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Cover Story from “Rhythm City Magazine” of Baton Rouge – February 2004 issue
Tom Coerver spins ‘Backwater Tales’
By Tommy Comeaux
Tom Coerver has spent most of his life developing his own brand of Southern rock and his debut solo CD, “Backwater Tales,” is the spirited embodiment of that effort.
A Baton Rouge native who spent several formative years in Houston, Texas, and a number of years in Florida as a professional musician, Coerver has been immersed in Southern rock forever.
While in Florida, for example, the talented guitarist/singer/songwriter was part of a band that opened for the likes of the Rossington Collins Band, the survivors of Lynyrd Skynyrd. And several music projects Coerver’s been involved in have included a connection to Molly Hatchet’s Danny Joe Brown.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Coerver’s musical history begins with childhood piano lessons beginning at age 7, which gave way in several years to an interest in playing baseball. Later, he developed a yearning to play drums, spurred by a drum set owning cousin first, then reinforced when a neighbor got a set.
“I had to have those drums,” Coerver said. “I heard that cowbell, it sounded just like ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ so I just had to have them.”
He finally got his drums and spent many years as a drummer. All the while, though, he was picking up on the guitar, first from a neighbor and later from guitarists who were bandmates.
“The guitar is probably the instrument I most gravitate toward,” Coerver said. “But I’ve been getting back into the keyboards more.”
He didn’t get serious about music until after his graduation from LSU and a period spent working as an engineer. Coerver moved to Florida in 1981 to pursue a career in engineering and later changed to music full time.
Probably Coerver’s most successful band participation was during his years in Florida with China Sky. The band was originally known as the Bobby Ingram Project, named after its leader, who had played with Danny Joe Brown.
“When Danny quit Hatchet, around ’81 or so, he got Bobby and put a band together, the Danny Joe Brown Band,” Coerver said, which cut an album and “sank (the albums’ producer) Glyn John’s yacht.”
“I’ll just leave the details to your imagination,” he added slyly, then joked, “That story probably shouldn’t get out anyway. Just another illustration of just how crazy those days were.”
When Brown returned to Molly Hatchet, Ingram formed the Bobby Ingram Project, recruiting Coerver from The Philters, a band “that was getting real popular,” Coerver said, adding the band had opened for Rossington Collins.
Ingram and Coerver had met through a mutual friend and formed a songwriting team. The two had earned themselves a development deal with Epic Records, a subsidiary of CBS Records.
“We demoed songs and we demoed songs until we were blue in the face,” Coerver said of their efforts, which had been fueled with money from their manager, Pat Armstrong, who also handled Molly Hatchet. “So he had a ton of money. He could afford to keep going back to the well and shopping us to all these bigwigs.”
The Bobby Ingram Project, like most every band Coerver’s ever been involved, specialized in Southern rock, kind of, Coerver said.
“It was kind of like Southern rock, with big three-part and four-part harmony vocals,” is how he described it. “It was like Boston meets Skynyrd meets Hatchet meets the Allmans, if you can imagine that.”
“It was about as commercially viable as dog bone underwear in the dog-eat-dog world,” Coerver continued, but even so, they finally caught the ear of “this big time songwriter and big time producer.”
“They hated everything about the band, but they liked our vocals,” he continued. “So we changed to make our sound what they wanted and got in the studio.” One of the changes was to the band’s name, which became China Sky.
“We called it ‘Chinese Guy,’” Coerver said, laughing. “They kind of forced that name on us.” The name went along with some “crazy artwork” cooked up by the folks at Epic. “It was like this woman’s head made out of motorcycle parts and doves and birds and the ocean behind her.”
The artwork would become the album’s cover art, the cover to an album that seemed to have promise.
“We got a bunch of stations (playing the album) in the first couple of weeks,” Coerver said. “And they gave us the impression that they were going to do a video if we got I think it was 80 stations.”
It was fall, though, back-to-school time, Coerver said, “and all the big boys put their albums out, Def Leppard, Keith Richards, whoever. That was all she wrote.”
China Sky’s members had abandoned the band to go off in their own directions even before the album’s release, fearing CBS wasn’t even going to release it. Coerver came home.
“I just tucked my tail between my legs and came back here, went back to school and got a real job,” he said, with GEC, Inc. Coerver’s been at GEC since 1990. “They’ve been so good to me. I couldn’t ask for a more supportive group.”
In no time, Coerver was longing to perform music again and performed with “a bunch of bands for a little time with each,” including Wendell Tilley’s Cool Toys, which included singer Randy Knaps, who was a longtime member of The Issue. “We had some good times,” Coerver said. “It was a good group.”
After leaving Cool Toys to focus on school, Coerver formed Route 66, which remained together for about 10 years. Not long after Route 66 began performing regularly, Coerver would step outside the band to perform with other local bands, most notably Catdaddy and The Delta Rockets, with whom he got hooked up with through a longtime friendship with the band’s original guitarist R.L. Spencer.
Later, he teamed up with the lovely and talented vocalist Patty Houk to form an acoustic duo, Tom and Patty. The two still perform several times a month together.
After building a home studio, Coerver expanded his involvement in music into recording other local artists, including Crosstown Traffic, Chicago Al and John Lisi. He and Lisi recorded and mixed Tabby Thomas’ “Long Live the King of the Swamp Blues,” which featured famed local blues pianist Henry Gray and international recording artists Tab Benoit and Chris Thomas King.
Guest artists on Lisi’s “Blues For Chloe” album included Gray and other Louisiana blues icons Larry Garner, Tabby Thomas and J. Monque’D. “That was a lot of fun,” Coerver said.
While he was working on all these other projects, Coerver was steadily writing songs, initiated by the purchase of a piano. Lisi, after hearing some of them, encouraged Coerver to record them, which started the lengthy process that led to “Backwater Tales,” released last year.
The 11-song CD is a solo effort for Coerver in an almost pure form. “Bob Chambers sang harmony on two songs,” he said. “The rest is me.” All the instrumentation, all the vocals, everything. “Mastered, mixed, recorded, performed, written, arranged, and produced” by Coerver.
He only recruited help for the photography, Don Kadair, and graphics, Veni Harlan, for the album. George Morgan also helped with the album artwork.
For Coerver, the new album meant a new band, one interested in playing his original music. He started with drummer and background vocalist Tom Barrow, a friend with whom he performed before who expressed a liking for Coerver’s originals.
The new band is called “Backwoods BBQ” and incorporates the talents of four of Baton Rouge’s most talented and best known musicians, including Johnny Rosetti on guitar and vocals and Denise Brumfield on bass and vocals.
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