Thommy Knox (left) and Moses Walker constitute the earnest-yet-comic musical duo the Clam Daddys. I play with them professionally.

If you wish to skip over my prose about these veteran blues/swing/jazz popular stars of Colorado Front Range, these bearded zen bonzes, you can go straight to the videos.

I meets the Clam Daddys

About 12 years ago, I walked into a bar and there were these two crazy cats with unbelievable beards, one sitting and playing guitar and singing in a gravelly yet perfectly modulated voice, the other hopping around the stage like a snake dancer, playing harmonica and singing like ... like I don't know what.

I got up on stage and spelled the bass player and so began my long relationship with Mo and Thommy as one of their many bass players, though the only one who consistently plays upright bass backing up their engaging and tuneful foolishness.

"You Clam Daddys are fabulous"

Wish I had a dollar for every conversation I've had that starts off like that. Dig it:

We're in the desert in Utah playing an outdoor festival  in the little mining town of Helper and the town Goths show up on the scene, maybe the oldest is 22 years, all in black with the collar studs on. Suddenly the rail-thin young lady with the purple lips shouts, "It's the Clam Daddys! I saw them in Denver!" and they're all over us with hugs.

Octagenarians get up and dance when we play.  Little kids get up and  dance when we play. Teens and twenty-somethings crowd around us to get a better look and listen. The Clam Daddys have the universal demographic. The Clam Daddys are, in this day of counterfeit novelty and carefully planned celebrity, the one thing so many other acts are not: truly entertaining.

People Like Us

The Clam Daddys recently released their first studio CD, titled People LIke Us.

The covers range from Harold Arlen's "It's only a Paper Moon"  to tunes by Tom Waits, Lyle Lovett, Delbert McClinton, John Prine and Martin Mull, who was gracious enough to phone us (he doesn't do email) and tell us he was tickled that we are playing his material.

There are four orignals, two by Moses and two by Thommy. While all the tunes are inimitable, in my opinion,  the whole CD is worth it just to hear Thommy Knox sing his tune "Hollywood Dream" ...

... Voted for a politician / Said he'd save this land / Got myself an email / Said he took all the money and ran / Things ain't what they seem / Stop livin' in a Hollywood Dream ... (© 2010 Thommy Knox)

I produced People Like Us ... with great difficulty. The difficulty was not in the recording: we had 14 tunes in the can in under three hours. It's that these seemingly slack dudes are in reality perfectionists, masters of a minimalist style forged not from theory, but from playing 7 to 12 gigs per week for 14 years with hundreds, literally hundreds, of other strummers, singers, and sololists in every place from major concert halls to notorious dives and cinderblock clubhouses to block parties to pig roasts. Mixing and mastering took about eight months.

My stoic wife, who offers no personal opinions ever, after listening to the  Clam Daddys for 10 years, one day said to me, "The thing about the Clam Daddys is that they don't sound like anyone else."

From Whence Sprang the Clam Daddys?

For the answer to that, please read Denver-area music journalist Chrissy Marie Hammett's article Moses Walker: The Man behind the Bearded Clam.

Clam Daddys Fan Videos

Here's an animated short film by S.H. Johnson, wherein the Clam Daddys are seen stop motion at a yard party. A Wayside Films Production.