the hum / By Bob Doran

A Plastic Vodka Bottle Full of Pennies

(May 3, 2007)  I caught Jason Webley‘sact a few years ago in an unlikely place: a sports bar behind the now defunct Arcata Denny’s. (The Placebo put on shows there for a spell.) What I remember most is him jumping up on a table with his accordion to lead the crowd in one rollicking sing-along after another.

Webley did not start out as one of those geeky kids playing “Two Guitars” and “Dark Eyes” on the squeezebox. “I was just a geeky kid; accordion came later. It’s since playing accordion that I’ve become cool,” he contends. “I used to be a geek with an electric guitar. I had a guitar and played in punky bands and I had a computer. I sequenced stuff. I was much geekier.”

Jason Webley and Rev. Peyton.

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Webley picked up the accordion in college when he was part of a performance of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He says he’s sometimes described as Brechtian, but rejects the notion. He’ll cop to a bit of influence from Brecht’s collaborator Kurt Weill, but, he says, “I grew up on punk rock music and crappy things like Billy Joel, and no matter what happens later in life, no matter what I listen to, those are my influences, the stuff I listened to when I was 16 or 17.”

And, he emphasizes, he does not just play accordion. “It’s just one of many tools. I play a lot of instruments, I tell stories. The accordion is dynamic and memorable, but I don’t really consider myself an accordion player. I’m not all that good at it.”

He assured me that he also played guitar when I saw him. “You just don’t remember. I also probably had a plastic vodka bottle full of pennies that I would bang and shake.”

He was in Tucson the day we talked, another stop on a long string of solo tours. This weekend he hooks up with The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band for a series of shows. The Big Damn Band is a family thing: the Rev, his wife and his brother make up the trio. The Seattle-based Webley met them at a club in their hometown, Indianapolis.

He was impressed. “They play something like Delta blues, incredibly straight, traditional Delta blues music, to my ear anyway. And because they play it so straight, to me it sounds almost like punk rock. Punk was originally a folk form more so than most popular music. Punk grew out of kids in their garages banging on drums and electric guitars — it’s not something that comes out of music schools or an intellectual elite.”

Webley and the Reverend joined forces for an album, Two Bottles of Wine, which will be officially released this weekend. The associated tour includes a stop in Arcata Tuesday, May 8, at Muddy’s Hot Cup. Expect individual sets from Webley and the Big Damn Band, then some numbers from the joint sessions. For example, the title track, a hard-driving, foot-stomping number with lots of slide guitar and a washboard-powered Cajun beat: It’s good, strong stuff, nothing geeky about it (not that there’s anything wrong with geeks).

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