Gomes finds own route to the blues

By: JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Wednesday, January 30, 2008 1:54 PM PST ∞

He's a kid out of Toronto who found his musical voice in the blues clubs of Chicago and now lives in ---- Nashville?

"That's a popular misconception that it's a country music town," Anthony Gomes said by phone recently of his adopted hometown of five years. "Of course it is, but it's a general music town. People like Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock have homes there, and there are a lot of rock 'n' rollers in Nashville in the music community.

"To me, Nashville is the pre-eminent music town in the United States."

But be very clear: Gomes (playing Wednesday at Humphrey's Backstage Lounge on Shelter Island) is not a country musician in any way, shape or form. His growing national reputation among rock fans is built on the blues-based rock of his string of albums (including a new live set, titled simply "Live"), music in the lineage of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy and B.B. King.

Growing up in the late '70s and early '80s in Toronto, Gomes said he grew up in a musical household. Both sets of grandparents were professional musicians, while his parents were both avid music collectors. Born to a Portuguese father and Canadian mother, Gomes said his parents' record collection took in everything, including fado, the popular salon music of his father's native land.

His love of guitar-oriented rock 'n' roll began, he said, at age 6, when he bought his first two records: "Kiss Alive" and "Aloha From Hawaii" by Elvis Presley. ("I bought those albums 'cause the cool kid in the neighborhood was into Kiss and Elvis.") In the following years, Gomes said he discovered and listened to Jimi Hendrix, Vaughn and Eric Clapton, which eventually led him back to where it all began, the blues.

"It was just the natural progression and evolution of things," he said of his journey to the blues. "I was into Stevie Ray and Clapton, and I bought a B.B. King CD that kind of linked everything to those players I admired. I soon became a fan of B.B.'s, and started getting into Buddy Guy and Gatemouth Brown and Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf."

He began gigging around Toronto and surrounding areas as a teen but in his early 20s decided to move to Chicago to learn more about the blues that he so loved.

"I went there to be in a larger community of musicians, and there's lot of blues and roots there, and I wanted to immerse myself in that," he said. Once settled, he was soon going out every night to hear some of Chicago's greatest blues practitioners: Buddy Guy, Phil Guy, Magic Slim, Melvin Taylor.

And while he's on tour in support of that new live CD, Gomes said that the CD is a bit of a marker, signaling a change in musical direction with his next studio CD.

He cited fellow Canadian rockers Rush as the inspiration for using a "live" album as a sort of bookend to one period of his career.

"A band like Rush always used to do that," he said, explaining that Rush would use its live albums to signal fans that a change was coming. "They'd have a certain style or element and sound that they would investigate, examine and immerse themselves in, and then they'd do something else. They would be trying different things.

"I feel like this is cataloging a certain blues-rock thing I've been doing, and I'm looking to turn the page and enhance that with different sounds. It's not that far from what I've been doing ---- more of a Southern rock kind of vibe, mixing in aggressive rock grooves with a blues sensibility and an element of funk and the storytelling of country music songs, and putting all those things together. I'm about 15 songs into the writing of it."

As far as his songwriting goes, Gomes writes nearly all of his own songs and said he's trying to take a more disciplined approach to writing new material.

"When inspiration hits, of course you capture that. But sometimes I force myself to write stuff. Usually, nothing really great comes out of it, but I do feel enlightened by that process, and when I feel that moment of inspiration, those lessons of writing a really bad song when I forced myself to write I can apply to inspiration.

Anthony Gomes

Where: Humphreys Backstage Lounge, 2241 Shelter Island Drive, San Diego

When: 8 p.m Feb. 6

Admission: $8

Info: (619) 224-3577 or humphreysbythebay.com

Web: anthonygomes.com

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