Where's Tommy (1990)
Led by guitarist Tom Mitchell, Sound of My Own Voice (SOMOV) formed in 1988 and released three hard-to-find cassettes and a single before breaking up sometime around 1990. The single, "Where's Tommy," occasionally turns up around New York and is a fine example of the sort of Feelies/REM inspired college rock of the day. However, the band's repertoire was far deeper than that as evidenced from cassettes such as Greatest Hits, March, and Lunch with Duncan.
Jim Gibson, who runs the aptly named Noiseville Records, discovered the band when vocalist Jamie Trecker sent him a tape and released 1,000 copies of their sole single. The tapes had sold fairly well in Syracause, and Gibson had plans to release a full-length album, but the band broke up and the album never materialized.
According to Trecker, the band broke up for "lots of reasons. The thing is, I think we felt like not many people really got SOMOV, and we were kind of sick of playing to small crowds and slaving away in our rooms and attic on stuff. Syracuse was really into hair metal then, and it was tough to find bills to play on because of that. We didn't do covers, and you know, we were kinda weird. The irony was when we disbanded, all of sudden, people were into us."
SOMOV recently played a sold-out reunion show in Syracuse and are playing another show on October 14th in Chicago. They are also finally releasing that lost lp on Noiseville. Check SOMOV's Facebook page here for much more info...
2 comments:
Hi Mark,
Sorry to get into a belated correction about insignificant facts here, but I was Googling my old band today while looking for examples of other people besides us and Phil Ochs to use the album title “Greatest Hits” in jest when I came across your post which prompted me to address a couple of its misleading inaccuracies and omissions. Although Jamie Trecker was indeed the lead singer and wrote more than half of our lyrics when we were playing out back in the 80s, he did not play guitar with SOMOV until I taught him a few of our songs for our mini reunion tour in 2010. I was the sole guitarist in those days, considered myself a leader at least in terms of the music as I wrote all of it on guitar (except for a bass riff from “50 Girls 50” by our bassist Sue Pieschalski and Jamie did hum how he wanted the basic intro of a song called “Robert Culp” to go). Also, if you’re referencing our one “single” Where’s Tommy /Valerie Dear, both of those compositions were both musically and lyrically completely my work. I realize it’s silly to care enough to inform you of this and be all possessive and credit hungry, but when a group is your baby and a strong majority of its creative content conceived of by your own hand, sometimes you’d like to be acknowledged as the true father a little bit…even if it is a dead baby.
Apart from that the rest of your article seems to be right on, though probably the publicity and the reality disconnect from within contributed to our demise as well.
Thanks for listening!
Tom Mitchell
This is gorgeous!
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