Like Father, Like Son...
Second generation musicians Trevor Wheetman and James Webb bring musical legacies to Lonesome “Traveler."
Words & Pix by James Scolari
As the saying goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. For Lonesome Traveler musicians Trevor Wheetman and James Webb, the saying could be tailor-made. Wheetman (who also serves as the show’s assistant musical director) is the son of LT musical director Dan Wheetman, while Webb is the son of legendary performer and songwriter Jimmy Webb, who penned such hits as "Up, Up and Away", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", and "MacArthur Park.”
The two bring that musical pedigree to bear in greatly enriching the Lonesome Traveler sound – Webb plays bass, while Wheetman plays, at intervals, guitar, fiddle, mandolin, piano and electric guitar.
RTC: You both come to Lonesome Traveler with a musical background; in some ways music is like your mother tongue.
JW: Thanksgiving in our house was crazy – we had Art Garfunkel and Larry Correal, Linda Ronstadt, and all sorts of folks would come, everybody would have a couple of drinks, and they’d always end up playing a bunch of songs. I just thought that’s the way things were supposed to be; my older brothers played music, so I naturally fell into that.
TW: You were forced to play?
JW: Oh, not at all, my mom definitely encouraged me to be a doctor, but that never worked out. I always ended up smoking cigarettes at night and playing guitar instead of studying and stuff – I was like a wreck in high school, (laughs) I was obviously bit by the devil, I was going to play music and there wasn’t much to be done about it.
TW: That’s similar to mine; I didn’t have Art Garfunkel coming over, but my family has a tradition of playing music together, music was definitely a big part of growing up. My dad with his sort of Appalachian traditional tunes, it’s a great way for a family to connect, to just bust out the fiddles and guitars and sing along. Music is deep in my genetics, I think being in the household helped, but I think it’s also in the blood.
JW: I would definitely agree with that.
RTC: Music is a common bond with tremendous power to bring people together, whether they play or not. Having that in your DNA, it makes you a connector.
TW: For me, I don’t know that’s it’s an idea that I’ve developed that pursuit, it’s more like a personality trait. I think everyone’s a musician; that sounds cheesy, but it’s almost impossible to find someone who doesn’t love music. Whether or not they get good at playing an instrument is beside the point; in my case and James’s case, we were encouraged – and were lucky enough to have access to great instruments.
JW: One thing I would add to it, is that, as a writer – if you write something that is universally true, that does all the connecting work for you. If you’re truly honest with yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish in any composition, people will get it because you got it. The message is universal, if it’s true. Some people contrive a lot of goofiness, and people can smell it.
TW: That’s true of writing, for sure, but also performance – the performing of music can bring people together, musicians and non-musicians. It’s interesting that it’s not as common–not as many people play instruments as I think should. It usually has something to do with a bad teacher along the way, and that’s a shame. Bad teachers can ruin your taste for music as a kid.
JW: Whereas if you are, as a kid, playing for people and getting positive attention, that’s much more massive. That’s where you can get a taste for it and crave it for your whole life.
RTC: And that’s where this roots music came from – playing it on porches. That same ethic that led to Lonesome Traveler is prevalent in your backgrounds; you’re very much a part of that tradition.
TW: Absolutely. Especially with the more traditional tunes. They have a funny way of changing over time; I’ve heard recordings of tunes that my pops has taught me on the fiddle, and they’re similar, but you can tell throughout the generations there have been changes. We see that with this folk music too–
JW: Just at the house and driving around we’ve developed new verses ourselves, though not appropriate for polite conversation! (laughs)
TW: They’re really simple melodies, and it’s easy, I can see how Woody Guthrie did it and why he did it, with popular gospel stuff, reinventing it. It’s automatically going to get stuck in your head, and you’ll be able to sing along with it–
JW: Immediately. We’re just sort of goofing around with it, but the lesson is, you can see the gestation of these songs, you can see how a tune’s in somebody’s head, and going back to speaking the truth, they speak the truth of their circumstances through easily grasped tools.
