Recently elected president
of the Nashville Musicians Union, Dave Pomeroy, has played bass
with scores of great artists crossing over many genres. The following
is taken from a recent 20 minute interview, meet Dave Pomeroy.
Q:
You’ve had a heck of a career. Where are you actually from?
Well my
dad was military so we had a little bit of a nomadic childhood.
I was
born in Italy, we lived in England for four years in the early 60’s
which I think was the beginning of my musical awakening before settling
in Northern Virgina when I was 8. When I was 16, we moved to Pennsylvania
for a couple of years. I went to two years of college at the University
of Virginia and at that point I was 20 years old. My dad was stationed
in Belgium so I dropped out of school, went to Belgium and informed
my parents that I was going to London to become a rock star, (laughing)
obviously that didn’t turn out but I lived in London for a year and
it was an incredible life experience. I got a work permit and played
in five or six different bands. After my year was up it was time to
come back to the states and a singer that I’d worked with in college
had moved to Nashville and had some stuff going. She was signed to
Roger Cook and Ralph Murphys’
publishing company, Picalic Music, and
so I came to town to check it out for a couple of weeks and that was
32 years ago.
Q: So when you first got to town did you find yourself
finding the studio type things or just playing live?
Oh no I didn’t
even know what a studio musician was. I was here about three weeks
and I got a job with a guy named Sleepy LaBeef.
Q: Now what year
was this?
This was 1977 and I toured with Sleepy for a year, we literally
did not come back to Nashville for a year. It didn’t pay very much
but it was a great musical education. I had grown up basically playing
rock and roll and jazz so it was such an incredible education in roots
music but I knew I had to get back to Nashville to get something going
on. I came back here about a year later and then I ran into a drummer
at one of my first ever recording sessions named Freddie Fletcher.
We hit it off and he got me a job with Guy Clark, who he was playing
with at the time. At the same time Billie Joe Shaver and Guy were
kind of sharing a band with Eddie Shaver and Freddie. We played around
town, we did a few road gigs and I did that for six or eight months.
I had met and hung out a bit with the guys in Don Williams' band,
Biff Watson, Danny Flowers and Pat McInerney, and we became friends
and we’d gotten together and jammed but, (laughing) I was so naive
I was never thinking of things in a career curve. I didn’t realize
at the time they were kind of auditioning me to join the band because
the bass player was getting ready to leave. So when he left I was
one of two guys that were up for the gig and when it came open, I
prayed and hoped and my son Philip was just born so it was perfect
timing. I joined Don at the beginning of 1980 and I stayed with him
for 15 years and I owe the vast majority of what’s happened in my
career to him. I became his band leader around 1988 and I was his
band leader up until the time I left the band in 1994. What I learned
from Don Williams, the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in
my musical life, is play the song and leave out the stuff that doesn’t
really enhance the song. If you’re just doin’ it for yourself, don’t
do it. I’ve been able to take that approach to all kinds of music
and it’s always served me well. He was amazing.
Q: Do you
have a preference for playing live or playing in the studio?
I love
both and I honestly try to look at it as more like the same thing.
To me what makes Nashville recording special is the group mentality
when you’re all there at once. Yeah, you can record it one guy at
a time but when you get five, six, seven guys in a room together and
you create, to me it’s much better. It’s a performance it’s just the
audience is a tape machine or now a computer instead of the audience
but to me the essence of it is the same. It’s emotion that you’re
trying to translate into a tangible form whether someone’s listening
to it live or listening to a record. To me the goal is the same -
you’re translating emotion, but I do love to be on stage. I love to
move around when I play and sometimes if I’m in the studio and it’s
a certain kind of a song I’ll stand up and dance around like I would
if I was on stage just because it gets me in that place. I need to
play like a guy who’s standing up and not somebody who’s sitting in
a chair like a bored studio musician might do but I will say I’ve
never been bored in the studio. To me it’s the most incredible job
ever. What’s great about playing live is that instant feedback that
you get from an audience and I could never give that up. To me it’s
great to be able to do both.
Q & A continued on website
www.nashvillemusicguide.com
Q:
You just recently won the election to be the President of the Nashville
Musicians Union. Fantastic and congratulations on that….
Well thank
you. I'm very honored and very humbled by being elected and I'm very
excited to be here to serve the musicians of Nashville which is my
job.
Q: A lot of people that read our magazine and listen to
my interviews are people that just came to Nashville or haven't been
here very long. What would be the difference for them joining the
union now that you're president?
Well I think the reasons are the same
in terms of collective bargaining and what that means as a group,
looking out for the interests of a group.
Those things, the basic
premise of the union, has never changed in that we can protect each
other if we unite as a group. We can share our problems and our problem
solving techniques with one another. It's about building a consensus
of what is good for the whole and technology has changed the music
business drastically over the last ten years and Local 257, the Nashville
Musicians Union has not kept up. There's a lot of reasons, but I like
to dwell on the positive and what's going on moving forward. You know
Craig Krampf is the new Secretary Treasurer so we have a whole new
slate of officers. Craig and I have both had pretty varied backgrounds
musically, as well as from a business standpoint, We have both been
producers, songwriters, been out on the road, done sessions, so what
I think is perhaps different now is that we're really making an effort
to reach out to the community to people who maybe didn't understand
what the union can do for them. It's our job to explain what we do
so that people understand that it could be worth it to them. Just
to give you a couple of quick examples, an independent singer/songwriter,
guitar player, or piano player, whatever you might play, but in Nashville
most people who get out and do gigs on their own are usually guitar
players, they would probably think, "well I'm not a session
player, why would I need to be in the union?" and the answer
is we have a live engagement department, we have live contracts that
are available free to any member that you can use to book your own
gigs because a lot of people in this day and age book your own gigs
whether it's house concerts or club shows and we offer you legal back
up for that contract. If you have a problem it's not just a verbal
agreement or a hand shake, you've got a piece of paper then we will
back you to the hilt and protect you in that way. Also a real big
area where things are changing is in the area of intellectual copyright.
Songwriters have done a great job through the NSAI especially and
other organizations to insert themselves in the legislative process,
assert themselves into the entertainment community and say "Hey,
don't steal our stuff and we deserve to be paid fairly, and so the
musicians who play on these recordings are contributing intellectual
property to a song, no they may have not written the song, they may
not have produced the record or be the artist, but that is very real
and by helping people do their recordings union and filing contracts
and helping them understand the paperwork which is not as complicated
as people think it is. It just needs to be explained properly and
we have people, including myself here, that that's our job to explain
these things so our goal is about communication and outreach to the
community and explaining to people why they would want to join the
union as opposed to the image that some people have had of the union
which is, all the union really does is tell you what you can't do
and to make what you want to do more difficult and complicated, and
we want to bust that myth for good because that's not what we do and
we have some catching up to do in terms of our perception in the community,
but we're doing it on every level we can. Reaching out to the colleges,
we've not had much of a presence there and you know Belmont's turning
out hundreds of musicians a year, Blair, MTSU, Austin Peay, there's
a lot, even Vol State. We want to be a bigger part of the community
and I think that the awareness of what we can do for people will come
naturally. We can't change a perception that's taken years to get
in place overnight but we've got a lot of tools at our disposal to
do that so our hope is that people will get curious and want to know
more about the union.
You can visit Dave at
www.davepomeroy.com and
listen to this entire interview at
www.bronsonsmusic.com/dave_pomeroy.html
