![]() Gomez moved to Los Angeles at 18 to pursue his music career and began writing songs and performing around the city at many notable clubs. Country greats like Mentor Williams and Lynn Anderson frequented the place that led them to become fans of his music. “The school I went to was playing in that bar,” he says. Soon thereafter he was playing at a late, lamented institution of a venue called the Old Blinking Light. ![]() You can get away with just about anything there, and we were turned loose as kids.”Īt 14, when Gomez performed at a benefit concert, he played “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down”-the down-and-out classic by future labelmate Kris Kristofferson. It’s still the Wild West compared to any city or suburb. Gomez reports that growing up in Taos was “wild. “He really studied what he did there were always a lot of books on old furniture in his studio.” ![]() “There’s a similarity between my dad’s work and mine,” says Gomez. The family moved from Santa Fe to Taos in the ’80s, and his father, Steve, became a furniture craftsman. The youngest of five brothers, by several years-“That’s why I got into ‘old’ music”-Gomez got a children’s guitar for Christmas when he was 10. Splitting his childhood between there and a farm in the Flint Hills of Kansas, Gomez is at home in the heartland, too. You’ll find his hometown of Taos and nearby Red River right there between Colorado and Texas on both your sonic and Google maps. And as a budding performer, he apprenticed in the rarefied musical climate of northern New Mexico, where troubadours like Michael Martin Murphey and Ray Wylie Hubbard helped foster a folk and Western sound both cosmic and cowboy. As a teenage guitarist he adopted Big Bill Broonzy as his blues master. As a child, the first songs he learned to sing were originally recorded in the 50s by Johnny Cash. T hough still only in his twenties, Max Gomez has always had the heart of an old soul.
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