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Crib Notes

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Wiyos’ Michael Farkas talks about opening for Dylan, Nelson and Mellencamp

July 30th, 2009 by Chad Radford in Music news

Chad Radford: Are you guys from New York originally?
Michael Farkas: I am personally, and we all lived there for the first 5 of the 6 years we’ve been together, but this year we’ve kind of retreated to other places. Right now I currently live in Western Massachusetts. After years of living in New York I needed a change of pace.

What’s the line-up for the group?
Michael Farkas (vocals, harmonica, washboard, percussion, sound effects), Teddy Weber (vocals, table/lap steel guitars, parlor guitar, horn), Parrish Ellis (vocals, National resophonic guitar, archtop guitar, banjo, ukulele), Joe Dejarnette (upright bass, vocals). And Adam Matta does the beat boxing.

Your press release says that you cut your teeth busking and playing around New York and New Orleans…
Yep, those are two places we played a lot. In New Orleans it was mostly street busking. I think the first few years we were playing we would go down there a couple time a year and we just cut our teeth playing and working in the streets and small clubs as an old school busking band. That’s where we learned a lot about craft.

The kind of settings you’re talking about are a far cry from the massive venues you’re playing now with Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp.
Absolutely. It’s strange, and I’m glad that we have 20-some odd shows to work on it. Personally, it’s like bringing me back to the street because there’s something to learn as you go along. With small venues and clubs you get an idea how to work it because you’ve done it all before, and assuming that the sound is okay and that people show up, you can have a good show every time, more or less. With these venues, which are a general seating environments, we’re playing to a full capacity crowd of 8-10,000 people… We’re used to playing where everyone can see us. We like intimate environments, but these shows simply are not intimate. The intimacy comes simply from the people who are pushed up against the front and really got there early. I treat that as the small club room in my mind.

How did you land this tour?
That’s the big question. Ultimately we’re not sure. Dylan’s management came to us and wanted us on this tour.

Have you found that you play your songs differently?
A little bit, but it’s mostly just the choice of the material. We only have 30 minutes, which comes out to about 8 songs for us. The arc of our show at the very least has always been about 50 minutes, so it’s different getting your paces and showing people what kind of repertoire you have. Obviously some people are there for the whole show and others are walking around and catching the last tune. Other people are getting seated or buying beers, so there’s all of that going on and we’re just trying to figure out how to best accommodate our sound and our performance style during all of this. Nothing can prepare you for it other than doing it. There’s no lesson in rock school where someone says ‘okay, we’re going to put you in front of 10,000 people who don’t know who the heck you are, GO!’

It’s also a real rock and roll environment, which we’re not used to either. We don’t have a drummer, so all of our bass sounds are coming from the bass player, although we are playing with a beat boxer who acts like a drummer sometimes. We’re not a plugged-in electric band like the other acts, so clearly there’s a volume issue. We’re not penetrating the crowd with the kind of volume that Dylan or Mellencamp are. That’s intentional too. They keep the louder sets for the big acts, that’s just stage craftsmanship.

The juxtaposition of scratching and beat boxing over the Vaudeville approach that you guys have also kind of takes me out of my comfort zone a little bit because it’s so unexpected in the context of the music you are playing.
A lot of the music we sourcing is very rural. Country blues, Delta blues, Piedmont blues, or the kind of New Orleans hot jazz that was kind of known further north and west in its trajectory. And the Duke Ellington big band feel, which we didn’t have because we were more of jug band experience. We took beat boxing in the Mills Brothers style of a vocal percussionist. If they would have had an Adam Matta around back then they probably would have used him too. So it was very much of a piece to us. A lot of those lines are like a mouth-trumpet piece the Mills Bros. would have done. They did a lot of their instrumental sounds with their voices, so we were trying to create this hybrid that felt of a piece in the lineage of urban, self-taught, DIY traditions.

In so far as the Dylan tour, we were excited because it corresponded with us releasing this record. We’re all pulling from the same well and I feel that since we are, I imagine these guys would be excited to hear what we’re working on, simply because they’ve all gone through the well and made their own careers out of original material.

There are no standards on Broken Land Bell, which is also a different take for such a situationist kind of group — I can imagine that draws fire from the purists.
It’s 100% written by the three song writers in the band. We’ve always fought with purists and we’ve never been a purist band. We learned the material very academically, but always let that go and tried to add our own flare. There are going to be people who are upset because there’s no washboard on the record, but we’ve been finding that people are excited about it mostly because they like the original songs, which is something that we’ve always done. For us the record feels like the culmination of all these years working a craft and this is what we spilled out as writers. If one listens to it from soup to nuts there’s definitely a lot of different styles going on there.

Touring with Dylan these days probably isn’t much like what we saw in Don’t Look Back, huh?
Well that was Dylan on the rise. What’s interesting for me is that – other than us – Mellencamp is the youngest rock star here and he’s gotta be in his 50s. Out of all of these guys they’re definitely the most rock and roll band on the bill and I say rock and roll loosely, because they’re all rocking out. But they’re definitely putting out a louder, aggressive kind of show.

These guys could all be resting on their laurels at this point, but at the end of the day they’re just musicians who want to play. I don’t think that any of these guys need to tour. They’re probably getting enough residuals from the songs that they have written — they’ve all written classics that are out there in the world, and some of those songs have been out there for decades. But they still love what they do and do it to a limited sense and know how to take care of themselves on the road. It’s cool to see. The comfort level is much different now from when they started. They’ve earned that.

Is Willie Nelson a wild man back stage?
We don’t see the stars themselves. They retreat to their own corners when they’re not on stage. They keep their space private. But the band members that we’ve met are terrific. We haven’t shaken hands with any of the main guys yet, and it may not happen. There are just so many people clamoring for their attention and we all respect that.