STILL DON'T KNOW JACK?: A little more of the Jack McTamney origin story

We took a long time to catch on to Port Richmond singer-songwriter Jack McTamney, but we're making up for it now. Read Mary Armstrong's profile on the man from today's paper. After that, come back and read a few outtakes from Jack's origin story.

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STILL DON'T KNOW JACK?: A little more of the Jack McTamney origin story

POSTED: Thursday, February 2, 2012, 3:30 PM

Filed Under: Music | Philly Bands Show

We took a long time to catch on to Port Richmond singer-songwriter Jack McTamney, but we’re making up for it now. Read Mary Armstrong’s profile on the man from today’s paper. After that, come back and read a few outtakes from Jack’s origin story.

It Was The Best House To Grow Up In

Bernadette McTamney says growing up in that house was a lot like Leave it To Beaver. Joe didn’t mind that Fran warped his LPs when the kids tossed them up on his bunk where he’d land on them. Good hearts were needed to keep the place humming but that didn’t preclude differences of opinion.

Jack loves a good spirited debate. Feel free to differ with him loudly and forcefully, that’s how he was raised. “Joe probably remembers better than I about the political/religious donnybrooks that my father would start — and lay out of smiling — because I was a little kid for most of them. I mainly just enjoyed the highly charged emotion. I chipped in more when I was a teenager. Me and Jerry got the dumbest dinner fight award when we were arguing about cannibalism and were on our way outside to fist fight over who would eat who first. … Haha! Mare was completely disgusted.”

Joe and Mare recall their father never leaving well enough alone. Sooner or later he’d ball up the tin foil from his baked potato and toss it at somebody. Then there would be a hail of silver missiles and mom hollering it, “God damn it Joe, [Sr.] you got ’em started again!” Joe jr. recalls Fran and Jerry being the most voluble. Jack recalls, “Yeah, Jerry was usually on the opposite side of everyone else. So then my mother would jump in to protect him with ‘Will you people knock it the hell off?! What the hell’s wrong you?!’ My mom really would do that because [when] she felt like too many of us were against one she would break it up. She would feel bad for the underdog. If one of the neighborhood kids was asleep on the corner, wacked on drugs, she would tell us to go get him and bring him in so nothing happened to him. If any family was in a crisis in the neighborhood, my mother would be the first one knocking on the door to help. She was so well-respected that neighbors would come for her advice, even medical! She was a powerful woman, full of love, compassion, creativity and passion. Sometimes her passion could boil right over the top and anyone within earshot would feel the burn!”

“It was the best house to grow up in. Sometimes my mom would come in and say ‘We’re having a party tonight” and by 9 p.m. there would be fifty people in a little row home with dancing and records blasting into the early morning.”

Jack McTamney plays Fri., Feb. 3, 10 p.m., $5, Dawson Street Pub, 100 Dawson St., 215-482-5677, dawsonstreetpub.com.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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