Thomas Hubbard with Steve Beck and the Whole Bag of Nickels Tour
Hey, all y’all! Thomas Hubbard here. This gig is in celebration of my 8th anniversary as a Seattlite and the start of my 9th season as a contract busker for the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department where I play 2 hour sets, with neither a bodyguard, nor a net, in some of the gnarliest parks Seattle has to offer. Some days you’re better than Bob Dylan, some days you’re raw meat. Some days your dancer sets himself on fire.
My historical repertoire includes around 100 original songs and so many covers that I can’t rightly recall how many I don’t remember. I perform an eclectic range from John Prine to the Beatles, Warren Zevon to Shawn Colvin, and Norman Blake to Taylor Swift. Heavy on the folk influence, social justice songs call my name, and I am always a sucker for an intimate story about real people and hard living.
My musical career began in 1960, at the age of 5, when I was strapped helplessly to an accordion and often locked in the unheated breezeway during Michigan winters to practice polkas and waltzes to the loud tick of an egg timer. Metronome it was not. I excelled at Children’s Choir from an early age whenever I wasn’t serving out an expulsion for excessive exuberance. In the all 7th grade vocal music class I beat out all the girls and was placed as 3rd chair alto. Many decades later I discovered that Mr. Moyer had once confided to a friend of mine: “That Mr. Hubbard, he was my best alto…” He didn’t dare place me in first chair because he knew my voice would soon change. When it did, I was relegated to the “growler section” amongst the entire cadre of small town hoodlums and bullies that literally beat the remainder of the voice out of me for quite some time.
It’s been a long road back with about 45 years of sporadic guitar wrestling and close to 40 years of songwriting therapy along the way. I hope you’ll come out and share some of that with me and “get high with a little help from my friends.”
Steve Beck, consummate musicians’ musician, will be leading the Whole Bag of Nickels, and you never know what sort of local phenom may show up to jam out when that happens. Steve is one of the finest treasures I have ever discovered in this universe. A bubbling, spring-fed mountain of a man with a booming baritone that registers well up the Richter scale and a range as wide as he is tall. Killer bass player and unbelievably lyrical guitar player, you barely see his fingers move, yet out comes magic! Steve is a wonderful songwriter, and he cradles an innate sensitivity that you have to feel to believe. Be sure to request my favorite song he covers: “Muskrat Love!”
Lyrics and music samples for Thomas Hubbard at www.PeregrineDruid.com