Pop Hinks

s. I guess I am some kind of field project or dissertation thang. Which I will never understand, having essentially written but one blues song in my life, and that being more about the blues than a blues itself. But now I have a plaque at BLI, I am told, in the “Blues Theory” wing. Me: Do the Marmode boys play on the track? Pop Hinks: Indeed they do. Colin plays the lead guitar and Cody is playing the organ. That’s Othello Washngston on bass Linda Cyzmanski on drums. Me: So Tom Marmode himself did not play on it? Pop Hinks: No, no. Even in semi-retirement, Tom is a very busy man with the Umericon Group. And to be perfectly honest, Tom never cared much for the song, even less for the fact that his own sons are so smitten with it. He perceived—correctly—that the lyrics contained some pointed jabs at his own blues purities and pieties. But Tom is a complicated figure. By day, VP of finance for a corporation so major that you never even heard of them, but they have holdings and interests globally. And you’ve heard of literally dozens of their brands, but their brands might actually be things like “grief,” or “earthquakes,” or the “1950s.” Things you can’t own, but they do. “Buy the sky, sell the sky.” Talk about your great white bluesmen. Michael Stipe was co-rrect. So anyway, Tom Marmode was doing the white collar by day, and by night he was doing what I now regard as a middling Josh White impersonation, trying to “rub the white out” a bit. Me: Tom’s pretty highly regarded in the rural blues revivalist community and especially among affionados of bottleneck. Pop Hinks: And rightly so. The man’s got skills. One of these days, those uptight f**kwads at the Southwestern Connecticut Blues Advancement League are going to give him that “minor treasure” designation they keep teasing him with and end this whole Susan Lucci melodrama. Me: Where does the name “Althius” com from? Pop Hinks: I was named for my great-grandfather, Althius Bigelow, who was named for a Roman general, Althius of Turni, who abandoned his troops at the Battle of Lyon, and was killed by a boar. Me: Does this remake of “The One Four Five” signal a return to performance for you? Pop Hinks: God no. It is a just a bit of my past that inexplicably comes unsettled every couple of years. It’s all because of that college radio novelty show I appeared on. They were playing “The One Four Five” and they invited me to do a live performance. Spirits were high, and I did a kind of rambling, talking-blues improvisation and that got circulated under the name “Preamble to the Blues,” and the rest is very, very minor history. It used to p**s me off, but now I am amused. My girls think it’s funny, so I go with the flow. Me: Thanks for the time. Pop Hinks: Thanks for the love.