Tom Dyer & The True Olympians

Oct 7, 2023 Lisa and the True Olympians Single Released

All-new versions of PNW classics by The Telepaths and Heart, featuring the wonderful Lisa Ceazan on vocals. One plain weird and one just plain sultry.

What’s the scoop? Last January, coming off the marathon that was “Olympia: A True Story”, I was thinking what next? Hadn’t written a song since the previous May (a long time for me) and was not feeling inspired. At the same time, I figured I needed to do something to keep The True Olympians busy. I decided to take on a project I have contemplated for a few years, History Of Northwest Rock, Vol.2 (1970 – 1986), my follow up to 2015’s History of Northwest Rock Vol. 1 (1959-1968). I made a list of my favorite obscurities from that period, picked a few of those and started rehearsing the band to record them. I quickly lost interest and set the project aside, except for two songs. The Telepaths’ “Frozen Darling” and Heart’s “Crazy on You” (not obscure!), for which we cut basic tracks. Those two languished as I got involved in some other studio projects and the True Olympians prepared to play what were probably our last two shows (we are on an indefinite sabbatical).I finally got around to finishing them and here they are. I am most pleased with them. I think Lisa is fabulous on them. I am so pleased with them that I have decided to slowly resuscitate Vol.2 with Lisa as lead singer for the whole thing. That said, it will be a pretty casual approach to recording – there will probably be the occasional single or two before it ever becomes an album. I have other irons in the fire.
TD
 

May 5, 2023 The True Olympians Play The Olson Brothers

The True Olympians Play The Olson Brothers Band. What’s up with that? Last year or so I figured out that a hard workin’ Nashville song writin’ contest winnin’ many giggin’ country band existed right here in OlyWa. Capitol HS grads, like former TruOly drummer and KGY radio star, Michael Stein. Whoda thunk, here in the land of Olympia-has-everything? Over the last year I’ve played them a bunch on my FreeFormNW KAOS radio show (which you can stream at kaosradio.org if you ain’t in Oly) – even interviewed them (twice) while they were driving back from an Ashland, Oregon gig. My favorites tunes are “I Bleed Evergreen” and “Kill Your Mom” (as in “It Would Kill” …). I dig them so much we decided to give them the True Olympian treatment and have now released them as an attractive limited edition CDr single. These are performed from the heart! 

 

Dec 19, 2022 TV Story on King 5 Evening.

Tom Dyer & the True Olympians release concept album about Olympia | king5.com

Dec 8, 2022 Tom Dyer on KGY with Michael Stein!

Tom Dyer Interviewed on Olympia’s KGY with Michael Stein Thursday 12-8-22 by GreenMonkeyRecords (soundcloud.com)

Dec 7, 2022 Tom Dyer on NPR station KUOW Soundside show. KUOW – A musician’s love for Olympia inspires a 40-song album

New video by Marc Sterling for Olympia My Home 

Nov 17 Review: 

THE STATE OF THE NORTHWEST PACIFIC (2022): People, places and some capital songs

 

“This is a glorious, beautifully presented project and – remarkably — during the three years it took to create, Tom Dyer also ran his label (through Covid remember), delivered three solo albums and a True Olympians Christmas album.
Remarkable.” Graham Reid

 Elsewhere by Graham Reid   https://www.elsewhere.co.nz/absoluteelsewhere/10504/the-state-of-the-northwest-pacific-2022-people-places-and-some-capital-songs/

 

Nov 14 Sweet review in the Terrascope

Terrascope Reviews for November 2022 ‘”Let It Rain’ is the perfect ending to this musical travelogue – lots of wet, steamy guitar soloing, raspy-throated childhood recollections of delivering newspapers in the rain, and a finger-shredding guitar onslaught that’ll have Neil and Crazy Horse fans freaking out. Next stop: Broadway and Olympia: The Musical!” Jeff Penczak

November 13, 2022 Wonderful article in the Olympian. New album is Tom Dyer’s love letter to hometown of Olympia | The Olympian https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article268210872.html

October 12, 2022 

TOM DYER INTERVIEWED ON PARALLEL UNIVERSITY

Stream Parallel U: Kim Dobson interviews Tom Dyer about Olympia: A True Story by GreenMonkeyRecords | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

New video for Arts Walk (Mossy Bottom) by Jeff Kelly

Sept 3, 2022. Great article in Thurston Talk.Tom Dyer: Musician, Owner of Green Monkey Records and a True Olympian – ThurstonTalk 

https://www.thurstontalk.com/2022/09/02/tom-dyer-musician-owner-of-green-monkey-records-and-a-true-olympian/

Oct. 14, 2022. Tom: A project started exactly 4 years ago with the tender longing of “Olympia My Home” has arrived in my hand. It is tangible. Real. Glorious.

