There’s more to Tommy Tutone than that phone number.
Imagine if just one digit in the 1982 Tommy Tutone hit “867-5309 (Jenny)” had been changed. Would the song still have functioned the same way?
“It’s like skipping rope, isn’t it?” asks Tommy Heath, frontman for the California rock band that at the time included songwriter/guitarist Jim Keller, who co-wrote the song with Alex Call, who played in Clover, the band that would back Elvis Costello on his first album. “Alex and Jim presented it to me, and it sounded like a (expletive) nursery rhyme. So I tried to inject a little soul into it. But credit them; that number combination they came up with was unforgettable. It burns its way into your thoughts.”
On one hand, a hit song can be a blessing for a musician or a band. Think of how many great artists made great songs for years and never had a charting hit.On the other hand, well, a hit song can be a ball and chain because it becomes a shorthand for musicians whose river of work can run deeper.
Heath growls a bit when we begin to talk. He assumes I hadn’t listened to “Soul Twang,” his new album and first in eight years, which finds him further refining a sound he worked on 40 years ago. Time in Nashville has further sussed out the rootsy side of it, but it’s still decidedly rock ’n’ roll with a Memphis-y bent.
I never drifted from Tommy Tutone, who plays Cactus Music and McGonigel’s Mucky Duck on Aug. 22, even though the band released a third album after “Tommy Tutone” in 1980 and “Tommy Tutone 2,” which included “867-5309,” in 1981. “National Emotion,” released in 1983, didn’t find a lot of listeners, initiating a 13-year hibernation until Heath would release another Tutone album. So naturally, I devoured the new set of songs, the first I’d heard from Heath since “A Long Time Ago” from 2011.
“OK,” he grumbles. “Now I know who I’m talking to. It’s fine to talk about the ’80s. But I’ve done some things since the ’80s.”
Heath has been a computer analyst for years now, steady work that stanched the output of Tommy Tutone.
With a longer view — further removed from the ’80s — Heath’s music sounds resilient. Tommy Tutone came from a similar lean sort of rock ’n’ roll about girls and cars. He says bandmate Keller was a Springsteen fan.
“Maybe a quarter of our songs that were written before I’d heard Springsteen, I just threw them out. I guess I just wrote car songs. But you have to give that to Bruce, right? So it was interesting years later to hear him doing something that sounded like my song.”
From the “tonight we’re leaving” on “Sylvia” to use of the saxophone on “Tip on Out,” which also finds its narrator knowing when to cut bait on a stagnant hometown, Heath’s latest finds its way into a similar sphere as Springsteen’s.
“I guess it’s because I see the songs as little movies,” he says. “I hear them as scripts that could be acted out. Instead I play them on a guitar, hopefully with an audience.”
Heath grew up an Air Force brat, so his childhood found him bouncing around the country, including time just north of Dallas. For a guy known for a song about a phone number without an area code, he comes across as particularly interested in place. When I asked about his speedy cover of the old murder ballad “The Lily of the West,” he offered context: “There’s a tradition of mountain song from when Louisville was the west,” he says.
There’s also a cheeky tip to his biggest hit with a take on Jim Croce’s “Operator,” to which, he says, “I decided to play it the way I imagined the Clash would play it.”
A lot of the new album sprang from writing sessions in Nashville several years ago.
“I basically got run out of Tennessee because I don’t do patriotic songs and I don’t like jingoism,” he says. “But there’s still something about sitting on the Cumberland River, with all the ghosts around. You can find songs there.”