By Terry Mosher
Editor, Sports Paper
JOEY JAMES DEAN
Bremerton’s Joey James Dean has been making music most of his life, and continues to make it whenever he can pick up a gig, but his latest big gig will have nothing to do with music.
This gig will have a baseball ting to it. Dean will leave July 10 and spent a week in New York City as part of the FanFest surrounding the 84th Major League Baseball All-Star game that will be played July 16 at Citi Field in Queens, New York City at the home of the New York Mets.
Dean, 48, and a 1983 graduate of Olympic High School, will for the second time in three years be involved with the All-Star Game FanFest, working the Diamond attraction as a “coach” putting on clinics with managers, MLB legends, and current stars, and entertaining kids through various games.
“What I do is just for little kids,” says Dean. “It’s free clinic. One clinic involves the kids sliding on this long pad, another is with a foam baseball the kids can throw and hit against a wall.”
Dean used to perform his music at FanFest at All-Star games, starting with the 2001 game held at Safeco Field in Seattle.
“I got paid big bucks, “said Dean, who performed at the All-Star game for eight straight years, going to Milwaukee (2002), Chicago (2003), Houston (2004), Detroit (2005), Pittsburgh (2006), San Francisco (2007) and New York City when the Yankees opened their new park in 2008.
Dean would get his airline fare and his hotel paid for, plus he would get paid those big bucks. That all stopped in 2009 when the economy went sour and corporations cut back. For two years he was in limbo, but in 2011 FanFest coordinator Amber Rae, who he first met in 2001 at Safeco and has become a good friend, called him back. So in 2011 he was one of the clinic coaches at Chase Field in Phoenix.
“It was close (he now has to pay his own airfare) and I got a couple gigs while I was down there,” Dean said.
He skipped last year in Kansas City because he figured he could make more money staying home than heading off to the mid-west. But this year he decided to go for it again, and you can’t beat a week in the Big Apple.
“It’s almost like a summer camp,” says Dean of the FanFest experience. “You hang out, you get to meet all these people (including Hall of Famers). It’s fun.”
His grandmother, Virginia Gilbert, influenced Dean’s music career.
“She played guitar and the accordion,” Dean said. “She placed a guitar in my hands when I was five and my grandpa (Cal Gilbert) bought me my first guitar when I was seven. We are a musical family on my grandma’s side, the Damschens.
“My grandma would have Sunday dinners and she would invite the Damschens and they’d all come from Tacoma and play music. We’d sit outside n the summer – and there were probably 30 of us – and play music while the kids ran around.”
Virginia Gilbert died in 2007; 24 years after a drunken driver on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge killed her husband, Cal.
“After my grandpa died, she didn’t do anything, “says Dean. “She didn’t go anywhere. It was tough for her. Me being here (in the house) was good. She did what she could to be happy. She played her music all day. She had a fear (agoraphobia) of leaving the house.”
Her music lives on in Dean, who performs all over the country. He is now at Tommy C’s in Port Orchard on Thursdays, and will be one of the main attractions at Whaling Days again this year.
Dean has been playing for over 30 years, starting as the lead singer/guitarist with the rock band Black Velvet when he was just 12 years old. Now he’s trying to make a buck where he can, tend to the family property and to his mother, Linda, who is in hospice care at her home, slowly dying from breast cancer.
So it’s not the best of times for Joey James Dean, but he motors on, trying to keep alive the music he inherited from his grandmother. And when the moments get too tough, he can turn to the pictures ad mementos of her and his grandfather to remind him where he came from.