Bill Toms brings soul-tinged sound to South Park concert
Bill Toms with his Takamine guitar at his Scott Township home
Bill Toms jams with Bruce Springsteen in 1995, with Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers. Springsteen produced the band’s album “American Babylon” that year.
At the top of the stack of LPs in Bill Toms’ living room these days is part of the collection documenting Atlantic Records’ heyday of rhythm-and-blues classics.
”My grandkids were here for a couple of days, and they’re like 6,” the Scott Township guitarist and bandleader said. “And we threw on that record and were having a dance party.”
That must have been reminiscent of what Toms remembers from when he was about that age, of his older siblings listening and bopping to the horn-tinged Motown and Stax/Volt hits of the 1960s.
“When the soul music came on, I always turned it up,” he recalled. “The horns are so subtle, but they’re such a main part of the music.”
Toms is making them more a part of his own brand of blue-collar rock as he continues to integrate reeds and brass into recordings and performances. And so the Soulville Horns will join the rest of his backing band, Hard Rain, on stage this summer and fall.
Next on the schedule is a free concert July 15 at the South Park Amphitheater, opening for Randy Bachman of Guess Who/Bachman-Turner Overdrive fame.
As far as the horns, the three Soulville players – Phil Brontz on saxophone, Joe Herndon on trumpet and Steve Graham on trombone – figure prominently on Toms’ latest album, “Deep in the Shadows.”
Other Hard Rain members bring a wealth of musical experience to the ensemble.
Longtime Toms collaborator and Peters Township collaborator Tom Breiding, for example, has an impressive solo discography in his own right. Brontz, another Hard Rain mainstay, has lent his talents to numerous recordings by Pittsburgh-area artists since the 1980s.
Drummer Bernie Herr, a Harrisburg native, has been playing professionally for more than 50 years and for about 10 years with Toms’ band. The two played together for nearly two decades with the Houserockers, Joe Grushecky’s backing unit, which Toms joined as lead guitarist in 1987.
Rounding out the Hard Rain lineup are keyboardist Steve Binsberger and bass player Tom Valentine, both of whom have flashed their R&B chops with Billy Price’s Keystone Rhythm Band, among others.
“Deep in the Shadows” was produced by a couple of other guys with great résumés: Will Kimbrough, a Nashville, Tenn.-based singer-songwriter who has collaborated with the likes of Rosanne Cash, John Prine, Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, and Rick Witkowski, best known as guitarist for the progressive rock band Crack the Sky.
“I just started putting together a schedule with Ricky and Will Kimbrough, and we’re going to start recording in February,” Toms said about the next project, to be called “Bill Toms and Hard Rain Featuring the Soulville Horns.” “It’s going to be more of an all-out rhythm-and-blues record.”
In the meantime, he plans by the end of the year to publish a book of his poetry, “Life, Death and Song.”
“What gives me the opportunity in the poetry realm is that I get to manipulate words, and you can do that a lot easier without trying to make them sing,” he explained. “It’s just another outlet. You’re not caged in by the music, itself.”
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