the hum / By Bob Doran

Cosmic Roadhouse Country

(March 15, 2007)  In my younger days I spent many happy hours in a dive bar on the Arcata Plaza called The Boot Club, where the No. 1 favorite on the jukebox was a tune by Freddy Fender, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.” While the leader of Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days was still in elementary school when the song hit the country charts in the mid-‘70s, Dave borrowed the name.

“Midnight California,” the title track from the latest Wasted Days album, speaks of “outlaws and angels who dance around that jukebox drinking all night long.” It wouldn’t be out of place on that jukebox or on a Flying Burritos album, and you could easily imagine Dwight Yoakam or even Freddy covering it.

Dave Gleason grew up in the Bay Area (he currently lives in Oakland) and was raised by a part-time country musician who probably played “Wasted Days” more than once. “My dad was part of a fairly thriving country music circuit from Sacramento down to San Jose, played lead guitar in several cover bands that would play weekends around town,” Dave told me. “There were probably 20 different bars, honky tonk/country clubs - all of them are gone at this point.”

As a result Dave absorbed a healthy dose of ‘70s and ‘80s country, “Anything with a guy playing Telecaster guitar on it,” as he put it, both the Bakersfield school - Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and the like - and The Byrds/Burritos/Emmy Lou Harris brand of L.A. country/rock, which was something else entirely. “The Byrds and Gram Parsons stuff came from a completely different world, one that made Buck Owens and Merle seems pretty square. Gram was hanging out with the Stones and the Dead and doing gigs with them and came from a different place.”

Of course, teens being teens, Dave did not start out playing twangy. “I went through my Grand Funk and Led Zeppelin phase, but when I got into my mid-20s, country was the only music that made sense to me - it was what I felt comfortable writing and singing. It took on a life of its own and took over. I put a B-bender on my Telly, and really got into anything country.”

I had to stop Dave for an explanation of B-Bender. “It was this modification that Clarence White and Gene Parsons [from The Byrds] came up with. It’s a mechanism attached to the B string on a Telecaster - your strap is attached to it and when you pull down on the neck, it’s as if you’re bending a note like on a pedal steel; it takes it up one full step. Gene still installs them in a shop in Mendocino.” (www.stringbender.com)

The B-bender comes in handy when Dave’s on the road since the traveling Wasted Days are typically a stripped down unit. “It’s basically me and our drummer John, and our bass player Mike, and whoever else I can get to go,” Dave explained. “We have another guitar player, Pat Johnson, who goes out with us, but he’s going to be at South by Southwest when we’re up your way. I might bring a pedal steel player, but he hasn’t confirmed yet.”

Where does his band play now that much of the honky tonk circuit his dad worked is gone? “The last club in the East Bay that fit into that style just closed. The Ivy Room was on the corner of San Pablo and Solano. Someone new bought it and they still have music, but just DJ nights with expensive drinks. It’s the way things seem to be leaning and it’s a drag. Now we play a lot around Sacramento, Sonoma County, head down to L.A. We’re getting a mix of people - folks my dad’s age, but also younger kids who are into the whole Gram Parsons cosmic legacy. That’s not exactly what we do, but there’s some of it in there.”

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