Preacherman

Tim Jones, an Oakland-based musician who worked as a self-taught electrician and engineer while also playing multiple instruments and writing songs, channeled his distinctive ideas through various one-man projects during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. One of these outlets took the form of Preacherman, a spaced-out funk prophet who appeared onstage armed with a modified organ and accompanied by a wooden puppet serving as a scrappy sidekick. In 1979 he issued a self-released LP titled Age of Individualism under the name T.J. Hustler, presenting off-kilter mystical synth funk pieces that he performed throughout the Bay Area. Over the following decades Jones continued to refine his craft in relative seclusion, growing increasingly assured as a songwriter and capturing his material on homemade CD-Rs that mixed spiritual one-man-band grooves with spoken exchanges involving the puppet’s gravelly-voiced persona, “T.J. Hustler.” He also held a technical position at IBM during the 1980s, appeared under additional aliases such as MIDI Man and the Ironing Board Man, and gathered his metaphysical reflections into a self-published volume. In 2018 Luaka Bop assembled the strongest of these private recordings into the expansive collection Universal Philosophy: Preacherman Plays T.J. Hustlers Greatest Hits.