People change careers. It happens all the time. We want more money, or a more meaningful role, or better work-life balance. But 40 years ago, and for none of those reasons, Earl Thomas went from touring the world to handling toxic waste.
“I do a spin. But it’s spontaneous. So, someone in the office called me Earl the Twirl,” says Thomas.
He teaches workplace teams how to safely manage and ship their hazardous materials. It’s not the most exciting topic, so he tries to add a little flair.
“I do a spin. But it’s spontaneous,” he continues. “[My co-workers] don't realize that it's not like a Motown spin. It's like a basketball spin. So, you know, that's, I guess that's entertaining for them.”
Thomas knows a thing or two about Motown, though. And that’s one reason I wanted to meet him. He and I sat down in the tidy, bright house Fairfield, California, house that he shares with his life LaDise. In his home studio, I see a recording session on his laptop, a group of microphones clustered in front of a keyboard, and guitars line the wall.
As he tuned his guitar, Thomas talked about how his relationship to music has evolved. When he was a touring musician, he had to play no matter what. “You couldn’t say ‘no. I really don't feel like playing today,’” he explained. “They hired you. You have to be ready. But you know what? Now, I can only play when I'm inspired.”
Thomas was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Detroit. Music was a part of his life from day one–his mom sang in the church choir and his brothers were in gospel groups that would practice in his living room. There was one guitarist who he was really drawn to.
“I’d get the broom, I would watch him, you know, and I’d emulate what he's doing, and pretend I'm the guitar player,” he says. “So I developed a love for that instrument, just watching them.”
In 1970, Thomas was a freshman at a public high school in Detroit. He met Kamau Kenyatta in the concert band. And they’d play music together outside of class. But then Thomas transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, on a scholarship.
“Exeter was a culture shock,” he says.
It wasn’t just that the people were different from his friends in Detroit. The homework load was also really intense. And then there were the amenities.
“They had a gym, they had a music hall, and I had homework. I had a choice,” Thomas explains.
He chose the music hall. Thomas left Exeter without a diploma, but with a game plan. He’d become a professional musician.
And he did. Reconnecting with Kamau in Detroit, Thomas became a musician for hire, playing nightclubs with acts that came through town. That led to touring with the R&B band Creative Source. Then, he landed a life-changing gig. He became lead guitar for one of the most beloved Motown bands of all time: The Supremes.
He went around the globe with the group (which had changed its name to Mary Wilson and The Supremes after Diana Ross left the trio in 1970). The Middle East, South America, Europe. Rehearse, perform, repeat. Day after day.
At night in their hotel rooms, Thomas and a band mate started a curious competition: a bible reading contest. That’s right. On a whim, the two musicians just started reading the Gideons’ bibles from the bedside tables of their hotel rooms each night. But after a while, it wasn’t just a game to Thomas.
“As we were touring the different countries, and I began to read, I began to associate what I was reading with what I was seeing,” Thomas explains.
He was seeing people less fortunate than himself and it made the narratives he was absorbing in the bible resonate more deeply.
“My heart began to melt somewhat,” he says. “I began to sort of grow away from what I was doing. My focus was different.”
Thomas felt so disconnected from the band, he decided to leave The Supremes. Back in Detroit, he resumed nightclub work but it still didn’t feel right. One night, a well-known guitar player came to the club, and joined the band at a table during a break. “He was saying something fairly lewd about a young lady,” Thomas recalls. He would have gone along with this kind of banter before he’d become a Christian. But now, Thomas wasn’t laughing. And this visiting musician noticed Thomas’ silence. He heard him mumble under his breath: “What's wrong with you?”
The tension became too much. “It came to a point where everyone realized that we weren't really compatible.” Thomas recalls. “I wasn't looking down my nose at them. It was just that I felt like I couldn't continue.”
He decided to cut his ties to secular music for good.
"There are still some musicians who are believers who are Christians. But for me, it was a conflict."Earl Thomas
“There are still some musicians who are all believers who are Christians,” he says. “But for me, it was a conflict.”
And he never looked back. Thomas got married, and he and his young family moved to the Bay Area. He needed steady work, fast. So when an acquaintance suggested a job at a Bay Area company called IT Corporation, Thomas took it—even though he’d mostly be doing hazardous waste removal.
"I went from the velvet curtains of the London Palladium to black oil tanks, in Martinez."Earl Thomas
“I went from the velvet curtains of the London Palladium to black oil tanks in Martinez [California],” he says.
This was 1982, and back then, companies that generated toxic waste—like refineries and manufacturers—would bring it to retention ponds. Part of Thomas’s job was vacuuming up that waste, which meant getting into full PPE.
“We'd have a yellow Tyvek suit on, full respiratory protection, a hard hat, tape around the mask and [around our] gloves,” he says. They’d also be wearing heavy duty hip waders, as they walked into the nearly-empty ponds, vacuuming puddles.
It was grueling work, but it felt good to be applying himself to a new role while also exploring a new spiritual path.
“I was being reborn … reformed at every level,” he says. “Psychologically, emotionally, [and] physically.”
Thomas took the job to provide for his family. But then he learned more about the harms that hazardous wastes had inflicted on humanity. And he became more committed to the work.
Thomas went on to spend over a dozen years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These days he works for a consultancy called Safety Compliance Management, running workplace training programs. He suffered a couple workplace injuries early on in his career, and says he feels morally obligated to share what he knows.
Thomas really loves his work. He loves advocating for public safety and environmental stewardship. And though he left secular music long ago, he still loves composing and producing. He’s been releasing contemporary Christian music since 2001, and has an exciting new project in the works with his old friend – and now Grammy-winning jazz producer – Kamau Kenyatta.
Thomas never second-guessed his decision to leave The Supremes decades ago. And he has never questioned the very different career path he landed on.
“It just sort of happened,” he says. “I think it was a beautiful formation. And I think it was, you know, divinely planned.”
