Tony Thomas

My musical background is quite diverse. As a youth, I played french horn in school and prim in a Serbo-Croation youth orchestra. The prim is a (soprano) stringed instrument, similar to a mandolin, and this experience with a stringed instrument led to playing lead guitar in quite a few garage-band jam sessions during my teenage years. Although this was great fun, none of these bands ever amounted to much and I gave up playing all instruments for several years.

During college I began studying jazz guitar. After a year of study, joined my college jazz band. This led to six years of serious jazz gigging during graduate school with the Roger Priest Group, Wabash Blues (a killer jazz quintet), and the Purdue University Big Band, which played a show at the Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival. My main influences during this period were Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell, Tal Farlow, and Red Garland.

Shortly arriving at UW-Platteville, I hooked up with an extraordinary sax, clarinet, and flute player named Rollie Anfinson. Rollie and I formed the jazz duo Satin Jazz and gigged for several years. We then added a vocalist,Sheila Cottrall, and continue to gig for several more years. Rollie died late in 2000, but Rollie, Sheila and I had recorded 20-plus songs at Heartland Studios during fall 2000, so the music of Satin Jazz still lives.

After Rollie's death, I began to look for a new musical avenue. What I wanted was to form a group heavily influenced by jazz-infused rock, like Steely Dan, and power pop groups, like Dada. While looking around the area, I heard the Kjelland/Ranney duo, the original Fallen Roadies, at several open-mike performances. Erik's vocal ability immediately stood out as I listened, and I had jammed with Art on several occasions, and I knew him to be an excellent musician.

The final component in my decision to seek out the possibility of joining the Roadies was the impressive songwriting that they had done during summer 2000. After my audition, Erik, Art, and I agreed that I would join the band and that we would look for a drummer. After several dead-end roads (Roadies?, pun intended), we invited Mike Steckling to join us.

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