As Ural Thomas freely admits, he is not a man overburdened with ambition. “I’m not trying to compete with anyone, or trying to be better,” he shrugs, on a video call from his home town of Portland, Oregon. “If I found someone that wanted to play music with me, that was my purpose – I wanted to play with him, not compete with the guy. I don’t want that competing. That’s not music to me no more, I’m doing something that’s not pleasing to my soul.”
Perhaps, he concedes, that’s why he never really made it as a singer in the 1960s, despite an extraordinary career that took in encounters with everyone from celebrated garage band the Kingsmen – of Louie Louie fame – to Otis Redding, Quincy Jones and James Brown. “I met a lot of people who showed me the business side of it, and what you had to be and what you really had to have to get to the top. I said, well, I don’t really want to fight with nobody. My best shot is to just live and be what I am, and people can make their own judgments.”
It wasn’t an approach that led to fame, but it did ultimately lead to an extraordinary second act in his career. At 82, Thomas unexpectedly finds himself fronting an acclaimed band, the Pain. Their third album, Dancing Dimensions, has just been released by Bella Union to widespread delight. The first Pain release to consist of entirely new songs rather than material than drew on Thomas’s 60s catalogue, it’s spacey, psychedelic and utterly fantastic, making perfect use of the singer’s remarkably preserved old-school soul voice without feeling in any way like a forensic re-creation of the past: it’s very much an album made in the 21st century. They’re about to tour Europe. He describes it as “a wonderful surprise”, which seems fair enough: after all, it’s over half a century since he quit being a professional musician and returned to Portland, working as a repairman in the shipyards while singing in clubs at weekends and hosting a regular jam session at his home on Sunday nights.
It was the jam sessions that inadvertently reactivated his career, when local drummer Scott Magee turned up one Sunday in 2013. He had served time with a variety of local alt-rock acts – among them Laura Veirs – but his real passion was rhythm and blues: he’d played Thomas’s scorching 1967 single Pain Is the Name of Your Game at his monthly soul night. “I was in a local record store, complaining that I wasn’t born in the 40s so I could have been a drummer in the 60s,” Magee says. “Like, every band I’m in now is some twee chamber pop thing, no one’s dancing. And the guy who worked in the store, Eric, says: ‘Well, there’s one way you could actually make that dream come true – Ural’s still around.’” Eric told Thomas that Magee would be stopping by at his jam session, and when Magee arrived, “15 people looked at me, then the drummer just stood up and handed the sticks to me. I was like: ‘Well, this is awkward.’”
Nevertheless, he called Thomas the following week, suggesting they form a band. No, he laughs, it wasn’t difficult to recruit other musicians. “I put out a post on Facebook with a link to Pain Is the Name of Your Game, and the thread was just hundreds long, like ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ They knew it was a rare opportunity – there’s nobody like Ural anywhere in Portland.”
Certainly, Thomas is one of the last survivors from a distant musical past: his early career hugs the contours of African American music as it shifted and changed through the 50s and 60s. He grew up in a gospel church – his father was “a musical preacher” – and started out in a doo-wop band, before the Monterays, who cut a 1964 single featuring the thrillingly raw R&B of Push Em Up and became a local attraction around Portland. Not for the last time, Thomas’s unassuming approach to music proved a problem. “Everybody was signing up for battle of the bands competitions, and I wouldn’t sign up: ‘No, I don’t want to do that man, I just want to make music.’ All the other guys in the Monterays became superstars in their own minds, but I didn’t want to be a superstar, so I let them go.”
Instead, he sat in with a host of bands from the burgeoning Pacific Northwest garage rock scene including the Kingsmen and Paul Revere and the Raiders – “all the bands wanted Ural to sing with them because he was the best in the area, and a hell of a guy,” notes Magee, “if you see old photos of him, he’s got a vibe like: that’s the guy to hang out with” – before relocating to LA. He got a deal with Uni Records, and recorded a live album and two singles with Gene Page, the genius arranger responsible for both the strings on the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ and Barry White’s 70s hits, but neither Pain Is the Name of Your Game or Can You Dig It? hit. He toured continually, sometimes with big names such as Quincy Jones, other times at venues so small “we had to do some gigs with no microphones and stuff. That’s when I started getting really strong through my lungs and oesophagus and my diaphragm.”
But constant gigging also brought him into contact with a darker side of the music business. “When I first went to Canada, a band called the Blazers had invited us up there. I had to get away from them, because they were always in the back room with that long spike and that was not my glory.”
He eventually fetched up in New York, playing 44 shows at the Apollo in Harlem. He talks enthusiastically about performing there – “you know how when you’re just at a moment of excitement, when you’re turning flips and don’t even know it? I used to do all that kind of stuff, doing the real splits, that never hurt me” – but seems to have been as horrified as ever by the rivalry between musicians. Otis Redding and James Brown were “bitter enemies” and furthermore, the former didn’t like the enthusiastic reaction Thomas’s opening set got when they played together. Eventually, he quietly returned to Portland, a day job and his jam sessions.
That would have been that had it not been for Magee’s belated intervention. Sitting side by side, the warmth between them virtually seeps from my laptop screen. “It’s a blessing for someone to come in and just really want to play music,” smiles Thomas. “That’s what I like about him. I wouldn’t push and try to do what I want to and he didn’t push me.”
Magee nods. “I always knew if people saw Ural they would just be completely blown away. I’ve never doubted the ability for Ural to be incredible on stage in a way you don’t see very often. I’m now just hoping now things grow more without it taxing the band or Ural too much. I don’t want it to be this thing where he’s like, ‘Man, I got with Scotty 10 years ago and now I’m in too deep, there’s all these demands being made, it’s too intense.’”
That seems a sensible course of action, given Thomas’s past willingness to simply walk away from any musical situation he didn’t like. “But if it’s the right things,” says Magee, “we’ll do it, because we want to make Ural known, we want him to leave his legacy.”
• Dancing Dimensions is out now on Bella Union.
