ABOUT
Despite his chiming guitars, soaring pop hooks, and songs evoking the grandeur of sinfully great also-rans like Big Star and Dwight Twilley, Alabama music legend Don Tinsley has seemingly been destined to be a phantom, his body of work twisting noiselessly down the street like a wind-blown newspaper, to be a forgotten voice once the last person is gone who ever heard him play. Thankfully however, there is work being done to avert such a fate – in the form of a retrospective album due to help the world at long last discover one of Alabama’s preeminently gifted musicians and songwriters.
A veteran of fifty bands since his teen years in the 1960s, including the well-regarded Dogwood, The Mortals and The Primitons, Tinsley grew up in a musical Montevallo family. “My grandfather and his brother and sister-in-law played in a jazz orchestra in the ‘30s and were still kicking when I was a kid,” he says, “my uncle played, composed, and arranged jazz, and my aunt played country bass. She had a ‘63 Fender Jazz bass and my granddad said if I want to be a musician, learn to play bass like Martha Jane.” So, he did, and came to be playing on jingle sessions at a precocious age and playing in his first band at 14.
Over time, it was not just his bass-playing that came to be held in high esteem. His songwriting skills, along with his big ears in the studio, his gift for arranging and his laid-back disposition, made him a hot commodity. Like most bands in Alabama, his groups played covers and slipped in the odd original when they thought they could get away with it. Over the years, in various acts and guises, Tinsley opened for an amazing cavalcade of artists over the years, including Lou Reed, R.E.M., The Commodores, Suzanne Vega, Warren Zevon, Bonnie Raitt, Dion, John Prine, Chuck Berry, The Band, Mitch Ryder, Flo & Eddie, Bo Diddley, Dizzy Gillespie?… the mind boggles.
“I quit for probably 5 years in the mid-70s,” Tinsley remembers, “I finished college and finished grad school, started with history, moved over to philosophy, and then ended up in art. I realized from all the chemicals I was using from ceramics, and the lead from stained glass, that I didn’t want to teach, and I was much too lazy to be a potter. So, I knocked around for a season in Denver with some people from Alabama, and I came back here and knew what I wanted to put together.” From there came his band The Mortals and then after that The Primitons, both of whom grew loyal followings and were said to be destined for big things that didn’t happen.
So it went that way for more years, many more, and led up to now, with Don Tinsley, 70 years young, in his easy chair in Montevallo next to his wife, a retired geologist, with half a century of musicmaking and mirth and ups and downs to look back on, and a closet full of recordings that have never seen the light of day… Enter Travis Morgan from Birmingham, proprietor of Skybucket Records.
“In 2006,” Morgan says, “I was invited to help put together a two-CD sampler of Birmingham music. And somebody introduced me to Don in this process. He’d made a cd with 22 songs on it, and we ended up using a couple of those songs on the sampler. But we didn’t use any songs from Dogwood or The Mortals or anything from that period of Don’s career. In fact, I didn’t really understand what he gave me, and how it would come back into my life years later when I was going through a closet in 2018 and found that CD.” Sometimes it takes a fresh listen after a while, and such it was when Morgan fatefully put the disc in a player 12 years after getting it and found himself being blown away by track after track.
“I contacted Don and asked to hear some more music. He’d send me mp3s and eventually after he’d sent me 60 more songs I said, ‘wait a minute, how many songs do you have, exactly?’ And he said, ‘more than 100 and less than 500.’ I was dumbfounded by the quality of much of the material and how I didn't pick up on it back in 2006. To be honest, I think Don left off some of his best material on the CD he burned. And after hearing 60 tracks in a few months. That is when it really sunk into me how amazing Don Tinsley was and that he was this incredible and criminally unknown musician and songwriter.”
Morgan got to work. “By necessity, over the last year I’ve become an amateur researcher and music archeologist. I just fell head over heels for him as a musician and a songwriter, and as a person. He’s a very kind individual. And I felt like I was called to help tell his story in the form of getting his music out there in a way that people who really love music enough to look for this would care.”…My goal is for Don’s music to be released and promoted internationally and help give his music the a second chance,” he says,
The album is garnered from the massive trove Tinsley has been sitting on going back decades. Definite placeholders include the delightful jangly “Love Goes to Your Head”. “Tell Me Why” is a 70s-ish slab of FM pop that would have fit on the charts back then in the ‘70s. There are the arpeggiated ringing guitars and urgency of “Forces Beyond Control” which recalls early Tom Petty in its between-the-eyes intensity, and then there’s the downshift into a mellow acoustic guitar valley of “Minnesota Turnpike” with its expansive harmonies that one might say harkens back to Neil Young’s “Harvest” if not for the fact that it was contemporaneously conceived. Then there’s “She Don’t Remember” which is practically new wave, as angular and leering as anything off the first Cars album.
Morgan has a plan for Tinsley. “I’ll be drawing from a massive amount of amazing visuals and audio to make a compelling argument for why listeners should pay attention to this man and his music ,” he says.
As for Tinsley’s role in things, “I haven’t played live in three years now,” he says, “my idea of a vacation is to shut the front door. So, I just shut the front door and have been writing, and thanks to Travis, scouring the house and the sheds at my folks’ place for vhs tapes of some of my bands playing, and I have a thousand cassettes and nothing’s written on any of them, pieces of music and stuff. I’m finding almost as many half-started songs as I have finished songs.”
Just because the one-nighters are not presently on his dance card doesn’t mean he’s shut the door on the idea of performing completely. And those songs may yet be finished. “The best song I’ve ever written is whatever song I’m working on at present, you know how that is. And a little success in later life would be fine with me, as long as I don’t have to lug too many amps or drive too far!” He’s earned that much, and then some.