FIFTY YEARS ON, THE INSPIRATIONAL SECOND COMING OF URAL THOMAS, PORTLAND’S PILLAR OF SOUL
“INEVER CARED about money, girls or fame,” says R&B veteran Ural Thomas. “Music always seemed so magical to me – it lifted my whole body up, so I felt like I was floating.” Thomas, now 82, initially called time on his professional music career over half a century ago, but you can’t keep a great voice down. Rescued from obscurity by drummer/DJ Scott Magee in 2013, Thomas is currently enjoying an unlikely comeback fronting his new band, The Pain.
Thomas’s course was set at an early age. His earliest memories are of listening beneath a pew as his preacher father sang in church, and as a teenager he’d sing doo wop with his schoolfriends in North Portland, Oregon. But while those friends got distracted by girls and drinking, Thomas kept his focus steady. “I wanted to make love with my music,” he says. “I decided to really do something with music. Then I got involved with the business side. And that turned me around.”
Thomas scored a local hit in Portland as a member of The Monterays with their 1964 debut Push ’Em Up. The group disintegrated soon afterwards but, under the wing of Jerry Goldstein (co-writer of My Boyfriend’s Back, and later manager of Sly Stone), Thomas relocated to LA and cut a handful of 7-inches in 1967, along with a concert record, 1968’s feverish Can You Dig It… Live!.
Despite playing a reputed 44 shows at Harlem’s Apollo and opening for James Brown, Otis Redding and The Rolling Stones, the big time eluded the man audiences came to know as “Portland’s Pillar Of Soul”.
“The industry seemed to have already chosen the ones they wanted to make stars of, and it wasn’t me,” Thomas says. After one final bruising encounter with a label Thomas alleges rejected his demo tape, only to then steal his songs for their own artists, he decided he “couldn’t compete no longer.” Returning home to Portland he started a family and built himself a ramshackle house that was very much wired for sound. Indeed, jam sessions at the Thomas basement became a weekly institution for several decades.
“I didn’t even know he was still doing music, let alone living up the road,” says Magee, who spun Thomas’s 1967 single Can You Dig It? in his DJ sets, and was introduced to the dormant deep soul legend in 2013 by a mutual friend. Soon, Magee had assembled Thomas’s new group, The Pain. “Our aim was solely to sound like one of Ural’s old bands,” he says. “We were honouring his legacy. He wasn’t looking for some big comeback or anything.”
Nevertheless, Ural Thomas & The Pain’s eponymous 2016 debut, featuring re-recordings of his old material, stirred enough interest for a 2018 follow-up of new songs, while the forthcoming Dancing
Dimensions is their strongest album yet. And this late life career-rejuvenation has lent Thomas’s story a redemptive arc he clearly relishes. “God put us together,” he says, of his (relatively) youthful bandmates. “We’re gonna sing from our hearts, and the music’s going to be a healing thing.”
Dancing Dimensions is released by Bella Union on June 3.
“The music’s going to be healing.” URAL THOMAS