Tampa Calling

John Wesley darts into his rehearsal room at a warehouse in an industrial section of Ybor City hunting for one of his $3,000 Paul Reed Smith guitars. “Ugh,” he groans. “I thought it was in here. I guess it must be at home.”

Most guitarists fortunate enough to own a PRS might be panicked if it wasn’t within arm’s length, but not Wesley — he has eight of them, courtesy of an endorsement deal with the manufacturer.

Nice perk if you can get it.

John Wesley on stage with Porcupine Tree

John Wesley is not a rock star, but he’s one of the more successful musicians that Tampa Bay has produced. The 46-year-old guitarist/singer/songwriter flies under the local radar for the most part. That’s because his main gig — the one that affords him those gaudy axes and a salary that provides a comfortable living — is as a hired-gun guitarist for the British art-rock band Porcupine Tree.

In seven years with the group, Wesley has toured all over the U.S., Europe, Mexico, Australia and Japan. Porcupine Tree routinely plays shows to crowds in excess of 2,000 — more overseas. Wesley performs out front, stage right, covering intricate guitar parts, background vocals and a handful of solos during the band’s two-hour sets. With a split signal and special pickup, he uses his Paul Reed Smiths to play both acoustic and electric parts.

But Wesley also has other musical outlets beyond his role as sideman. “I remember we closed a tour at the Millennium Dome in London in front of several thousand people and three days later I was playing solo in a [local] restaurant in front of three people who weren’t sure they wanted me there,” he says with a chuckle. “So, it can be humbling.”

When in town, Wesley plays cover gigs, just him and a guitar and a loop station, at places like the Green Iguana. In addition, he occasionally does concerts at area clubs with a power trio that showcases his original rock music. A naturally disciplined guy, he usually spends five hours a day in his Brandon home practicing guitar and writing music. Wesley has five solo albums out — only one, 1994’s Under the Red and White Sky, has been a minor commercial success, moving some 15,000 units in Europe.

All of his albums are available for download — free (at john-wesley.com). “About a year and a half ago, I had this kind of nervous breakdown where I was frustrated that people weren’t hearing my music,” he says. “In Europe, people have to plunk down like $25 American to buy one of my CDs. They really have to like me to do that.

“So after talking it over with my wife, I made a move to get all my rights back. It was like, ‘I have all this music — it’s effectively my life’s work — and no one is hearing it. I want people to hear it.’ So I made it available free via download. Yeah, I’d like to make some money off it, but at least people are hearing it and hopefully the business takes care of itself in the form of gigs or something.”

During their first week of availability, Wesley says his CDs generated around 10,000 downloads, and have subsequently totaled more than 30,000. The five albums show that Wesley follows a far-flung muse — ranging from passionate acoustic ballads to proggy rock, but always with melodies, delivered in his urgent, at times tremulous, tenor. He values lyrics, and his themes range from the vagaries of love to young men being killed in senseless wars.

Wes in Red Room Recorders

Wesley, whose full name is John Wesley Dearth (friends call him Wes), is telling his story in Red Room Recorders, the cozily lit studio he owns with drummer Mark Prator. The small space is situated on the opposite side of the warehouse from the rehearsal room. He’s wearing tight, faded jeans, battered work boots and a gray sweatshirt on an abnormally chilly weekday afternoon.

Wes is one of those fellows to whom the phrase “nicest guy in the world” applies. Affable, talkative and generous, you can see how he can gallivant around the world with a bunch of sarcastic Brits, and then return home and pick up solo gigging right where he left off. He takes an interest in younger musicians on the local scene. When Wes noticed that singer/songwriter Geri X was playing a cheapo acoustic guitar, he pulled one of his Babicz models off a wall and gave it to her.

“The Morris brothers [who own Morrissound Studios in Tampa] had faith in Mark [Prator] and I, and helped us out,” Wesley says. “That inspired me to do stuff for Shawn [Kyle of the Beauvilles], Geri X and a metal band called End of the Rope. The Morrises gave us a break, so I try to pass it along.”

Wesley lives with his wife Rebecca in a home that’s three doors down from the one he grew up in. His parents adopted him in 1962 when he was a couple months old, and he grew up lower middle class. He loved music practically from the cradle, and at age 12 started taking once-a-week guitar lessons from a guy down the street.

One day Wes spotted an unmarked 8-track on the side of the road and picked it up. He listened to that tape constantly, mesmerized by the harmony vocals and moving lyrics. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he discovered it was Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Trouble Water. Why he wasn’t obsessed with discovering the identity of the artist Wes can’t say: “It was like my little secret.”

