Dimestore Outfit - Icon Article

Living for the Moment
by Aaron Wolfe
Photos by Sandy Dyas

...I'd give 500 dollars for something true,
Everything I got in this pocket, change too.
Keep thinking about when she slipped her hand in mine,
hard to find anything that seemed more right.

Redemption

If there's something about the quality and sincerity of depressing country music that can draw you out of a pretty deep funk, and if there's something about being depressed that helps you write, then Tom Jessen must have been really low when he wrote the songs he plays now, in better times.

Buy it Online

Jessen's self-titled tape with his band, The Dimestore Outfit, helped me through some long, lonely drives through the country last fall after I heard it for the first time, appropriately, in a friend's truck. His music belongs among the stocks of popular remedies his ageless tales of loneliness, frustration and homesick love demand. Now, almost a year after recording the tape, Jessen seems to be on the verge of material payback for working out his pain and insecurities in public. But the music business can keep talent on the verge for a long time.

Jessen stands to gain at least some regional recognition when he plays a 40-minute gig at the Mississippi Music festival in St. Louis. It will be the first time he's played out of state since getting the Outfit together in the spring of 1994. Since then, Jessen's built a strong, local base of appreciation for his music, playing out as often as possible with the band and solo.

Jessen's music isn't really the kind that can become a big draw in a college town where there are, as Jessen puts it, basically two kinds of bands, "the ones you shake your ass to and the ones you can sit down and listen to." Bands in the second category don't make that much money here. That's not to say Jessen doesn't have strong, danceable material that comes from pop and rock elements in all of his songs, but the partying college crowd doesn't get into the downer, sometimes-life-sucks tone in a lot of his songs.

Right now, the outfit is at a turning point. With drummer Jim Viner amd lead guitarist Darren Matthews also playing in High and Lonesome, it's almost impossible for Jessen to take the band on the road and hard to schedule weekend gigs in town. They play with the Outfit because they like the music, Viner says, but H&L works more, makes more money and was there first. Viner and Matthews will miss the Outfit's gig next month at the Mississippi River Music festival. H&L plays the festival on a Thursday and then has a gig in Des Moines the next day, leaving Jessen with a backup drummer (Eric Griffin, who plays with Dave Zollo and has played with Bo Ramsey) and no lead guitarist for his Friday night show.

It will be hard for Jessen to break out to the next level without a regular band. In a pinch, Jessen plays solo acoustic, usually to fill in for an opening act that cancels, but most of his songs demand a band -- only a few work solo -- and playing solo isn't something he enjoys doing that much anyway. "It's boring for me and for the audience. You have to be a charismatic performer."

Jessen started playing in bands in Iowa City when Viner saw a guitar in Jessen's dorm room and asked if he would play bass in Peterbuilt, a band Viner says wanted to be the Replacements. Jessen played bass until Jim Vallet joined up -- he had practice space -- then Jessen switched to guitar. The band formed in 1988 and was around for about a year, at about he time of the birth of alternative rock.

Then, during Jessen's senior year in college, came Devastation Wagon with Matt Hornaday and Pat White on guitar, Viner and Vallet on bass (later replaced by Steve Tyler). Jessen calls D Wagon a punk-drunk country thing that developed a small cult following. This was the first band of Jessen's to play any country at all. It was kind of "goofy" music. "The ideas behind it were a lot more interesting then the actual music," and the main idea was to get drunk before, during and after the shows.

...Spending too much time with drunks who had their time,
A story for every day of the week.
Their half-opened eyelids, yellow-stained finger tips,
Sometimes so quiet you can hear their bones creak.

At the time, Jessen was getting tired of being around here. What he calls the bitterness of four years of being in the same place pushed him out. "Everybody was cynical as shit."

A studio art major in painting at the UI, Jessen became disillusioned with his art, his friends and his surroundings. "You can't help asking yourself, 'Why am I doing this?'" He realized he didn't have the will to make painting his life.

So Jessen split town on a disappointing journey that quickly cleared away any illusions about life after college. Not really sure what he was looking for, possibly somewhere country music is king. First stop: Branson, Mo. This was just as Branson was becoming the commercial, country music Mecca it is today. It seemed to him then even more absurd and bizarre than it is now, with auditoriums out in the middle of the country.

