“That title cut, Pimps & Preachers, some folks might think there is just a catchy phrase I came up with,” said Thorn, who plays Brixton Friday night, in an interview this week. “But it actually has real meaning in my life because my father was a Pentecostal preacher and his brother was a pimp and those two guys were my mentors when I was a kid growing up. So a lot of the way I look at the world was molded by them.”
Thorn is from Tupelo, Mississippi, home of Elvis Presley, and like Elvis, he spent his formative years both in black gospel and countrified white gospel churches. He was performing on the pulpit, tambourine in hand, by the age of 3, and started playing guitar at 12 – at the very same time his uncle, presumed dead, reappeared after a decade that had included stints a boxer, a pimp, and a stay in San Quentin.
“I lived in a small world where all I knew was the church and when my uncle came into my life he had traveled abroad and seen the broader world and he exposed me to things I never knew existed,” Thorn said. “It really helped me in life, a lot, and prepared me for going out into the broader world myself, which I inevitably did.”
Thorn likes to say there are many seasons in a life. He’s living proof.
Prior to becoming a fulltime musician somewhat later in life – he is 46 now and scored a major label record deal 13 years ago – he worked at a furniture factory and at one point became the ninth ranked middleweight prizefighter in the United States. The highlight of his boxing career – his uncle served as his trainer – came when he fought the great Roberto Duran. He lost in a sixth round TKO in an extremely bloody bout in Atlantic City in which the New York Post reported the scrappy kid from Tupelo won over the crowd and outfought the former champion.
“Paul Thorn had a rip in his forehead and his lip looked like it came out on the losing end with a street encounter with a stiletto,” the paper reported. “Duran…had a flesh wound in his scalp, a bullet hole sized cut on his left eyelid, and a bazooka hole in his reputation.”
For Thorn, boxing, like his music, was about more than the numbers or the fame.
“Man, I‘ve got a picture in my house of me and Duran fighting in the ring,” Thorn said. “I just look at it and it gives me a good feeling. Even though I was defeated, I won…It’s just another wonderful season in my life I can look back on.”
Thorn has co-written songs with his writing partner Billy Maddux since he was 17 years old, and he has produced a body of work that presents a bedraggled but oddly beautiful cast of characters who are likewise bloodied but unbowed. He may not have followed his father’s footsteps to the pulpit, but there is a deep gospel moral to many of these tales, a blend of Jesus and Hank Williams.
As he sings on “I Hope I’m Doing This Right”: “Most of my friends are from the wrong side of the track/Here’s why I do not have a problem with that/Hank Williams was in the darkness when he sang I saw the light/I believe there is good in everyone/I hope I am doing this right…”
The music has a Lowell George-era Little Feat groove (and slide), a little bit of Steve Earle growl, and a whole lot of Eddie Hinton gravel-voiced soul. But the revelation regarding Thorn is that there really aren’t adequate reference points: he’s strangely familiar but authentically original.
One of the truths he is here to deliver is about his hometown. John Lee Hooker famously sang about a great flood in Tupelo, while Van Morrison sang about Tupelo Honey. Neither existed; the flood was a tornado, and Tupelo has no honey.
“I guess God put me on Earth to straighten this mess out,” Thorn said. “Tupelo doesn’t have honey, but you can go to just about any Piggly Wiggly and get a can of Spam, fry it up, get it brown on both sides, and put it between two slices of white bread with some Miracle Whip and watch your favorite Tivo’d cartoons and you are in heaven.”
Thorn is also known as a riveting live performer.
“One of the advantages I have of being schooled by a pimp and preacher is I have a certain set of social skills,” he said. “Because a pimp and a preacher have a lot in common, actually – they both have the same wardrobe, they both promise you heaven while they dangle you over hell…and they both have the ability to talk to people. I benefited from learning from them some of them skills about how to just happily coexist with people.”
He also has a message of wrath for those who might not be able to make his show.
“Be sure to tell in this article somewhere if people read this and don’t come to the show, my Daddy told me to tell them they are going to hell,” Thorn said. “I am not telling you what to do, but that is what he said. All I can do is try to obey his will.”
For more info and free song downloads see www.paulthorn.com. For tickets, see brixtonsouthbay.com