The guitarist broke his cherry in a band called The Void, which he says didn’t have enough sense to learn cover songs. As a result, they rarely played out. In ’82, Wes, Mark Prator, his keyboardist brother Paul Prator and singer Jimmy Murdock formed Autodrive.

Three years in, they became part of a rock showcase circuit and chased the almighty record deal. Autodrive performed five, six, seven nights a week, three sets of covers and one of originals. In the Button South in Miami and similar large clubs around the Southeast, the band played shows with big crowds, big production, big expenses and big hair — but little tangible to show for it.

Although Murdock had the look and the voice, Autodrive just didn’t have the heart to become a hair band, although in some respects they tried. “We had real chops and tried to go pop with it, and, horribly, it didn’t work,” Wesley admits. “Management tried to make us a hair band, but my favorite album in 1987 was Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. We were always trying to be something we weren’t.”

Wesley wasn’t aware at the time just how artistically dysfunctional Autodrive was, and it became increasingly frustrating as the months and years wore on and no big-label record contract materialized. The band collapsed in 1991.

He returned home, broke, and within days was playing a solo acoustic gig at Scotland Yard pub. In the early 1990s, struggling to cover his nut, Wesley took a job as a guitar tech on a tour for British prog-rock band Marillion. Early in the trek, he found himself on stage in a club, battling it out with another guitarist on a Led Zeppelin tune. That got the Marrillion guys attention.

They offered Wesley the opening slot on the tour. “I made a hundred bucks on top of my tech pay to do 30 minutes of my own stuff with an acoustic guitar in front of big crowds,” he says. For their subsequent 70-date tour, Marillion invited Wesley to come out as strictly the opening act. “Without my tech salary and room allowance, I had to take care of everything myself,” Wes says, bemused. “On one date I played in front of 14,000 people, but I came home from the tour with just a few hundred bucks.”

Marillion frontman Fish left to form his own band, and in ’98 hired Wesley as a guitarist. The arrangement lasted until 2001. Steve Wilson, the creative nexus of Porcupine Tree, became familiar with Wesley via his work with Fish. One day, Wes, back in Tampa, got a call from Wilson, who asked him if he could “heavy some guitar parts up a bit.”

Wes — an expert on how to exact a well recorded guitar sound — delivered in spades, and Wilson combined Wes’ tracks with his own for the final master of “The Blackest Eyes.”
Wes says he didn’t negotiate a fee for his work. “You leave something on the table,” he says. “I didn’t ask for anything; it was the experience of doing it. I think he eventually paid me a couple hundred bucks, but doing it obviously opened doors.”

At about that time, Porcupine Tree’s music was getting more layered, complex and guitar-oriented — and increasingly difficult to reproduce on stage. They thought of Wes. “It’s essential to have someone who’s a really good guitar player and a good singer who has a strong work ethic, as Wes does,” Wilson says by phone from England. “He’s also comfortable playing more complicated things than the average R&B stuff, different time signatures, long songs that go off on tangents. It’s really a godsend that he can fulfill that role.”

An outsider might ask: Why, after this many years, has John Wesley not become a full-fledged member of Porcupine Tree? “They have a particular creative and business dynamic, and it would be difficult to add me into it,” he says. “I don’t expect to be added as a full member, but I’ll contribute to the creative process when asked.”

To that end, for the last two Porcupine Tree albums, Wilson has flown to the States and stayed in Brandon for a week, cutting his guitar parts on Wes’ collection of vintage instruments, amps and effects. (And using Mark Prator as an engineer.) Wilson plans to do the same for an album that’s currently in the works.

Wes says that Wilson has taught him many things, but none more important than this: “He told me, ‘Make music in a vacuum.’ A lot of things I do never fit into a particular commercial niche. But he insisted it doesn’t have to. It’s just music. Don’t conform to anyone else’s idea of the music you should make. Now I don’t care anymore. I just make the music the way it comes out.”

Porcupine Tree’s tour legs are generally four to six weeks of five to seven shows per. The four band members and Wesley spend a lot of time together on a luxe tour bus — an arrangement that took a bit of getting used to.

“I think it was harder for him than for us,” Wilson says. “You’ve got these miserable English guys full of sarcasm and cynicism, that British sense of humor. It took him a little while, but he has adapted wonderfully well to it, even though I don’t think it comes naturally to him. But he takes it all in stride, and has learned to give as good as he gets.

“I think there’s an element of our being different that helps it work. It’s nice to have that kind of positive personality on the bus. Sometimes after shows, when the fans are waiting outside, us four English guys can’t be bothered. We just want to get on the bus. But he’s out there chatting with fans, signing autographs, going for a beer with them. He acts as a decoy for us. It’s not for nothing that he’s known as the nicest bloke in the band.”

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