a background in Southern Rock. I’ve got a little gravel, a little growl, and whereas some of the producers wanted me me to pull back, he told me to let that show. She said, “This song shouldn’t be as pretty as it is. You are more or less telling him it’s the last time. Not doing this anymore. I’m leaving. The song was already great, but it’s what the different eyes of the different producers brings out for you. He brought that song to life.
Let's talk about your newest album. I was at your CD release party in October, and you've mentioned it a couple of times today. Tell us about Masters of Music.
Wolf: This album ended up taking us four years to finish completely. We’d always had a target audience set in mind. Since we were a biker band, we were going to write biker songs. But I thought that with this being the 6th album, I didn’t want to lock myself into a genre. It’s still Wolf and Gypsy Band music, but a little bit of a different message.
All of the songs are special, and there is something for everybody on this album.
Just a few things about it…
The 4th song, Masters of Music, is a rock opera. Which is an incredible story in itself, with a really great story. You have to know Greek mythology to really understand the song. But one thing that was not done intentionally, that someone pointed out to me was that I left it open for a sequel. The masters have lost their immortality, and Gypsy’s only in chains. Once she gets free… well, we may write more, we may not. We’ll see.
The 5th song is called Standing Rock. Carmen is Native American, so Standing Rock is about the pipeline and the problems they had there.
The 6th song on the album, I’m Just a Child, is a song about child abuse. It was written, not about Robert Bee, but around that time and with him in mind.
The 8th song, Changing Lanes, is the one we talked about earlier. The first female song I had ever written, the title song for our third album but re-recorded with a different producer and released again on this album.
The 9th song is an R&B Country crossover song that we pre-released in 2016, called Lies.
The 10th song is this goofy bluegrass song where I have my nephew come in and beat-box, called Bikes, Beer, Pot, & Women. People really seem to like that song.
Gypsy: We end up playing it almost everywhere we go.
Rock opera, country, rock, bluegrass, R&B, Love songs and songs about justice and social justice and then ending on a lighthearted note of fun. There is a lot on this one album. It is easy to believe it took you four years to finish. Everything has significance to someone on this album.
Wolf: Like I said, it’s not really locked in to one genre. There is something for everybody on this album. We’re going to perform two of the songs from that album, Highway Signs and Kickstart Our Hearts for this interview.
I had listened to the album on YouTube, and because of the playlist I was on, I checked back several times to make sure I was still listening to the same album… because they were so different. Although, I can also hear how they are uniquely “you” as well. People really need to check out the whole album to get a feel for it.
The Masters of Music track was amazing and I hadn’t realized there was an open ending, but now I do hope to hear a sequel in the future.
I probably have a thousand more questions, but it’s about time to wrap this up. Before you go, I have 10 quick questions I'd love for you to answer, right off the top of your head. Don't think about it too much.
What’s your favorite food?
Wolf: Mexican
Gypsy: Bangs – Indian fried bread
What food could I not pay you to eat?
Wolf: Brussell Sprouts
Gypsy: Guacamole
What popular song you could live the rest of your life without hearing again?
Wolf: Achy Breaky Heart
Gypsy: Red Solo Cup
Favorite Peoria Landmark?
Wolf: Obed & Isaac's Building
Gypsy: Spirit of Peoria
What is something you wish Peoria had more of?
Wolf: Music Venues
Gypsy: More parks
What is something you wish Peoria had less of?
Wolf: Violence
Gypsy: Buildings & Parking Lots
Favorite swearword?
Wolf: I'd have to say goddammit, unfortunately.
Gypsy: I have to pick a favorite? I say Fuck the most.
If success was guaranteed, and you had to pick another profession, what would it be?
Wolf: Cowboy
Gypsy: Sculptor
Name another local artists I should have in for an interview.
Wolf: Fighter Jet Pinups
Gypsy: Stone Cold Cowboys
If you could choose a superpower what would it be?
Wolf: Xray vision
Gypsy: An invisible shield so people couldn't touch me without permission.
I honestly could have talked to them for another hour or more, and I could have written three blog posts about all of the great information and stories they shared.
One thing I realized with this interview is that future interviews will talk about current bands and projects, but will focus on the artists. Because, as Wolf & Gypsy talked about the other members of their bands, I realized I wanted to interview them as well.
Nobody is hatched with a bass guitar or a set of drumsticks in hand and is immediately hired by a band. And the fact that someone isn't the lead singer doesn't mean they don't have a lot to share! I'm looking forward to being able to share some more great artists and stories with you in the coming weeks.
Find more of The Wolf & Gypsy Band at any of the links below, and watch the videos of the two songs they played after the interview here: