Tom Heyman – “Baby Let Me In” (video) (premiere)

Known mostly as an august sidekick to many modern Americana greats,
Tom Heyman started playing to the beat of his own blues-infused rock tunes since the late 1980s when he hit the scene with his band, Go to Blazes.

Since then, he’s gone on to release a number of solo efforts in between playing along with the likes of Chuck Prophet, Alejandro Escovedo, and Hiss Golden Messenger. His latest full-length solo effort was released just last month. Like his latest music video featuring a tune from off of the record would attest,
Show Business, Baby is all about leaning back into the pocket of ’70s and ’80s pub rock and letting Heyman take it for a spin.

On the video, Heyman says: “‘Baby Let Me In’ was the first song recorded for
Show Business, Baby. We cut it in the big room, Studio A at the venerable Hyde St Studios in SF. The riff is so knuckle-headed and fun to play that the song practically plays itself, so we got a good take really quickly. After listening to the playback, the engineer Chris von Sneidern (currently the bassist in the Flamin’ Groovies) suggested a static piano part like the one in Iggy’s ‘Raw Power’. Studio A has an absolutely beautiful Yamaha concert grand that, believe it or not, used to belong to Frank Sinatra, so I hammered out the ‘two finger genius’ part for 3:22. Happy to say that I was a real ‘one take Jake’ on that.”

“The video director Steve Hanft and I go back almost 25 years to when he used a couple of Go to Blazes (a band I had in the ’90s) songs in his film
Kill the Moonlight. He did a video for my last record, and he was really fun, and loose, and has a way of making you feel unselfconscious when you are walking around in public making an idiot of yourself. He has been making films and videos for a pretty long time and is one of the least jaded people I know. He is really fast, and his work is really kinetic and connected to the music.

“I wanted to make a performance-based video, so we shot that part in the Make Out Room, the bar where I work San Francisco when I am not out being ‘bad and nationwide’.

“I thought it would be funny, and not that far off the mark to show the band really rocking out, and then pan back to a mostly empty bar, with just one drunken patron, and an extremely bored bartender. The bartender is played by my wife Deirdre White, and the drunk was played by my brother in law Pat Ryan. I had to call in a couple of favors to get them into a bar that early in the morning.”