After 31 years, Tom Pittman is leaving the Austin Lounge Lizards. While he’s still on board for upcoming dates in California, Virginia, and Houston, Saturday’s Lounge Lizards show at the Texas Union Theatre is his last Austin appearance with the self-described “most laughable band in show business.”
This spring Pittman and his wife Elizabeth will be moving to Asheville, North Carolina, just in time to miss Austin’s summer, and to enjoy and learn from the old-time music scene that thrives there.
“It’s cooler there,” he explains. “It’s in the mountains. Not only that, but the lifestyle there is very attractive to me. You walk around and people are on their front porches. People can live outdoors a little bit there, which never happens here. It’s something I wanted to experience before I pass on. Also, my wife’s an old-time fiddler and that’s where fiddlers go if they can. She’s been going to festivals in that area for 20 or 25 years and she’s made a lot of friends that way. A lot of them have retired and all moved to Asheville.”
The Lounge Lizards will continue as a fourpiece for now, without Pittman’s skills on banjo and Dobro. “They’re going to work a little harder, but they’re pretty confident that it’ll work out,” he claims. “I was never that involved in the vocal end of things so that’s one thing they don’t have to worry about.”
Thinking about the band’s longevity, he says, “It’s all because we didn’t try to be something that we weren’t. We never set out to be a country band or a bluegrass band or anything else. Our whole reason for existing was to have fun. We weren’t trying to fit into any niche; we created our own niche quite by accident. We just assumed that we’d have some fun and it’ll be over when it’s over and lo and behold if it didn’t turn into a 31-year career.”
I wondered about high and low points over the years and he talks about a gig at a Chicago country music festival where they played at what was set up as a line dancing stage.
“When they started dancing to ‘Shallow End of the Gene Pool,’ I thought that was just perfect,” he chuckles. An early gig at California’s Strawberry Festival is a fond memory because it brought them a wider audience. “Riders in the Sky was before us,” he recalls, “and Hot Rize was on after us and I thought we had arrived. Those were the steadiest hitters I knew. Oddly enough, we outsold them at the merch table, since the audience never had a chance to buy our stuff before.”
Pittman, always humble, wanted to assure the fans of the band that there’s nothing nefarious behind his moving on. “I want to thank Hank Card and Conrad Deisler for making all this possible. I just never dreamed that I could play music for a living. I don’t want anybody to think there’s any hurt feelings or that I’m leaving the band because of something unfortunate. We’re still getting along, still good friends. I just want to go play another kind of music after 31 years and I’m having fun with the challenges of that. I wish them all well and I’m sure they’ll do fine.”
This article appears in February 11 • 2011.