To be sure, multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter Tom Reock is resourceful. He knew his vocational path would have to involve rock, jazz, and blues music by the time he was 10.
By combining his passion for audio engineering and producing in the studio with live shows, Reock, born and raised in the Kendall Park section of South Brunswick — known as “Pumpkin Land” in the 1970s and ’80s — has been able to make his living in music for most of the last five decades. Like Ernie White, Joe Zuccarello, Paul Plumeri, Andrew Hudak, and other prominent musicians around the Trenton-Princeton scene, he was around in the late ’70s and ’80s when playing in clubs from New Hope to New Brunswick could amount to a lucrative income.
Reock has organized a one-of-a-kind show for Robbinsville Day, slated for Saturday, June 7.
“Everybody starts off as a guitar player at first,” Reock recently explained from his home studio, Squirrel Ranch in Hamilton Township.
“Then I switched to bass and drums around age 10, and then I went back to guitar, and I was so bad at all of that, I decided I would learn how to play piano because nobody was playing piano. I’ve been self-taught on everything,” he explained of his formative days off of New Road in Kendall Park.
He formed his first band, This Was, with older guys from the neighborhood when he was 12. Other bands followed, including Last Exit, Wizard, and perhaps the band he’s best known for, The Down To Earth Band, “which went through many metamorphoses until the early 1990s, when we finally split up.” The band was invited to several overnight concerts at Rutgers’ WRSU-FM New Brunswick studios in the early 1980s and frequented clubs like the Tin Lizzie Garage on Route 27 in Kingston, City Gardens in Trenton, and large and small original music venues around Princeton, Hamilton, Trenton, and New Brunswick.
His father, Ernest Reock, worked for the Bureau of Government Research at Rutgers University, and his mother, Jeanne, was always involved in education and worked for New Jersey School Boards Association in Trenton. His decision not to attend college did not disappoint his parents too much, he recalled proudly.
“They never ever pushed me to do the academic thing; they kind of knew from a very early age what I was going to do,” he recalled. “Back then I was going to go to California and get signed to a record deal, but then I chickened out, and I’ve been here ever since.”
He graduated from South Brunswick High School in 1976, sharing an alma mater with Steely Dan keyboardist Donald Fagen, who graduated from the same high school in the mid-1960s.
Reock is proud of his niece, who alternates with Bucks County-based singer-songwriter Lisa Bouchelle at Reock ‘n’ Roll Revue concerts.
“She’s been very lucky she didn’t have to do many years of $75 club gigs; she’s already playing in country clubs and big halls and is much better paid as a performer than I was at her age,” he said. “I don’t know if these kinds of gigs spoil a person or deter you from what you really want to do with your career. But Lindsay is her own person, and she’s going to make her own way, one way or another. She’s got an exceptional voice, and she has since I first heard her sing when she was eight years old.”
Having always played a little bit of guitar, bass, drums, and a lot of keyboards worked in his favor once he founded Squirrel Ranch Recording Studios in Hamilton 20 years ago.
“I’ve always recorded my songs my entire life, but I really did not take it seriously until about 2005,” he said of Squirrel Ranch. He said it has always been challenging running a studio, given the investments needed to stay on top of the game in a time of transition from analog [recording tape, tube amplifiers] to digital [computer-based] recording techniques.
“I procrastinated for many years going into computer land — the digital world — with my recording, but now I utilize the computer a lot, but still record in the old fashioned way.”
To that end, he encourages beginning and intermediate musicians to rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse some more before setting foot in Squirrel Ranch. Sometimes they follow his advice and sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, it ends up costing the band more money to make their recordings.
“Everything is digital; they don’t even make tape anymore,” he explained, “but the way I go about recording with my clients is very much the same way they recorded back in the 1960s and 1970s and ’80s, before all this digital technology came into play.”
He describes Squirrel Ranch as a very laid-back studio.
“When I started out my goal was to work closely with singer-songwriters, so we work on the material together and often piece the music together. I don’t get a lot of bands coming in here; a lot of the recordings are built up and pieced together over a period of weeks.”
In the last two decades, Reock’s reputation for presenting superb live concerts has grown as he began presenting multi-media tribute concerts at the Kelsey Theater at Mercer County Community College. The Reock ‘n’ Roll Revue concerts began at the now-closed Hopewell Theater as a vehicle for him to play more of his original music, he said.
“Eventually, of course, you find out that [original music] doesn’t always get over in the bars, so then we started doing this eclectic mix of songs by artists that people knew but they didn’t really know these songs and you wouldn’t always hear them in a bar setting,” he explained of his popular Reock ‘n’ Roll Revue concerts.
“One day, somebody at rehearsal started playing ‘Back in the USSR’ from The Beatles, and at the end of that, we started going down the rest of the album. Then I said, why don’t we rent a theater out and see if we can’t do ‘The White Album’ from start to finish?” His concept turned out to be a success, and a few years later, they moved the annual concerts to the Kelsey Theater at Mercer County College.
The show for Robbinsville Day is modeled after what he’s done at MCCC, but without the video screens, film clips, and vintage photos as a backdrop to what the musicians are doing on stage. Since 2011, he and his backing musicians from the area have put on engaging tribute shows devoted to Sly and the Family Stone, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Jackson Browne, and others, always with superb sound. In early March of this year, Reock and his troupe paid a nod to John Lennon’s solo career, post-Beatles, with three sold-out concerts at the Kelsey Theater.
At Robbinsville Day on June 7, he’ll be leading a band featuring vocalists Lisa Bouchelle and his niece, Lindsay Jordan. Reock ‘n’ Roll Revue includes a four-piece horn section, two drummers, a percussionist, and several guitarists, keyboardists, and bassists. He spends most of his time at the keyboards and is assisted by his wife, Fiona, who serves as stage manager and who works for Princeton University’s Index of Medieval Art.
“You’re going to see a great class of musicians playing phenomenal music from the 1960s and ’70s,” he said of his 14-piece band.
“That’s what this whole project was about, trying to do studio recordings in a live setting.”
Reock ’n’ Roll Revue with Lindsay Jordan and the Gypsies, 44th Annual Robbinsville Community Festival, Robbinsville Community Park, 15 West Manor Way, Robbinsville. Saturday, June 7, 2 to 9 p.m. (Rain date: June 8). www.robbinsville.net/recreation.
The Reock ’n’ Roll Revue with Lindsay Jordan and the Gypsies performs at the annual Robbinsville Community Festival on Saturday, June 7.,