"It was a twisted carnival of a scene, an amusement park for musicians."

There were three bars in town then. Jessen hit them all in one night and left for Memphis the next morning. He checked into a motel, drove around, got lost and scared and left for Portland, Ore., discarding his plan to try Nashville.

In January of 1992, he ended up in Portland, where he figured out how to write songs. Songwriting has a function for him. It's a catharsis that starts with a catch phrase and three country chords, progresses to rock and pop sensibilities, all while clearing his mind of negative feelings. In Portland, he says, his songs started to say something instead of saying dopey things or pretending to say something.

During Jessen's first two months there, he was unemployed and alone, trying to get something going in an unfamiliar town. He dealt with it by writing, in his cockroach infested apartment on a five-dollar typewriter, not songs, but just typing out his thoughts.

"It's almost like yelling, but you're writing it down." Thoughts like "this really sucks" quickly developed into journal writing Jessen needed just to deal with his situation. He didn't start writing music and playing until a year after he was there. His poring over the dejected thoughts in his head and on paper clearly helped him write some of his best songs.

"Your thoughts are more articulate when you're down. It goes over and over in your head all the time."

"The feelings of my songs are like going to therapy. You create something from negative feelings." Without the therapeutic function, the writing motive isn't there. "I don't know how to write about stuff I like."

"Country music really helped me figure out how to write songs." Jessen says the major themes of country music were elemental to his life at the time -- women, booze and small-town life -- or drinking, not having enough women or having the wrong woman.

While in Portland, he wrote many of the songs he plays now in the Outfit. It was a prolific period that gave Jessen more than enough material for his current band. "The band hasn't caught up with the output."

...In Iowa you can see for miles.
The sun seems to come out when you drive.
Everything looks fine,
Behind this windshield when you're driving by.
Everybody's got their two cents worthless.
Leave this town with the windows down tonight.

Jessen left Portland for his hometown, Strawberry Point, Iowa, population 1,400, where his immediate family owned the Super-Valu until his father sold his share to Jessen's uncle. He wrote about the store from his father's point of view in a song called "I Haven't Known A Life." The song describes how Jessen imagines his father must think about 30 years of changes in Strawberry Point and how difficult it must have been for him to retire from his life's work.

...I guess I've pretty much stayed the same
while things around me come and gone . . .
The DX station, the movie theatre and the
ol' school got torn down some time ago . . .
Six A.M. comes pretty early when your
back still hurts from the day before,
I haven't known a life without this store.

The song isn't on the tape, but Jessen sings it solo occasionally. Jessen continued writing in Strawberry Point before coming back to Iowa City. He didn't plan to come back, but the friends, musicians and proximity to home made the choice easy. His desire to play was obvious. He formed the Outfit in the spring of 1994 with Viner, Matthews and Steve Tyler. Eric Straumanis took over on bass after Tyler left last winter. In November, pedal steel player Marty letz joined up. Letz's instrument has come to represent the sound of the band almost as much as Jessen's voice.

"I don't know that you can say we're really playing country music," Jessen says. "I'm more interested in country instruments doing a rock or pop kind of thing."

They quickly worked Jessen's songs into a couple of tight sets and have become the band that consistently warms up local audiences to such national, country-influenced acts as Wilco, Martin Zellar, Junior Brown and Marshall Crenshaw.

"There's a core of people around here that really dig us and I really appreciate that," Jessen says.

After recording this fall, Jessen will do some serious thinking about what he needs to do to make it as a musician. But, considering he's only thought of himself as a musician since returning from Portland, he's got a pretty good start. As Viner says of people Jessen's played with, "we didn't even know he could write songs for four or five years."

Jessen, always patient and modest, is also realistic about his chances. "I'm not anticipating making money, so when I do make money I'll be pleasantly surprised."

That shouldn't be too long now.

[Home] [Bio] [Discography] [Reviews & Press] [Lyrics] [Photo Gallery] [Feedback] Junkshop Order]