Western Swing Hall of Famer Tommy Thomsen of Sonoma is back in the saddle
Tommy Thomsen walks through the swinging doors of the bar at the Swiss Hotel and goes straight for the photographs on the wall.
'My family's been in town 100 years,' he says, pointing to his uncles and his grandfather, a beer distributor of Danish descent. Their professional quality, black-and-white portraits, circa 1940, still hang in the corner along with other Sonoma merchants.
The bar, the plaza, the buildings around it, the greater Sonoma Valley. They all drip with stories linked to Thomsen, a Western swing authority and band frontman who helps keep the sub-genre of country music alive.
His roots run deep in his native Sonoma, where he began playing guitar as a freshman in high school and became a favorite on the nightclub circuit, playing rock, blues and bluegrass before settling into country swing. He has recorded five albums and played clubs all over the world while working as a merchant marine, from Japan to Italy, Denmark and France.
In recent years Thomsen has stayed closer to home. While recovering from the second of two life-threatening illnesses, his appearances have been limited to festivals in the Sonoma and Healdsburg plazas and a few pub dates.
Now 67 and with liver cancer that is in remission, he has ambitious plans for the next phase that include more gigs and a tribute album.
Rooted in music
With his cowboy hat and boots, pleasant banter and stage demeanor, it would be easy to place the 6-foot 4-inch Thomsen as a picker from the Lone Star State. But he was born in a house his family owned off the Sonoma Plaza. By 7, he was taking piano lessons, studying the classics and working his way up to a recital of Franz Liszt's 'Hungarian Rhapsody.'
His mother, with whom he now lives in Sonoma, was a piano player from the musical side of the family that included a milkman uncle who sang opera. Her collection of Big Band 78 rpm records stoked his interest in popular music, and she taught him some 'mean boogie-woogie.'
In ninth grade at Sonoma Valley High School, Thomsen bought his first guitar with money he saved working at Benedetti turkey ranch, an electric one from Ruggles music store.
'I paid $70 for a $35 guitar,' he recalled with a laugh, 'but I shoplifted enough music over the years that it was even now.'
Playing without an amp, he practiced in his bedroom late into the night, emulating the blues style of Freddy King, 'The Texas Cannonball,' whose playing influenced a string of musicians from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan.
The mother of a friend arranged for his fledgling band, The Headsmen, to use a deli on the Sonoma Plaza (Vella's Cheese, now Burgers and Vines). They turned it into a music club every Tuesday night for four years. Thomsen honed his blues and rock 'n' roll chops there and at school dances, parties and shows at the Sonoma Veterans building.
'We were pimply-faced white kids,' said Thomsen, except for their lead singer, a black youth who got them into shape with rehearsals, harmonies, matching outfits, 'ascots and steps.'
Thomsen also absorbed the country influence of cowboys who stopped in Sonoma, still rural at the time, to relax between dates on the rodeo circuit.
After graduating from high school in 1966, Thomsen migrated to San Francisco and spent a few years jamming and playing clubs in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
He hung out with members of Big Brother and the Holding Co., dropping LSD a few hundred times by his own estimate and sharing methamphetamines for a year with an outlaw biker he initially looked up to. By 1967, Thomsen had joined the San Francisco-based Sailor's Union of the Pacific.
Periodically over the next 35 years, he worked on ships that docked in exotic ports, using his ever-present guitar as a calling card to play for locals, or to pick up a band.
Thomsen took a hiatus from the sea in early 1969, when he refused to be drafted for military service because of his Vietnam-era 'pacifist, conscientious objector' views. He was convicted of draft resistance and was sent to the federal penitentiary at Lompoc.
Thomsen served 18 months before he was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, but those months weren't exactly hard time. He acquired his first acoustic guitar in prison and recalls daily jam sessions during which he learned jazz licks from fellow inmates.
After his release, he hooked up with the late harmonica virtuoso and showman Norton Buffalo in a band called Sonoma County Line and later joined or jammed with musicians that ranged from 'red rocker' Sammy Haggar to Commander Cody, Billy C. Farlow and the Moonlighters.
But years of partying and hard living eventually caught up with Thomsen. He remembers his last cocktail — on Oct. 28, 1988, at the Swiss Hotel — as the night he hit bottom.
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