Smokey Hormel: Guitarist to the stars

By Brian Braiker

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The first thing you’re likely to wonder is: Is Smokey Hormel this guy’s real name?

And the answer is, well, yeah. Hormel is a scion of the Hormel meat family. The company was founded by his great grandfather George A. Hormel. Smokey’s grandfather invented Spam. “If you ever see the way they make it, it’ll kind of turn you off to it,” Hormel says today.

Indeed Smokey, who legally changed his name from Gregory, didn’t go into the family business. Nor did his father before him. Instead, Hormel took a long road to becoming an accomplished and sought after session musician, a guitarist who has recorded or toured with Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Beck, Nora Jones, Adele, Bo Diddley and on and on.

“I remember seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan,” says Hormel, who is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “We were all around the TV …That’s one of my earliest memories. I wouldn’t stop singing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ I just annoyed the hell out of everyone.”

He was instantly hooked, and music would become a lifelong passion. “It was a cultural explosion,” he says about growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s. He was a free range kid, who loved Jimi Hendrix and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, as well as modern dance. “Once the ‘70s kicked in, it got a little darker.”

if you live in Brooklyn, you can catch Hormel live Wednesday nights through October at Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook. He’ll be playing 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s Western swing music in the style of Bob Wills with his band, Smokey’s Roundup. Think: fiddles, upright bass, yeehaws and boot scootin’.

“Mr. Cash was super encouraging of my singing, so that’s why I started the Roundup after he died,” says Hormel of his relationship with Johnny Cash at the end of the legend’s life. “I just didn’t want to stop trying to rescue these old songs from obscurity.”

After getting too far into drugs in the 1970s, he quit music to get away from the scene and leaned in to dance and theater. Music came back into his life later when he washed dishes at the iconic L.A. diner Millie’s Cafe, which was owned by a Wester Swing musician and was frequented by denizens of the burgeoning punk scene. Members of bands like X and the Blasters, which Hormel would later join, frequently dropped by.

“There were always guys who could just shred circles around me on guitar,” he says. “I kind of gravitated more towards the people like Neil Young, more after a tone than anything else … That’s my aesthetic. It’s less about Van Halen stuff in your face. It’s more about creating a vibe.”

That vibe has served him well. Once while gigging in LA, super-producer Rick Rubin dropped by with Mick Jagger to check him out, which led to a long, productive stretch as a session musician.

“Rick has that New York hip hop thing,” Hormel says. “He doesn’t mind being dick if he has to.”

We cover all of that and more on the podcast, growing up with a bit of a rolling stone for a father and a ballerina for a mother. And he tells a story about how, early in his life, he got a blues guitar lesson from Malibu neighbor who turned out to be … actor Peter Fonda.

If you can’t catch him live, he also appears on the new album “Dawn” by an up-and-coming singer named Yebba.