| Back To Good Who Weekly, Novermber 20, 2000 |
These days many of his lyrics revolve around life with Marisol (nee Maldonaldo), a New York model of Puerto Rican and Spanish descent. The two were introduced by a mutual friend after a 1998 Match-box Twenty show in Montreal. Rob and I met for literally 10 minutes, says Marisol, 24. "When I left I looked at my girlfriend and said That's the man I'm going to marry' After months of courtship by phone, Thomas, who had been on the road in Europe, had his first date with Marisol at a Boston music festival. Afterwards, he says, "I told everyone I was going to marry her." The twin predictions came true in a private ceremony at his manager's California home last year. Still, says Marisol, laughing, "girls are like, 'My God! Do you realise that's Rob Thomas?!' I think it's really funny. He's a boy who's very sloppy and has to be shown where the [dirty clothes] hamper is.,,
The tempest in Thomas's life began swirling soon after he was born on Valentine's Day 1972, in Landstuhl, Germany, where his father, Bill (now 49 and a textile company supervisor in Manning, South Carolina), was stationed in the army. Robert Kelly Thomas was 6 months old when his family moved back to the US. Two years later Bill Thomas and his wife, Mamie, now 49 and employed at a software company in Orlando, divorced, and Rob and Missy (Mamie's daughter from a previous marriage) moved with their mother to Lake City, South Carolina. There they lived briefly with their maternal grand mother (now deceased), who owned a roadside market where she sold moonshine and marijuana under the counter. "Everyone in my family," Thomas says in his Carolina drawl, "sounded like Elvis when they talked. We were these barefoot, dirty redneck kids."
As his mother moved from town to town, before settling in Orlando in 1983, Thomas and his sister lived in a succession of low-rent apart-ments and trailers. "For a while we had no furniture," he recalls. "We'd put newspaper down and say, 'This is our couch.' That was our big joke."
Young Kelly, as Thomas's family still calls him, was only 12 when his mother was diagnosed with Hodg-kin's disease. "I would be up all night taking care of her," recalls Thomas, whose sister moved out of the house to get married at age 17. "I felt a lot of resentment, like I was dealing with things nobody else was dealing with. I felt all this was her fault. She had totally robbed me of my youth." Once his mother's cancer went into remission (it is currently dormant), she adopted a free-spirited approach to life. "There were always bikers around the house," Thomas says. "There were wild parties, and my mom would wake me up and introduce me to her friends-'This is my son'-and I was like, 'Aw, I've got to get to bed.' By the time I was 16, I felt old." Estranged from his father as well, Thomas (who has since grown close to both parents) left home, crashing with friends. "I would sneak into their houses at night and stay in their closets. Sometimes friends would leave the family car open and let me sleep in it."
Before dropping out at 17, Thomas (who later obtained a high-school equivalency diploma) attended Lake Brantley High School in Altamont Springs, Florida, where he joined the choir because, he says, "I had the hots for a girl." At the same time, a friend taught him to play keyboards, and he began "writing really cheesy love songs, so I could play them to all the girls at parties."
He joined forces with Doucette and Yale in a succession of Orlando bar bands before they were signed by Atlantic Records in 1996. (Cook and Gaynor were recruited a short while later.) So far the group's enor-mous success hasn't seemed to swell egos. "We all keep our heads on our shoulders," says Thomas. "He is modest to a fault," adds Marisol, who recently moved with her husband from a New York loft to a home in an upper~middle-class neighbourhood in Westchester County, New York state. "He tells me, 'The day will come when you're the only one who's still going to think I'm hot.'
At least one megastar doesn't think much of him. Thomas cringes as he remembers approaching Leonardo DiCaprio at a New York nightclub in 1998 and introducing himself. When the Titanic star gave him the cold shoulder, Thomas took a humiliating walk back to his seat. "I realised I'm still such a fan," he says. "I've had to learn to back off. If you're in a restaurant and Billy Joel's there, just leave him alone."
Michael Haederle IN TALLAHASSEE AND AUSTIN
