I fronted a swing band in Montana, the “Live Wire Choir,” that toured the West from Big Sur on Monterey Bay up to Likely, British Columbia. As a solo I’ve played to rowdy crowds from Sloppy Joe’s in Key West and the Starboard in Dewey Beach. I went to the Knoxville World’s Fair as Delaware’s “exhibit,” courtesy of the newly-formed Tourism Bureau, for whom I penned “Small Wonder,” about Delaware.
PRESS by Gary Mullinax of the News-Journal
Here's the way Jerry "Crabmeat" Thompson's mind works south of that boldly
bald dome and somewhat north of the devilish goatee.
The singer-songwriter is invited to perform at this summer's annual Delmarva Chicken Festival. He wants to write a song for the occasion.
He gets to thinking about chickens, which leads him not to eggs or drumsticks but to the Guatemalan truck drivers who will deliver poultry to the event in Millsboro.
"I think I've realized one of my life's goals," he said happily. "I was able to put 'Chichicastenango' in a song." (more of this in the “Press” section)
That's the Guatemalan town many of the truck drivers come from. "I put the whole word in there," he pointed out. Chickens themselves do have a role in the song. "They fall off the truck and have a romance," Thompson said.
He is known to most of his fans simply as Crabmeat. He says he got the name as a teenager when he was designated by his friends to toss three paper bags filled with scraps from a seafood meal into a roadside dumpster in Dewey Beach.
The waterlogged paper gave way, "coating me with the juice of many pounds of seafood and beer." With only one set of clothes for the weekend, "I toughed it out, to the jeers of my peers, who stuck me with the handle 'Crabmeat.' "
He has been setting his funny, clever lyrics to his good-time, folk-country-rock music since the early 1970s. He has opened for the likes of John Sebastian, Steve Forbert and Norman Blake.
He has performed lately in his native Delaware. He got it going, though, when he lived in San Francisco in the early 1970s. There, he hung out at the boho City Lights bookstore, opened for cranky post-Beat poet Charles Bukowski at a reading, gave a party where he did a juggling act with two other jugglers on his shoulders and learned some of the mysteries of life from a San Francisco State University professor he refers to simply as "Wong."
"We drank some of Bukowski's Heinekens backstage," Thompson said of his brush with the man who eventually became one of the most popular poets in America. "He had a contract that they had to have Heineken for him in a case of ice. I didn't talk to him. He would have said, 'Get the heck out of the way. Where are the women and booze?' "
Thompson has lived mostly in Delaware the past two decades. He also performs in other states, including Florida, where he lived for a few years in the 1980s.
He keeps going back to Florida to perform songs that remind audiences of another good-time singer with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts - even if he sometimes wishes they didn't. "I played in Florida twice last year and nobody requested any Jimmy Buffett songs," he said. "I think I've turned a corner."
He recently was a guest on a radio gardening show in Birmingham, Ala., where his version of "One Ton Tomato" is played between segments. "They want to get me down there for Tomato Day at the state fair. I told them my bags were packed."
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"So why do zay call you Crabmeat? Why zees fish nickname?" Crustacean, I thought—for Christ's sake. Babette's liquid brown eyes ,searched my face like tiny halogen lamps. She was standing below me, in shadow—I wondered if she could see up my nose.
I sighed, and took her dear, heart-shaped face in my hands. Her lips moued in a pout. "You do not trus' me weez zees secret," her eyes brimmed with tears, beaver dams of disappointment. Besides being nosy she had allergies. Sometimes I couldn't stand her; why did I stay with her? Maybe it was her tits…
Could be. It had been raining when we met. Car wheels shushed along the boulevard in the crepuscular light, and passersby hunched against the deluge with their hands in their pockets or clutched umbrellas.
So what? Now, as she snuffed, I brushed an errant lock of chestnut hair back from her forehead. She had a mole under her chin. Odd place for a pet.
"Look, Cheri, it's a good nom de guerre, because, well, people remember it. And crabs are a favorite delicacy in these parts." I was warming up to this,
"You see, mon bien, it creates a whole Persona to hide my shy self behind. The word "persona," in fact, comes from the ancient Greek stage, where actors wore big masks with built-in megaphones, so that they spoke through (per) a ‘sonic enhancer' while hiding, behind their masque. Thus they were louder, and they could disguise their timid, everyday souls and become Zeus or Antigone. And. not being recognized, they could take out the garbage or go shopping without getting mobbed."
