SONIC REDUCER / CARL HANNI

RAIN, GOD, AND MORE VINTAGE GEAR: Wiyos on the Bob Dylan Summer Tour, Pt. 2

By Carl Hanni

August 4, Austin, TX: Fourteen days into a eighteen day run with NYC's The Wiyos across the country on the Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson/John Mellencamp summer tour. We're in Austin with a day off as part of a seven day/five show Texas mini-tour; a Texas five-step. The band jumped off the tour last weekend for two days to fly to Portland, OR, to play Pickathon, a study in contrasts for sure. I drove the van from Atlanta to Houston via Orange Beach, AL, where I hooked up with the Two Man Gentlemen Band, the fill-in openers for the tour on July 31.

Making good time, I dropped into New Orleans for lunch at Coop's on Sunday, which always has a good mix of locals and tourists who have strayed in off Decatur. This is the first time I've been to N.O. since Katrina; missing roofs, caved in houses and desolate looking streets can be seen from I-10, but downtown and the French Quarter look (and smell) pretty much the same. New Orleans is still, blessedly, New Orleans, in its humid, fetid, crazy-ass, dysfunctional glory.

The tour continues to unfold with its military-like precision. The marshalling of multiple semi-trucks full of gear, rigging, lights, staging and catering is carried out by a huge crew of road-tested veterans, many of whom have been with the various headliners for years or even decades. With separate production crews for Dylan, Mellencamp and Nelson, promoter staff for each show (often the same from show to show), a huge local production crew at each venue, plus security and catering staff AND three sets of band members (not counting The Wiyos) this is a huge rolling operation with many intertwined parts. After 2 weeks I'm getting a grip on who's-who, but still find someone new to meet each day that's been with the tour from day one. The Wiyos, with our five guys (including myself), are like guppies swimming with the big fish. But the tour has been great for the band so far, and they have been getting a good response to their opening half-hour set each night, making new friends and fans at each stop, selling CDs and planting themselves in the mind's eye of tens of thousands of music fans coast to coast.

The uniformity of the production is both necessary and terribly impressive, but the flavor of each city, crowd and venue comes through loud and clear.

Durham was a beautiful, urban/downtown ball park with a lively crowd that was ready to party, rock-concert style. Afterwards the band was put up by local friends, fellow musicians; a living room jam session kept everyone hopping till after midnight. Simpsonville, SC, outside Greenville, was a rolling green park of a venue in the heart of the conservative South, with a relatively sedate crowd that seemed a little less impressed with The Wiyos than other crowds; polite more than enthusiastic. A local evangelical gospel choir appeared backstage to join Willie for "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" and another couple of numbers; with their black suits and shoes and starched white shirts, they hung out outside backstage, seemingly completely peaceful in the crushing heat and humidity. A newscaster for the local Fox News affiliate was broadcasting live from the front gate and interviewed The Wiyos after the set for a spot on the 10 p.m. news. We camped at a local state park after the show, woken up at 7 a.m. by the first (but not the last) rain of the day. Rain has been a constant in the last couple of weeks; there may be a day or two that it hasn't.

The Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, just north of Atlanta, was blessedly a covered venue, and afforded the band our first, actual (air conditioned!) green room backstage, timely respite from the rain and humidity and general funkiness of The Wiyos' sturdy Freightliner van. Various friends and ladyfriends of the band appeared from Asheville and elsewhere, a mid-tour mini-reunion to help the band remember what life is like Off The Tour.

The band flew out at a very early 6 am for their shows at Pickathon, while I drove the van to Orange Beach for my rendezvous with the Two Man Gentlemen Band. The venue is an amphitheatre situated in a huge entertainment complex of shops, amusement park attractions and hotels on to the Alabama Gulf Coast, just off the beach. The area is incredibly lush and beautiful, half bayou and half not, with massive, kudzu- and creeper-draped trees dwarfing everything around. Churches in the area (and there are LOTS of churches) vie for having the most clever slogans on their signage out front - "Here comes the Son," "Beat the heat: instructions inside" and more witty come-ons. It's nice to see a little humor mixed in with their efforts to keep us out of hell; I wonder how many local church goers will be at the show tonight? Is this still "the devil's music" being played, or have we gotten past that?

The Gentlemen play a knockout set to a soggy crowd in the persistent rain, sign CDs and give away kazoos before hitting the road for an all-night drive to Nashville. Willie and Mellencamp play their standard sets, Willie spreading the love like only he can do. I finally get to see my second full set by Bob Dylan, whose voice is pretty rough at first, but warms up after a couple of songs. The band is incredibly tight, with guitarists Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball curling around each other like snakes in a pit and long-time bass player Tony Garnier swinging on the bottom end. Dylan is really mixing up the set-list from show to show, drawing on maybe 30 + songs for the tour. Tonight he plays "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding"), "Thunder on the Mountain," "It Ain't Me Babe," "The Levee's Gonna Break" and others before the standard three-song encore of "Like a Rolling Stone," "Jolene" and "All Along the Watchtower." Judging from a couple of his splay-legged leans into his keyboard, it looks like he might be having some fun on-stage; it's really sort of hard to tell, though.

After a Sunday sprint in the Freightliner that took me across parts of Alabama, all of lower Mississippi, Louisiana and into Texas (via New Orleans), I reach my nadir of the tour: Beaumont, Texas. I'm sure the people of Beaumont love Beaumont, and most folks were pretty decent all around, but I also got such the "you're not from these here parts" vibe from some of the locals at dinner (not the sweet waitress, thanks hon) that I almost had to check my calendar to see what decade it was.

Really guys: I'm not here to take, change or corrupt anything; just passing through and spending money. If you think I'm weird, you should see my friends. It all felt very Easy Rider for a moment. It's so humid that my glasses fog over when I step out of my hotel at 7 am.

After grabbing the weary Wiyos at the Houston airport (they knocked 'em dead at Pickathon, no sleep) we head to the beautiful (covered, thank you) Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion so they can jump back on the tour for the final twelve shows. They play through the exhaustion for a great set to a huge crowd and we hit the road for a late-night drive to Austin, for three evenings' worth of respite under a friendly roof, doing errands, hitting thrift stores, taking a dip in Barton Springs, and chowing down on Tex-Mex cooking (including my first salsa since leaving Tucson over two weeks ago). Time off in Austin: the perfect antidote to road burn.

Next: shows in Austin, Corpus Christi and Dallas/Grand Prairie.

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Carl Hanni is a music writer, music publicist, disc jockey and vinyl archivist living in Tucson, AZ. He  hosts the vinyl-only Scratchy Record Show every Tuesday night at the Red Room in downtown Tucson, and spins records wherever and whenever he can. He believes that in a better (all analog) world all records would be released on vinyl, but takes good music from wherever he finds it--even on CD. His feature piece on legendary bass player/record producer Harvey Brooks was recently published in Goldmine.