Twin Cities native Tommy Nehls was talking on the phone from Ft. Lauderdale, where he has been living since 1986. Nehls sounded alternately incredulous and bemused that an obscure record he made with a bunch of high school pals had become a hot (and pricey) commodity among a small but international community of vinyl fetishists (as well as garnering playtime on such eclectic public-radio bastions as New York’s WFMU). “The music on that record is thirty-four years old,” Nehls said. “When people first started tracking me down to ask about it I always thought they were friends trying to pull something over on me.”
In 1973, when Nehls’ self-released I Always Catch the Third Second of a Yellow Light, he was a junior at Southwest High School and had been working at a Southdale record store, absorbing the music of the period and squirreling away money to make his first record.
“I was a very serious student and a jock early on,” Nehls said, “but from the time I saw the Beatles at Met Stadium I realized that making music was something I wanted to do, and I’d been playing in bands since I was in seventh grade.”
Nehls’ debut is a dense and ambitious record, even by the trippy compositional and production standards of the time. And he either had incredible good fortune or a real knack for assembling prodigally talented musicians from among his school chums. Either way, the lineup he took into the studio to record Third Second (which was released under the name Tom Nehls) featured a cast of characters that would later make their mark on the Twin Cities music scene and beyond. The engineer for the project (and owner of the studio) was Paul Stark, who would later co-found Twin/Tone Records, the label that would help launch the careers of the Replacements, the Suburbs, Soul Asylum, Ween, and the Jayhawks. Among the credited players were future members of the Wolverines Classic Jazz Orchestra, and Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos. Dorothy Benham, a classmate of Nehls’ who was crowned Miss America in 1977, provided a spooky and ethereal vocal on the apocalyptic “Clean Air” (“The black ash rain that obstructs the sun/has eased those people’s pain/You know they’re relieved from their pressure, they could only think of work”).
Other song titles on Third Second include “No People in the Forest,” “The Underwater Symphony Dream,” and “Your Death.” The instrumentation ranged from the standard guitars, bass, and drums to bells, synthesizer, organ, flute, saxophones, and banjo, augmented with all sorts of period-era studio effects like tape loops, loads of echo, and backwards piano. The insert included with the original album gave a pretty good idea of where Nehls’ head was at in 1973: Among the record’s dedicatees were the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and J.R.R. Tolkien.
“We were just a bunch of kids bouncing off the walls,” Nehls said. “I think the music was a soup that resulted from a lot of good influences and the dynamics of that time and place. This was probably one of the first records Paul Stark worked on, and he turned out to be the perfect person; he was totally patient and supportive of what we were trying to do.”
These sorts of rediscoveries are increasingly common in an era marked by obsessive completism and the fevered research of legions of Internet musicologists engaged in a sort of perpetual game of obscurity one-upmanship. Still, that Nehls’ record would find an appreciative (and covetous) audience decades after it originally appeared is particularly strange given that by his own reckoning very few copies of the original vinyl ever made it into circulation. “I didn’t sell very many of them, I can tell you that,” Nehls said. “I sold some to friends, and the record was played by Howard Viken on WCCO one morning. Most of them ended up in my sister’s basement in Chicago, and I lost a bunch of those to flooding. By the time we were finished recording the thing I knew I was going off to college and I was just happy to have done it. It was like a high school project, really, and I didn’t really think about it for probably thirty years, until I started getting these random calls.”
One of those random calls was from Mark Trehus, longtime Minneapolis record collector and owner of Treehouse Records.
“A number of years ago a copy of the record came into the store,” Trehus said. “I’d never heard of it, but it looked interesting, and after I listened to it a few times I was intrigued. I’m always looking for records that are kind of odd and are of a particular time and place, and this one definitely fit that bill. It had a sort of late-night psychedelic bedroom vibe to it. I did a little poking around and learned that it was something that a few other people in psychedelic-record-collecting circles had heard about, so I went about trying to track down Nehls and found him alive and well in Florida.”
Nehls, it turned out, had been not only alive and well, but steadily making music since the day he left the Twin Cities. He’d gone off to River Falls for college, and then one night while he was home for the summer, he remembers, he played Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony with a pops orchestra at the Lake Harriet band shell. By the next day, he said, he had “driven back to River Falls, packed up my stuff, picked up a pedal-steel player who had gigged with Mel Tillis, and headed west.” A couple of nights later he was sitting in with a band in a Reno lounge, playing “acid Spike Jones-style Dixieland.” Nehls credits Don Stoyke, his old music teacher at Southwest, for instilling in him an appreciation for diversity and versatility. “He really drilled it into us that if we wanted to make a go of this we had to learn to play as many different styles as possible.”
He turned thirty in Reno, after years of traveling and playing a little bit of everything in casinos and clubs on the Reno-Tahoe-Vegas circuit. The eventual move to Florida, Nehls said, was the result of a combination of burnout and opportunity. “I’d spent a long time on the road, and it was getting to be tiring,” he said. “I’ve been writing music every day since 1970—I have over two hundred songs in my BMI catalog—but I really wanted to be able to concentrate on doing my own stuff.”
Fort Lauderdale has been good to Nehls; he stays busy gigging around the area, has written and recorded music for Disney and the Florida Marlins, and has also released a batch of discs featuring his own compositions. He now has ten CDs available on his website (tommynehls.com), including a reissue of I Always Catch the Third Second of a Yellow Light, which he remastered himself from the archived master tapes he recovered from Stark a few years ago. The record has also allegedly been remixed by indie/experimental/improv pooh-bah Jim O’Rourke (producer-in-demand and a former member of Gastr Del Sol, Red Krayola, and Sonic Youth), even though that rumored version has yet to surface.
Nehls’ recent music is a serious departure from the lysergic flights of his debut—he is, after all, fifty-one now. The discs have titles like Beachy Keen and Palm Tree Way, and a Caribbean-inflected smooth-jazz feel with occasional forays into New Age; most of the recordings wouldn’t sound at all out of place on any urban lite-FM station. “I basically do everything myself,” Nehls said. “But I like to hire a very good soloist to add the icing to the cake. There’s a lot of amazing talent down here.”
When Third Second popped up on the radar after all those years, he hadn’t listened to the record in decades. “There were these people finding me,” Nehls said. “People from Japan, a guy from England, another guy from Spain, Mark Trehus in Minneapolis. It was weird. I guess people were learning about it through word of mouth. I sold a couple batches of the records from my sister’s basement to Trehus, and then a couple years ago I typed the album title into Google and was surprised to see these hits from all over the vinyl-collecting community.”
After Nehls got the master tapes back from Stark he finally pulled on some headphones and sat down to listen to his old creation with fresh ears. “Initially I had a hard time hearing it outside of the context of everything I’ve done since then,” he said. “I mean, I was pretty naïve at that time, and I was just trying to be sincere. But overall I’d have to say I was pleasantly surprised. There were all sorts of things on there I’d forgotten about, all these Sgt. Pepper and Hey Jude references. The notion that people can get excited about something I did is always such a pleasure, but I guess the only thing that really bothered me about the record thirty years later is that I had just gotten a wah-wah pedal at the time, and I definitely over-used it.”
