A Guest Post
By Tommy Womack
The last time I saw Tim Krekel was at the Bluebird last winter, when we did an in-the-round with Marshall Chapman. It was a really fun night – it always had been with them, we’d played as a threesome 7 or 8 times in the last couple of years, and Tim was fine. Just fine! He looked good and played and sang like the fleet-fingered rockin’ R&B hard man by way of Louisville guy that he’s always been.
And now he’s gone. Just like that. I’m only learning as a middle-aged man-child now how fast cancer gets people. I heard in spring he had a tumor needing removed and then I heard nothing more, until Friday the 18th of June when I heard he was in hospice. I should have called already for a long time before, and after that I vowed to rectify that soon.
I put it off, pissed at myself for doing so but datgummit I hate the phone. I hate not seeing the person you’re talking to. But I swear to God I was coming home from the Y that next Wednesday evening and I said distinctly to myself “TONIGHT! I CALL TIM!” Beth had her Facebook open when I got home and
Scott Esbeck had posted on his wall that Tim had passed. Snooze, you lose, Tommy. I never got to talk to him one last time.
I first saw his name was as the writer credit for “I Can’t Help Myself” by Jason & The Nashville Scorchers, on their seminal Fervor EP. That was autumn of ’83 and that song is my favorite Scorchers tune of all time. Always has been. It rocks like a howitzer cannon in cowboy boots. It still makes me boogie a quarter-century later. A song like that, you remember the writer.
He opened for the Scorchers outside Cat’s Records in Nashville in the summer of ’85. I was there, and he rocked. Despite the constant shouting of “Jayyyson! Jayyyson! Jayyyson!” in place of applause, he rocked; and I liked him because he told everybody “Jason’ll be out soon, shut up!”
Fast-forward to 1993 and it’s the Scorchers again, this time it’s Tewligan’s in Louisville, and I wound up onstage with them, playing Warner’s guitar and hardly believing I was doing such a thing, and we were playing “I Can’t Help Myself” and across the stage was Tim Krekel also playing guitar. (He’d moved back from Nashville to his hometown of Louisville by that time.) After that we played “Route 66” with Warner on drums. Perry playing Jason’s acoustic. Tim and I trading Keith Richards licks. And Jason going nuttier than a Payday bar.
Later, Tim shook my hand and said “how are you doing, Tommy?” I shook his hand back and said “Oh just fine! How’bout yourself?” but inside I was geeking out. (“Tim Krekel knows who I am! Tim Krekel knows who I am!)
Fast-forward to Christmas ’95 and I’m having a holiday gig at 12th & Porter with lots of special guests. As happens at such Nashville gatherings, I had my spate of solo acoustic acts and that’s all well and good, but after a while we needed to rock. In comes Tim Krekel, plugs into an amp, has a rhythm section, and when he tore into a Chuck Berry rhythm so groovy and dead-on that he practically didn’t need a drummer, the whole room levitated a foot in the air. He rocked like piss, tore up the guitar and I was in heaven just watching him do it. There were no more acoustic acts the rest of the night.
Fast-forward to 2006, Marshall Chapman and I had gotten tight after doing a gig at the Decatur Book Festival and she invited me to an in-the-row at the Bluebird, along with her old buddy, songwriting partner and fellow alumni of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer band: Tim Krekel.
By this time we’d moved from the handshake to the man hug. Seinfeld should have done a show on the man-hug. You shake hands and reach around each other’s back with the free arm, and maybe bump shoulders, but nothing else too gay (Not that there’s anything wrong with that...).
I’d never heard him play acoustic guitar and man he could tear that thing up. He could make it sting, make it swing, and what’s more, I heard what an R&B tinge he had to him. He wasn’t just a rocker. Songs like “All Night Radio”, “I Love Everybody”, “They Buried Wilson Pickett in My Back Yard”, & “State Of Grace” all showed me what a soul songwriter he was, with some Gospel in there too. He could write stuff that made you feel like you felt when you first heard “Mustang Sally”, long before you got sick of it.
We were a hit, sold the place out and had such a ball that we did shows together for the next two years, not only at the Bluebird but Eddie’s Attic in Decatur and Swallow At The Hollow in Roswell, GA. We played seven or eight shows together, the three of us, and it was always more fun than a barrel of Monkees.
The last time we did that show was, like I said, the Bluebird last winter. We traded licks and smiles and harmonies and I had no idea this would be the last time we’d get to do that.
I don’t reckon he did either.
I didn’t get to say goodbye over the phone, but I made it to the funeral - in Louisville, naturally - last Sunday the 28th. I drove home alone from Daddy’s Frankfort gig the night before.
Everybody loved Tim. It was standing room only by the time I got there. It was a beautiful service and what was even more beautiful was the old-fashioned New Orleans style parade from the church three blocks to Vernon’s, complete with umbrellas and a brass band. We all left the church singing “State of Grace” and that turned into “When The Saints Go Marching In” all the way to Vernon’s, where the jamming started in earnest and so many people had shown up that the place was sweltering with all their AC units pumping like a Marshall on 10.
Marshall & I sang “Forever Young” together. Tim’s band, complete with horns, was badass, and at one point onstage we had Marshall, me, Danny Flowers and Bonnie Bishop. It was rockin’, we were playing “I Can’t Help Myself”, and there was laughter and tears. It was the closest I could have gotten by then to saying goodbye in a way Tim would have dug. I’ll miss him. He was a great musician, great songwriter, great singer and a beautiful human being.
-Tommy Womack