Olympia: A True Story 3 CD set

The day it arrived was rather stunning to me. A ridiculously large project, a ridiculous amount of work and effort, not just by me, but over 100 Olympia musicians, several photographers, proofreaders, my designer Rosie and of course the dedicated and beloved True Olympians, Gene, Joe, Lisa, Michael, Jason and Jeff.

October something. Longtime Oly drummer Jeff Parkhurst has taken over the drum throne. Brit Jason Homewood has joined the True Olympians as a second guitarist!

The scoop (in case you didn’t know already):

Joe CasonOlympia: A True Story, a 40-song, 47 track, 3-CD box set with 80-page book, is a loving ode to Olympia, Washington. It tells the story of the greater Olympia area going back 2 million years. Recorded over four years thru the pandemic, it is a heady brew of eclecticism writ large. It is monumental.

The True Olympians in the woodsWhen I moved back to Olympia in 2016, I was most impressed by the Sylvester’s Window collection at the downtown Olympia Library, a series of eight Olympia cityscapes ranging from 1841 to 2001. These drawings really got me thinking about Olympia on some sort of time continuum in a way I probably hadn’t before.

I was at least partially inspired by David Scherer Water’s entertaining little Olympia book, first encountered in the spring of 2017, where I first learned about things like Bordeaux and the 1959 downtown train station crash. I grew up here and had never heard of either. 

Tom Dyer recording OlympiaBy 2019, the yet unnamed Olympia album was a thing, a concept in my head – a work in progress. The other book that really kicked this off for me was Olympia: A Peoples’ Almanac. Out of print, I got it from the library early on and it inspired further digging. It was the first place I had read much of anything about Little Hollywood, Olympia’s shantytown in the 20’s and 30’s and where I saw the picture that directly inspired the lyric.

We tracked our first five songs for the album in August, 2019. We did not suspect a pandemic was around the corner and how difficult that would make everything. Three years, three drummers, three Tom Dyer solo albums, and one True Olympians Holiday album later, it is done. Hallelujah!

This is not any sort of complete history; it is a collection of sonic sketches reflecting my particular take on the many-headed beast that is Olympia. We hope our little entertainment will inspire people to dig deeper into the story of our hometown and have provided many references you can pursue for more information.

I’d like to give a giant thank you to all the Olympia musicians who donated their time and skills to this undertaking – on their behalf, we will be donating a portion of our proceeds to the not-for-profit Olympia Arts + Heritage Alliance.

On October 28, I did a radio interview with Kim Dobson about the album that can be heard here: Stream Parallel U: Kim Dobson interviews Tom Dyer about Olympia: A True Story by GreenMonkeyRecords | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

January 13, 2022: UPDATE Work on our Olympia: A True Story album continues, with a recent blizzard of Olympia music guest stars, including Arrington De Dionyso from Old Time Relijun and Dave Harvey from Nudity. One of the tunes (with Arrington), “It’s Mud” appears on the new Ball of Wax comp – #66, where we got this great review: 

Ball of Wax 66 Songs: Tom Dyer & The True Olympians – “It’s Mud”

The last time I reviewed a song by Tom Dyer & the True Olympians, I closed it by calling the song “just damn fun” and heck if they haven’t done it AGAIN. I still don’t know where Tom Dyer finds the time to be involved in so many projects (most of which bear his name and all of which seem to have come from the playful end of the rock strata before bouncing through the various sands, soils, and waters of the rushing effluent and digging in among the sediment of Dyer’s own delta of joyous madness), but I’m thankful he does!

“It’s Mud” is a wild ride through that very delta, a pop song treading the depths of the aural spectrum where the bass, drums, guitar, and even Dyer’s vocal beat the bedrock like it’s the final barrier to getting every last ass in the place out of its seat and wagging with the rhythmic rumble of the sonic flood. Joe Cason has his hands full keeping this tectonic leviathan from cracking through to the mantle, but his electric piano does so admirably (love the way everything sinks away at the end, leaving only the keyboard to remind you that some things can never stay submerged) and gives the beat a touch of syncopation.

Tom Dyer’s vocals are always a blast, but on “It’s Mud” he sounds more like a man possessed than I think I’ve heard, hooting, hupping, and growling every lung-collapsing line in a frenzied competition with the True Olympians’ guest artist, one Arrington de Dionyso, who takes the title of the song as literally as possible and all but blows his bass clarinet to bits (gods bless the little reed that pulled off the Herculean task of being channeled from one to the other of its instrument’s four-plus octave [I’m including overblowing because I’ve heard other de Dionyso material and the man favors pushing his woodwinds to and often beyond their limits]). In fact, Dyer gives his guest complete freedom and lets de Dionyso exorcise every spirit in the immediate vicinity, clearing the nooks and crannies in double-tracked stereo glee (I hope, anyway—otherwise there’s a lot more black magic happening here than bargained for) for 30 seconds before the band explodes into action, at which point his guest kicks into high gear, coming up for air maybe twice over the next three minutes.

