Tom Wood is a strange brew … a fairly conservative type of man with a predilection for the heat of the desert. A wanderer in trades too.
Tom is a showman, who a decade ago. took a gamble and moved to Vegas, yet had little interest in the Elvis look-alike culture, its plastic playground cities, its stretch limos and dime-a-dream casinos, fast food-at-the-speed-of-light and the cheap neons of Mammon.
Tom has a driving desire to become recognised for his music …oh, and he adores mangos. So much so, in fact, that he has named his record label Mongomon.
Sweet name that, once you catch on to the hidden meaning, it makes you smile. Mango Man.
And it is on his new label that Tom, now well in his Sixties, has released the strange fruit to come from his powerful and enigmatic creative world.
It is a good set of songs, so good in fact that here at The Society we are promoting his work wholeheartedly … and a mutual friend, LA film editor and director Bob Mori is set to make a video of Tom’s performances.
See GoFundMe page here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/provide-a-budget-for-a-new-music-video
Bob too has seen the burning glory inside his work.
For instance, Peaceworld is about, yep, a peaceful world.
Tom said: “It’s not too unlike John Lennon’s beautiful Imagine. Mine came with the start of Putin’s war, I was so depressed and saddened by the lack of compassion for Ukrainian citizens’ lives, property, etc. War is only destruction and loss of life. Peace is the opposite of war. I believe that 90 percent of all humans want a peaceful world to live in, raise children, learn, experience, laugh, grow. Imagine!”
His grand view of peace doesn’t make him pull his punches though. He had this to say about Putin: “He is a dictator. He is probably a murderer as well. No compassion for anyone, or life in general. He is like Trump. Hateful. Narcissistic. His war is useless. Nothing good. Only death and destruction has been achieved.”
https://tomwood2.bandcamp.com/
Tom was brought up in the ‘war zone’ of racism St Louis, but as the son of a middle-class couple in a suburb of the auction block city he says that it was something he mainly caught in his peripheral vision.
The way he tells it, as a boy in the 1950s and 60s Tom Wood never suffered from the St Louis blues.
His mother was an 8th grade English teacher and his dad was a post office supervisor. One way or the other his family had standing in a community where racism burned just around the corner.
He never really suffered from the St Louis blues.
His mother was an 8th grade English teacher and his dad was a post office supervisor. His family had standing in a community.
Lyrics in Where are you Going reflect the security and comfort he was afforded in the city that left blues hero and inveterate drunk WC Handy was ignored as he dossed on the streets. Lyrics like: “The comfort of family, more precious than gold, one love, one heart, loving the young and the old.”
Tom’s parents and he lived in the railway town of Kirkwood Mo, named after James P. Kirkwood who put it on the map when he planned a new route for the Pacific Railroad in 1852.
Tom said: “ My childhood was almost idyllic especially by the standards of today.
My parents bought a home in Kirkwood Mo and I was able to walk to my grade school and middle school without worry.
“Kirkwood High School is where I received my diploma. But I attended two colleges
in the St. Louis metro area where I achieved a degree in Fine Arts.”
But still though, The Klu Klux Klan were all around him like terrifying ghost riders in the sky.
He rose above them all … but there is a darkness in his new song Rise which, to me at least, invokes the shackles of slavery and race hatred, murder and the postcards of the hangings: “You tell me why
I cannot fly as I ascend into the sky…”
And there is love and loss in 25: “I left behind everything I knew, to learn how to give everything to you.”
https://www.mongomon.com/sound-bytes
When Tom moved to Las Vegas, like we said, he wasn’t necessarily seeking fame and fortune, but went there for love.
Tom said: “I’m not an old bluesman with trauma after trauma behind me, but I have had broken hearts. And it was moving to Las Vegas that finally made me a happy man.”
He was reunited with his former St Louis lover from the 70s Tamara … they met up again in 2010 at a reunion of a band called the Homegrown Harvest One of the members was a mutual friend.
Tom said: “I am happily ‘married’ to my lovely, witty, and fun common-law wife Tamara. We live in a deluxe single story home 25 miles north of Las Vegas. Neither Tam nor I have children. We relish our privacy and home-life to it’s fullest.”
He said: “I worked a three day shift as a customer service representative in
Red Rock Canyon.”
Red Rock Canyon, 17 miles from Las Vegas, was Nevada’s first National Conservation Area and is visited by more than two million people each year.
Now he is looking for work in the cannabis industry … and there is no smoke without the burning embers of ambition.
And Tom’s new album is smokin’.
#TOMWOOD #MONGOMON #PUTIN #STLOUISBLUES
Tom Wood Go Fund Me Page:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/provide-a-budget-for-a-new-music-video