TW: Its in the public consciousness, in the vernacular already.
JW: It’s there already – everybody knows the tune to “This Land Is Your Land.” That’s how it gets infectious.
TW: I’m pretty interested to see how much the audience sings along with this stuff; I honestly think we could have sound problems because of it – I mean, we have all this tech and we’ve got it down, but if that whole place starts singing, it could be really cool.
JW: All of a sudden we’re not just playing with each other, but we’re–
TW: Wrangling an audience.
RTC: I don’t think it’s a matter of it’s going to happen, I think it’s pretty certain to happen. As you said, everybody’s got music in them. You also said you’re just goofing around with it, but isn’t that really what’s always happened?
JW: That’s it. That’s the nugget of truth. Everybody is, and who knows what Woody Guthrie’s intentions were in re-writing the lyrics to a spiritual, but probably he had the tune in his head–
TW: Even in that sense, the lyrics are kind of tongue-in-cheek, he was kind of goofing around…
JW: That’s part of hanging out, you’re going to want to have a laugh, you’re going to want to have some levity in it, and people are going to want to gather to have a fun time.
TW: It’s easy to change lyrics to fit the current problems, because the problems never change, it’s just the context, you know, so it’s easy to just manipulate them a little for today. I think a lot of these songs have been forgotten by our generation.
JW: I would say so, and I’m extremely grateful for this experience, getting exposed to it, and I learning that style of writing has been really eye-opening for me. I can’t even imagine – Trevor and I are reasonably musically savvy people, and still have quite a distance from this material. Thinking of the generation after us, how far they must actually be. The legacy of that kind of get together might have passed. I think maybe the idea of a porch meeting on a July evening – that ship has sailed. In a lot of ways this show is an affectionate look at that period.
RTC: Have we changed so fundamentally?
TW: Our attention spans have gotten more frenetic, but I think our need for music and camaraderie is just as deep, as far as being human goes.
JW: That’s just universal, you’re not going to get around that. There’s a vein in our generation of being very thirsty for authenticity, and that camaraderie is not there, in the sense that you can’t get something like that out of a text message – you can’t get the feeling you’d have walking away from that porch meeting from a YouTube video.
TW: Also, not as many people play instruments. Back before recorded music, everybody played piano, at least one member of the family did, and you got your sheet music, and that was your CD, that was your entertainment. So that has changed, but I think people’s dependency in music is still there. And I think actually it’s something that’s coming back around–I think more and more people are taking an interest in playing music.
But the folk songs? I don’t know if enough people know all the standards. If you go to an old-timey fiddle pickin’ party, everyone knows all the tunes–that’s part of that specific tradition. As far as folk singing goes, I don’t know if our generation has a lot of that.
JW: Do you think that’s because that the folk tradition in and of itself is very humble, and that playing an instrument has become so synonymous with stardom and “the business” itself, that it’s sort of lost that recreational, amateur thing? People not trying to be big stars, just playing piano and having fun, you know? Music for the joy of music; it has to be divorced from this idea of becoming a star. I think perhaps there’s a chance that someone could come out of left field and become another great folk star; the world is thirsty for it. But it’s such a humble medium, in its nature.
RTC: Its the nature of zeitgeist that it’s always shifting, and nobody can predict where it goes next.
JW: Then all of a sudden folk is the new punk–
TW: It’s already going that way, kind of. You look at Fleet Foxes, Mumford & Sons, the Crosby, Stills & Nash sound is coming back – that’s just the cycle of music popularity.
RTC: I think that there’s something very, very personal about folk; it’s always spoken very directly to people’s lives. You can put your finger on all sorts of contemporary artists who simply wouldn’t be, without being able to stand on those great shoulders – people from Jewel to Jason Mraz, anybody who stands up there alone with a guitar and sings a song…
JW: Yes, they’d be in that family, whether they like it or not.
