EAST SYRACUSE — Living on the West Coast, Tom Kenny no longer has to give thought to brushing snow off a car or scraping an ice-coated windshield before leaving the driveway, but he has never forgotten the local village he once called home.
As with every one of his return trips to the Central New York area, the established entertainer made it a point this week to visit his 92-year-old mother, Theresa, who still resides in the East Syracuse house where all five Kenny kids were raised.
This time around, however, the Annie Award winner was in town to receive a lifetime achievement distinction granted during the March 4 Syracuse Area Music Awards ceremony.
The presenter of that honor was none other than fellow comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, a close friend and confidence booster of Kenny’s ever since their formative years at Bishop Grimes, back when they were first navigating their interests in music and humor.
“It was a charmed youth,” said Kenny, now 59. “We were these oddballs who loved rock ‘n’ roll probably to a degree a little more than the average kid our age, and we started doing stand-up comedy and playing in bar bands as teenagers in clubs we were too young to be in.”
In those days, Kenny and his friends were less keen on stadium rock and more appreciative of the stripped-down and succinct punk records of The Ramones and The Dead Boys.
With their frequent namechecking of various influences, those CBGB regulars turned Kenny’s attention to artists who made their biggest marks in the 1950s and 1960s, most notably Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and The Beach Boys.
“You just kind of keep following the thread and going back as much as you can,” Kenny said. “It’s all connected in some way.”
His listening journey led him to discover, as he put it, a “wacky variety” of record store finds that crossed into genres like Western swing, Cajun and zydeco.
When his fondness for electric blues came up, Kenny said he still thinks back to the “life-changing” night he and Goldthwait snuck in to see Muddy Waters at the Stage East, a concert site that used to stand on Manlius Center Road.
So enamored by those tunes and his encounter with the bluesman, who was said to be impressed that a teenager owned his albums, Kenny decided to later name his son McKinley in tribute.
Despite not receiving the best grades in their high school classes as Kenny admits, both he and Goldthwait were encouraged by the teachers who noticed something special in them.
“People saying ‘yes’ is what makes your life what it is,” Kenny said. “For me, it’s been a series of those people helping me out and putting me on the road I’m on now.”
After graduating from Bishop Grimes in 1980, Kenny took a year off to try his hand at comedy, a decision that brought him deeper into the local music scene as a supporting act.
Soon informed that Syracuse-based group The Tearjerkers were holding auditions to replace departing lead singer Buddy Love, Kenny stepped in as a frontman with “high energy” according to member David Soule.
Kenny would end up staying with the band for their early ‘80s stretch before moving to Boston and then San Francisco to further pursue his stand-up career.
Though he kept hold of his comedic sensibilities, Kenny transitioned from the microphone to the voiceover booth in the 1990s, going on to lend his talents to cartoons like “Rocko’s Modern Life,” “Johnny Bravo,” “The Powerpuff Girls” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Alongside his wife, Jill Talley, also a voice actress, Kenny joined the cast of the live action sketch comedy program “Mr. Show” in the middle of that same decade.
“That bonus year is still going on for me,” Kenny said. “I look at East Syracuse to now as this one unbroken line of just figuring out stuff on the fly, trying to monetize having fun and maybe getting in over my head sometimes.”
Through the years, The Pushballs and The Boozehounds brought on occasional gigs too, but apart from The Tearjerkers, his most extended run musically has been with the pop-soul outfit Tom Kenny & The Hi-Seas.
That 12-piece group performed onstage Saturday night at King of Clubs on South Clinton Street—Kenny and his “never-in-distress” backup singers The Damselles included. They were also joined by SAMMY Hall of Famers Gary Frenay and Arty Lenin for a cover of Eddie & The Hot Rods’ “Do Anything You Wanna Do,” a song the two formerly did justice as members of The Flashcubes.
“You only get one lifetime, and if you get a lifetime achievement award during it, then that’s beating the odds, so we wanted to have a party,” Kenny said before the show.
The set list additionally included a handful of originals and renditions of such songs as The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” and “Mama Said” by The Shirelles.
