Johnny Lawless, J.B. Beverley, Dan Mazer. Three As One.
Johnny Lawless walked to the far side of the room and stepped up onto the half-darkened stage. He bent quickly to pick up his bass and pulled it towards him, settling it between his legs, centering it towards his body. Dan walked onto the stage next. He picked up his banjo and put his fingerpicks on with a deliberate care. No drums. Just a doghouse bass, banjo and acoustic guitar. Just the razor moment, the night and the sound. Everything.
The red and blue spots on the stage went on and the band picked their instruments to check the sound in the monitors. J.B. gave a thumbs up to the soundman in the back of the room and stepped up towards the microphone.
“Good evening, Gibson City. If you like honky-tonk, rockabilly, rock and roll, bluegrass and everything that the radio doesn’t play, then you’re in for a hell of a time tonight. I’m J.B. Beverley and we are The Wayward Drifters,” he said. He stepped back from the microphone, turned to Dan and said something, his words lost to me on the side of the stage in the applause. He stamped his cowboy boot down hard on the wood stage, driving the first point of the rhythm. His right hand slashed down across the six strings of his guitar, Dan jumped right into the fray in a machine gun of banjo, Johnny threw a concussion wave of bass notes in triplet across the room and they were off.
Visible as a tear on a new widow’s cheek the long drives, the motels, the bad food, the cigarettes and the whiskey dissolved into the sound coming from the stage. There was no former Marine, no former Murder Junkie, no former music theory major up there. Three individuals had given their selves over to the search and met as one. The search that they were willing is the search that we all face, though only some hear. It is a search that once all the influences, environments, cities and lonely moments that fall upon the mind as it drifts off to sleep have faded leaves only the exposed core of the self. In that exposure, that illuminated and isolated core the individual stands, their selves raw and naked. It is a self that is at once unique and at the same time a part of a larger sweeping dynamic that fuels us all. The musician, the artist in any right, leaves the core exposed to accept what is around him, to become antennae for that dynamic, a lightning rod that funnels the voodoo back down into the earth, into the ears and hearts of those that choose to listen. It is acceptance then by all. Acceptance by the artist of his place and of the releasing of the egos and an acceptance by the audience of the sound that is given to them. In that accepting all may be transformed, a transformation that separates us from other animals because other animals can’t sing the blues.
I watched Dan’s fingers crawl across his banjo like spiders on the run and thought of what he had told me earlier about The Wayward Drifters’ sound. “When I was playing bluegrass only, I was really worried about technical virtuosity, since so much of bluegrass is about that. Being in this band I don’t worry about that; not in the same way at least. What I worry about is making it simple and perfect. And it can be simple and perfect.”
“It definitely can be,” J.B. had added. “It just has to be honest and we have to play it well enough and people will listen. It has to be honest. Even if I change the lyrics of a song we’re covering a little, I have to be true to what that song is saying and be true to myself when singing it. That way, in the end, it all stays part of The Wayward Drifters sound.”
As a band they were all seasoned musicians, capable of lengthy expressions of the mind, but they chose to make songs that were short, tight as anything ever created and ‘simple’ enough to burn down dance floors everywhere. It is one thing to play music; it is another to play music that is tight and funky. How much easier it would be to unleash a torrent of notes across a room, to show off skill and speed and use the rhythm section as a backdrop for that only, than it is to reel in the virtuosity and attempt to clarify and simplify the ideas until they show brightly and clearly and for all. It is one thing to stand apart from a band and solo, it is another to solo within a band as a part of it, part of a larger sound, just trying to make it simple and perfect.
Deep into their first set J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters had fastened themselves to that magic spot and were grooving a set that had the backbones in the room wiggling like jellyfish sex. They cut into a cover of Chuck Berry’s ’30 Days’ that had the bottom end of the song opening wide up like a chest wound. They dug into the chord changes deeply, a pocket more like a crater and they took it low and slow. Johnny Lawless’ slapping hand was playing the bass like it was a conga, the deep notes rippling across the room in waves, punctuated by a staccato flurry of upper register notes and slaps that made him sound like a one-man drum line and bass factory. J.B.‘s right hand kept a hard rhythm right along with him, his voice crying Berry’s lament for his woman across the room, each word falling in all of the right places. His voice carried all of the weight of his time, of his losses and the tattered edges of his heart. Dan’s banjo filled out the groove, going from stank scratching like a DJ filling in the breaks to runs of notes that had people screaming at him from the back of the room. As Dan took his solos, J.B. stepped back towards the solid center of their space, the pocket itself, and lowered his head, concentrating solely on the moment. That drawing back drew their sound together and anchored it from some place that only the three of them could know.
From the center of the crowd that had gathered in the middle of the room to listen a legless vet in an electric wheelchair drove himself out onto the dance floor in front of the band. He spun the chair once, his 82nd Airborne sticker showing proudly across the chair’s back. He stopped and faced the band, smiled and then used his chair to dance him around the floor. There were people dancing already and there were people that had latched onto the band’s sound, but this vet cut the floor to pieces around them. His eyes closed, his chair circling and weaving, turning sharply, and coming back he danced harder than them all, leaving me on the side of the stage awash in sound and sight and feeling like the walls were made of smoke.
Here they all were, brokedown and busted in the middle of what they love. But what they love creates the wounds and the only way to patch them up is to play more, to get on stage and let go of yourself to something else, to break more, to grow more and expose the core. The process was clear and it was only here, out on the road, that it could happen. In order to find that core they had to cross the horizon, but when the horizon is crossed there is still much that is left behind. That is the risk they face every night and every mile, but there in the middle of ’30 Days’ they asked the crowd and the legless vet a simple question: If you’re not willing to risk it all, why try?
The song ended at the same moment the crowd burst into applause. J.B. raised his right hand in thanks and unslung his guitar, laying it gently on top of the case behind him. Dan unhooked himself from his banjo and fingerpicks, Johnny put his bass to rest. The set was over and they needed a break. They came off of the side of the stage towards me.
Johnny Lawless and J.B. Beverley. Running the Voodoo Down
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