Honker: An interview with bassist Jim Lomonaco

Honker is a Binghamton band who is in it for the music, if nothing else. They’re not trying to go on tour, though they’re serious about practicing. And even though they don’t have dreams of topping the charts, they write their own music, throwing in a few choice covers when they play local venues. The group comes from varied musical backgrounds, with a wide range of experience between them, and they are continuing to grow as they get into their groove. Carousel spoke with Honker founder and bassist, Jim Lomonaco, about the band and his musical roots.

TRIPLE CITIES CAROUSEL: How did you come to name your band “Honker”?

JIM LOMONACO: Well, we just thought that if we came up with a name then we were admitting that we were a real band. Tim Linkroum, the guitarist, had lent me a Frank Zappa video, and at the end it said Honker something productions, or Honker something video. I can't remember the exact phrase but I thought, “Geez, honker is a great word, and I can't believe I've never heard of a band named Honker before!” So, since we're toying with the idea of needing a name, since I just heard that word—that's just too good of a word to pass up on! Let's use that as our band name! It's just silly enough and just short enough. It sounded like the perfect band name, and we stuck with it.

TCC: You've described your band's sound as “original, electric, funky rock.” Judging by what I've heard so far, I don't think you'd be out of place sharing a stage with say, Parliament Funkadelic.

JL: I'm very much influenced by George Clinton and Parliament, and as a bass player, Bootsy Collins. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Parliament. I'm proud that you made that association for sure!

TCC: You were the bassist for the band Yolk in the ‘90s and ‘00s. Yolk shared stages with bands like Fishbone and Sonic Youth. Won't you please tell us a little bit about Yolk?

JL: Sure! Yolk was my major project between '92 and '99 or 2000, which is when it really started to fizzle out. We all got together—we were all in our late teens and early twenties at the time. Every member of the band would have their own sort of perspective on the history of it, but for me, there was a band out of Susquehanna Valley High School called “Thelonious Funk.” And there was a guy by the name of Phil Clark who deserves some amount of credit for the history of Yolk, because he had come up with this idea for a funk band with horn players, doing original music. So I got hooked into that band, and gradually over the course of time, that band became Yolk. Phil Clark exited at some point. I guess you could say that we kicked him out of his own band or whatever; these things happen in bands. But yeah, at some point we came to the lineup that we wound up with: Dave Fitzhugh on guitar; the second guitarist, Pete Carvelas; Jeff Pettit on alto saxophone, and Adam Ash [on tenor sax]. [Then there was] JimmyJohn McCabe and myself, and our original drummer, Matt Murphy, who is now deceased.

So, the history of Yolk is a long story. We started out as Thelonious Funk and ended up as Yolk about '92. We enlisted one of our friends who wanted to be a manager, Vlad Efros. And we got hooked up with a booking agency. Over the course of a few years, we started playing up and down the East Coast. We released a few albums under our own financing. Wrote a lot of great songs, met a lot of great people, had great times.

TCC: You've also been a session musician. Won't you please name a few records you were on? Which one stands out from the others in your opinion?

JL: Well, immediately, Jimmyjohn McCabe's record Stir comes to mind as being one of my favorite records where I was a session musician because obviously, working with him we've already got a great relationship. And he writes songs that I really love. So I think that making the basslines on that record is one of my favorite studio recording experiences. I was on two other records that JimmyJohn put out. There was a band called Cementhead; I was on that record. There's a producer in town named Jeff DeBella and a studio called Audio Arts. There were several artists in the late ‘90s who were in that studio where I was the bass player. And then I moved on from that. I haven't done studio work in a while, but I miss it!

TCC: Though you're not a cover band, I've loved your choice covers of Talking Heads, David Bowie, and Frank Zappa. How do you choose tunes to give the Honker treatment to?

JL: We're almost certainly going to choose a cover by Frank Zappa because Tim and Jeff [Howard] and I are all very big Zappa fans. HG Thor—I think he's a big Zappa fan. I'm still getting to know his musical background. He only joined the band a few weeks back. He's on guitar. So, choosing covers up to this point has been really easy, as long as Tim and I know it and want to do it, that's how it happens. Now, since we do have HG in the band, we have to relearn our entire repertoire, so some of those covers—we haven't re-learned them yet!

TCC: What are Honker's plans for the future?

JL: Well, we're fairly realistic about what the music industry would have in store for old guys like us! Jeff Howard, our drummer, of course is the exception to that rule. He's in his early twenties and he's in another promising band called Raibred. I certainly hope that band has a future perhaps similar to Yolk’s, or even beyond that.

My aspirations—and I think most of the guys would agree—are that we just kind of want to spread as much joy and peace as we can. People seem to like the songs we make. So, we simply have to keep getting together, writing new songs and recording them. We're not interested in playing shows every single weekend, but we are interested in trying to play a few shows a year. We're not interested in going on the road, but we are interested in playing around Binghamton or any local or upstate area gigs that sound like fun. Otherwise, we just want to write new material. That's the major driving force that keeps the four of us coming back every week. We all want to create catchy songs that we would enjoy listening to, and we certainly hope that others would enjoy them also.

Honker will be playing on Saturday, March 17 at Cyber Cafe West, 173 Main Street, Binghamton. Show starts at 9pm. They will be opening for Raibred. More information on the band can be found at honker.rocks. Honker's music from previous live performances can be found on their web site and at archive.org/details/honker.