As a whole, “It’s Mud” is spiritually and emotionally (and almost physically) cleansing, washing over everything in a deluge of delirious sound, and Levi’s choice to close this volume of Ball of Wax with it is simply inspired. In fact, this has been one of my favorite volumes yet, and each time “It’s Mud” ends, I have to catch my breath and shake off the silt before realizing that another spin of this whole Ball of Wax is desperately needed.

Ball of Wax Volume 66 | Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly (bandcamp.com)

Dec. 8, 2021: We decided last week to put out a Christmas album so here it is. All the True Olympian Xmas tunes bundled up in one sweet-n-jolly package. Also, as you may have noticed in the genuine JC Penny Photo Studio picture, Lisa Ceazan has joined the band on vocals. All this will be on display at our McMenamin’s Spanish Ballroom in Tacoma show Thursday Dec. 23.  

Summer update: There have been changes. The pandemic came. A new drummer came – Michael Stein.  We are working on a new record – Olympia, a thirty-five-plus song concept record (remember those) about you-know-what. Scheduled for release in 2023.

We also did another xmas single last year “Pandemic Christmas” (our third), which was sorta jolly.

Here’s all the old news.

File under Rock.

Tom Dyer and The True Olympians released their debut album 12 New Recordings on August 17, 2018. To warm you up they released a video for “The Ballad of Donald John Trump”. The album features all-new material written by Dyer and recorded by the band in  the spring of 2018, ranging from the super-pop of “The Grey” to the brilliantly obtuse sludge of “In The Light.” Some of the songs are pointed like “Hegemony,” “The Ballad of Donald John Trump” and the not-quite sacrilegious “Wibblin’ For Jesus.” (Hey – it’s just the  true facts, ma’am.) Some are vague and some are wistful. Probably none of them fall in the “pretty” category. The majority of the band’s efforts could easily be clumped into the “cruddy rock” category. The True Olympians are too old to care what anyone thinks about their music.  They just do what they gonna do.

The True Olympians are Tom Dyer, vocals and guitar, Joe Cason, keyboards and vocals, Gene Tveden, bass and vocals, Lisa Ceazan, vocals, and Michael Stein, drums and percussion and vocals. Tom Shoblum was the drummer on 12 New Recordings. As a band, their beginnings go back to high school in Olympia, Washington, where Tom D and Gene played in teen bands together. After high school, Dyer left town and eventually started Green Monkey Records, releasing his own solo and band albums, while Gene stayed in Olympia and played with a number of bands. He was a union  man. Joe and Michael are also natives who have played in pile of Oly bands. Joe currently plays around town when it suites him in The Crescents. This band got its start when Dyer moved back to Olympia a couple years ago and reconnected with Gene. Scott Vanderpool of the Green Pajamas ( a Greener) introduced Tom to Tom and away they went. At the practice pad, there was a pile of keyboard stuff in the corner – Tom asked Tom “who?” and Joe was in.

The True Olympians are not a particularly ambitious bunch. Their first masterpiece is done and they plan to play at least one show this year. Perhaps more, but they ain’t no spring chickens and don’t like to haul gear that much, so we shall see. Regarding the “True Olympian” business, while it is true they all are from Olympia, they are neither nativists nor exclusionary. They understand rather that True Olympianism is a state of pure existence available to any being on this round planet, with enough focus, work and clarity. You too can be a True Olympian. And they like to do the rock. Yes they do.

The band released a digital single (now a video) from the album in May, “The Ballad of Donald John Trump,” Dyer’s second editorial commentary about Mr. Trump. The hope was to get it out before Trump could do anymore dumb/evil stuff that required writing new verses. Dyer’s previous single and video, Trump-ville, was released one year ago in June of 2017. Mr. Dyer is hopeful it will not be necessary to write a third song on this unpleasant topic next year.

The True Olympians made their debut last December with the wonderful and secular “Christmas In Olympia/Christmas Is Love” single.

Despite living in the Land of Trump, The True Olympians work hard to maintain an optimistic vision of the future.

Tom Dyer – Vocals & Guitar

Joe Cason – Organ, Piano & Vocals

Gene Tveden – Bass & Vocals

Lisa Ceazan – Vocals

Jeff Parkhurst – Drums & Percussion

Jason Homewood – Guitar