TW: Whether they know it or not; some people don’t even know their own roots, which is always surprising to me…
RTC: So the question becomes, as young men, more than musicians, as members of a generation, do you see this music penetrating?
TW: I see the tradition penetrating. As far as our generation goes, I don’t know if these particular songs will be re-born in any way, but I think that the same thing that created these songs is still around. It’s never stopped; there’s always been the troubadour and the voice of a generation and people telling stories, and that’s deep and is probably never going to go away. I think its becoming more popular now, especially the instrumentation, the mandolin and the banjo, the rootsy sound is coming back. The true reason for this is never going to change.
RTC: So there’s this idea of the folk revolution: as much an overturning as a societal revolution as another turn of this great wheel, coming back around to serve another generation.
JW: It will change – the difference between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan is pretty impressive.
TW: Yes, and only a generation difference.
(Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper joins the group)
RTC: Hi Nick – we were just talking about zeitgeist and the way folk comes back around to serve new generations, and whether this music really can inspire the youth of this age.
NMC: I can’t imagine it couldn’t; mostly because as far as culture has come, the issues haven’t changed very much. The people who are frustrated and writing this music, the young people now are frustrated about the exactly the same issues. I think that’s evident all across the country and all across the world at the moment.
JW: Is there a case to be made that a transformative character like Kurt Cobain, for example, could be at least intellectually understood as a counter-cultural part of a revolution that speaks honestly to a whole different generation of people? That perhaps folk music lives on, but as changed–
TW: He to me is the abstract artist, as opposed to the representational artist. There’s something in his work that is saying something about his time and place, but he’s not saying it directly.
NMC: He’s also much more introspective; Kurt Cobain was maybe even the grand master of that kind of abstract introspection, whereas maybe Bob Dylan was the only one to really successfully ride that line between both worlds, to sort of do introspective and representational culture at the same time.
JW: But I’m searching for the folk music tradition in our time. Has it changed to the point where it can’t be recognized at face value for what it is–
TW: We just have to decide what you mean by that – if it’s music that becomes popular on the charts, maybe yes, that’s kind of come and gone. But folk music has always existed, from the days of the caveman, by definition, that’s what it is, music of the people.
NMC: I think if what you’re looking for is an artist for whom you buy their record, and you’re listening to it–I’m not sure how you’re defining folk music, but let’s say in the context of this show. A lot of let’s say “cause-based” music, forward-motion, people’s movement music, finding an album based on that is difficult. You find pieces of it in a lot of popular music, but albums as whole pieces aren’t driven that way, even if you find those elements in their work.
RTC: Cause-based music, in album format. Does that make Pink Floyd folk artists of a sort?
TW: Yes, well some of their music was protest songs.
NMC: Folk music isn’t just defined by the ideas you’re communicating, though that’s a huge force. So yes, does Pink Floyd have folk identity? Of course. Are they a folk band? (laughs) No.
TW: Part of it that you have to remember – to make a good folk song, it has to be easily accessible and easily playable, that’s how it spreads around. It’s three chords and the truth. That’s all you need.
NMC: That actually might be the best definition of folk music that I’ve ever heard.
TW: I think it’s true, that’s all you need.
RTC: Back to generational influence – Nick, you’re also a second-generation musician.
NMC: My parents are classical musicians, yes. My dad was never really a folk fan, though - as a classical musician, three chords were just not interesting enough for him. He did actually tour with a folk musician – I believe the tour was called “Folking Harpsichord.” So the lens I come from through my dad is a lot of musicology and music theory. I will say as my father’s gotten older, he’s mourned the lack of this kind of music in the music scene.
My mother, on the other hand, she’s a singer, and she met her friends in college by sitting around by a tree with a guitar, singing these songs. That’s how I met a lot of my friends, too, I just didn’t know it was part of her background.
TW; That’s just because it’s hard to sit under a tree and play Bach Etudes together.
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