Babs still looked puzzled. "So zee Crabmeat eez a…a stage name so zat people weel remambair eet; and you can take out zee garbage? And you jus, jus, "she shrugged and tossed her hands, "med eet opp out of meed err?"
"What?"
I took her hands and gently pushed her down onto the settee. '"This is going to take a little time. Trust me."
Well that's the way it USED to be, maybe, but hey, I have been playing music and expounding my unique and pungent philosophy for eons. That estimable position as a bellwether and role model, plus the obvious ravages of time and a burning desire to make some sense of my life (coupled with a burning sensation in my bladder), makes me feel I should finally let the truth be known. So here it can finally be revealed:
WHY THEY CALL ME CRABMEAT
I was always a difficult child.
When my father got home from the war I was two, and he marched into the house and picked me up and I cried. He cut off his moustache, and took off his uniform, but every time he touched me I would bawl.During my first two years I had been around only women and the mailman Mr. Ralph, who was in uniform. It was 1946, and all over the U.S. fathers were coming home, scaring their kids, who thought they were mailmen.
We lived in Ardmore, PA, outside Philadelphia, and my father often went on the road selling dynamite to the miners up in Tamagua or Allentown. Then I was once again the little man of the house, which my mother and sister filled with their sweet singing as they rustled in the kitchen. I played in the basement a lot, and I had my comic collection down there.
The fathers who were coming home from Europe were proud of whipping the Jerries, as they called the Germans. The Nazis were taut soldiers, though they had wrongly killed a lot of Jews. Nicknaming me Jerry in 1944, when on my birth certificate it says "George Walter Thompson, Jr" was maybe some kind of joke. I don't know; I just know everybody always called me Jerry, and my dad was Tommy. So it doesn't seem that strange to be Crabmeat. At least they spelled it right—I had a student whose name was Antione. Which reminds me: Did you hear about the dyslexic highway patrolman who was fired for giving out IUDs?
.........
Later, when 1 entered school, we moved to Seattle for five years. My memories of that town are of the heartbreaking sunsets over Mount Rainier, which we could see from our house; of light showers on the playground which never drove us indoors; of the octopus at Ivar's; and of sawdust, which the Langtons burned in their furnace after it came down a chute, as coal did into my grandma's basement, in Philly.
Sawdust in my shirts, sawdust in my pockets and my shoe. We played hide and seek in the sawdust. They used timber byproducts for everything in Seattle, even putting sawdust in snow tires. That sawdust worked about as well as kitty litter, and the cats seemed to have an affinity for it too, wich we found out sometimes playing hide and seek.
One day Sissy Crawford, a skinny girl with pigtails who lived up the street, said to me: "I bet I can beat you up with no hands, " and 1 laughed. She brought her knee up into my nuts as hard as she could, and I saw the white light for the first time. I told my sister about it and she was curious but would not avenge me. She had always wanted to be a boy. Now she wasn't so sure.
This led me to wonder, when 1 could stand up again, why God had put men's testicles on the outside rather than hiding them up inside, as is the case with elephants. A feminist author has postulated that it is because God wanted men's sperm to be quicker so they could compete at swimming to the egg, female humans being promiscuous. Hanging in the air cools the sperm and makes them more active than those of elephants, who are monogamous and needn't compete.
I'm not sure this is true, though it would explain some things about my first wife. I'd believe it more likely that God put them in such a vulnerable spot because of Her weird sense of humor, which is also why she put man's prostate up his butt and all of our primary sex organs where we pee: I mean, why not be like Ferenghis, and use our ears? Now there's a nice neutral zone, and surely pleasant sounds can be soothing and sexy at the same time. Then after sex you could just lounge around swabbing with a Q- Tip, rather than running like a monkey to the bathroom with a bruised bladder.
Anyway, when I got my own band, in California, I lobbied for a name I had seen in a dream "Rock Macho and the Country Felons." Somebody said that was too obvious, but in 1975 it wasn't; especially for hippy bands playing country rock in Mexican bars. So in Tahoe some people still call me "Rock.” Rock doesn't suit my disposition, though—it was just part of a hell of a name for a country group, and I never liked "George" that much.
So when I was playing four or five nights a week around in the 80s, I resurrected "Crabmeat," a name given me in college—when I accidentally soaked my clothing with Crab and clam juice over a long, long, weekend—by Don Woods, a ne'er do well who has since faded into oblivion, though I’ll probably hear from him now.
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