Where did you record your new CD called “The Crying Kind?”

Oakland and Petaluma, California.  I was living in a studio apartment on East 15^th Street in Oakland and recorded my guitars in the bedroom/living room and did my vocals in the closet.  Thank god for tolerant neighbors because the walls were so thin in the building you could hear butter melting one room over.  My sister Annie’s parts, her fiddle, mandolin, and vocals, I recorded in her art studio in Petaluma.  I quickly found I enjoyed hanging out in Sonoma County so much that after 30 years in the East Bay I moved to the hills above Santa Rosa on February 1^st of this year. 

What does this new record sound like?

Modern Old Time.  Annie and I love the old Appalachian Mountain sound, and since we grew up in Southeast Ohio with parents born and raised in West Virginia it comes through us often when we least expect it.  While we typically sound something like a 1938 hillbilly harmony duo we are no slaves to tradition.  No doubt we love the Louvin Brothers and the Carter Family, but we grew up on Rock ‘N’ Roll, so you won’t have to listen too close to hear Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, or Exene Cervenka in our sound.

What about the songs?

All 12 songs were homemade by me.  Then again mostly I feel like I didn’t write them at all, that they came through me from a higher power, all I had to do was get my human mind out of the way so I could receive them.  Easy to talk about.   Not so easy to do.  Then it took years for me to understand what the songs were about.  I had to grow into them before I could adequately sing them, much less record them.  The songs are strong and versatile.  I can sing them in church Sunday morning as well as Saturday night at the corner bar.  People from all backgrounds dig the songs, and what I finally understood is this is music for people who grew up wounded in the church.

What do you mean by wounded in the church?

Somebody hurt by the spiritual philosophy of a church or religion.  Usually happens when they are children when their parents force them into their own religion and church.  We went to a church that was fear based, if you didn’t accept Jesus as savior you were going to burn in hell, and there was a lot of drama around it.  No other possible outcome.  No other way to think.  It didn’t quite make sense to us, but it was very scary at the same time.  Annie and I both decided when we left home to not go to church anymore, or pursue any kind of spirituality for that matter . . . with the exception of music.  The songs were our salvation.

 How did you end up making your recording debut a gospel record then?

Around 1993 my next-door neighbor heard my wife and I arguing night after night.  You could say at that time I was particularly tenacious about being right.  I could debate really well, and loudly too.  The neighbor, who I had a good relationship with, gave me a tape by Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.  On it Thich Nhat spoke about mindfulness, watering the seeds of other people’s happiness, and the importance of meditation.  I listened to that tape like it was a lost Bob Dylan record from the early sixties.  All the time.  I tried to follow Thich Nhat’s direction.  I started to meditate.  I was stepping out onto my spiritual path without knowing I was doing so.  

 
Why not a record of you doing Buddhist chanting then?

I may have been meditating but Rock ‘N’ Roll still dictated almost all of my moves in the world.  I was playing lead guitar in a San Francisco fake punk/fake rockabilly band called the Wankin’ Teens.  Someone once called us “wannabe hipsters” and I think that tells it pretty well.  We were traveling up the coast playing Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver.  I was practicing meditation in the back of the van as the miles ticked away.  I guess I was visioning, although I didn’t know what that was then, but my gut feeling kept telling me that I had to quit my job, leave my marriage, and remove my electric guitar from active service with the Wankers.  I also decided that in order for me to play out again I would have to be singing my songs, and there would have to be a spirit to the songs other than “hello, we’re cool, let’s party.”  I followed these intuitive changes almost to the letter.

 
Almost?

Almost.  In between Johnny Cash announced his illness and I met Smelley Kelley.  My response to Cash cancelling his third appearance at the Fillmore never to tour again was to organize a tribute show at Berkeley’s punk rock institution 924 Gilman Street.  The idea was to celebrate the music of the man in black by having singers from the Bay Area punk, alt country, and rockabilly scenes get together for one night to sing his songs.  Cinder Block, Johnny Dilks, Devil Doll, Smelley and a bunch more answered the call for what turned out to be a sold out show.  I lead the band and played guitar as close to Luther Perkins’ style as I could manage.  Everybody had a blast.  At the end of the night Cinder and Smelley and some others told me they’d like to keep going.  The East Bay Drifters were born.

Was it an easy birth?

Yeah, once I decided to go ahead.  You see the biggest part of me was locked down and steadfast.  I was going to do a solo act and that was that.  But then I made the mistake of going to see honky tonkers Red Meat, Smelley’s main band, at the Great American Music Hall on a Saturday night.  He roamed the stage laughing and carrying on, making faces, shuffling and dancing, singing lead and harmony, and telling outrageous jokes whenever there was a dead spot in the show.  I realized I might never have another chance to work with such a talented front man again.  So I put my solo plans on hold.  We always tore it up on stage, and believe it or not had even more fun at rehearsal.

 How did a seventies style outlaw country band like the East Bay Drifters end up playing at 924 Gilman?

That was my idea.  I love going against the grain of an audience’s taste just to see if I can win them over, and so playing country music to a room full of punk rockers appealed to my imagination.  It all started when the Wankin’ Teens were a two-piece.  I convinced The King Teen, who sang and played acoustic guitar, to get us a place on Gilman’s Sunday audition night.  We were the tenth and last band to go on.  After nine straight fast as hell, loud as hell, and mostly unintentionally funny as hell punk bands blasted through their sets King and I came on.  We played George Jones’ “White Lightening,”  Johnny Cash’s “Wanted Man,” and “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young” by Faron Young as fast as we could.  Plus some rockabilly stuff and a few originals.  Just two guys.  One acoustic guitar.  One electric guitar.  King singing.  No bass.  No drums.  When we were done the room filled with dead silence.  As we put our guitars back in our cases we were chuckling to ourselves figuring it would be the last time we would see the inside of Gilman.  Then this pimply faced kid who maybe was 15 ran up from the back of the room and told us we were the most original thing he’d heard in years.  Turned out he was the booker.  Next thing we know the Wankin’ Teens are playing Gilman on a Friday night. 

 
What was that like?

Fun.  There were a lot more people in the audience.  I think the Hellbillies were headlining.  King walked out on stage holding his acoustic guitar up high in front of him, like it was protecting him or something, in case the crowd started throwing things.  I stepped up to the mic and said, “Don’t be afraid kids.  I know you’ve never seen what The King Teen has in his hands before . . . but don’t be alarmed.  It’s a harmless acoustic guitar.”  Brang!  King beats on that thing and we’re off playing country music as fast as we can.  A few kids try to get a pit going, but no dice.  Some punks stage right cut some fast square dance moves as we played.  The crowd clapped between songs and everything.  We went over well.  After that the Wankers played Gilman three or four times a year for a stretch.  It wasn’t hard to convince them to give the Drifters a chance later on.

Were you a punk rocker then?

No.  Not really.  Every once in a while some venerable Gilman punk would come up and tell me I was “Punk as #@&%,” a high compliment for sure, but no matter how much I enjoyed Gilman and a lot of the better punk bands I never claimed it.  The only music that I could ever play was some variation of country mixed with rock attitude.  That’s who I am.  It was great though.  Because Gilman is an all ages club I’d get these 12 to 16 year olds coming up to me and telling me I was the best guitar player they’d ever seen.  I really wasn’t that good, but since all the other guitar players they’d watched up close based their style on fast power chords I can understand why the few twangy string bends and chicken chokin’ solos I knew sounded so fresh to them.  And I dressed cool and jumped around a lot.  That was probably just as important to my appeal. 

Can we get back to how this first CD of yours ended up being a gospel album?

Sure.  When I said to myself that I would no longer make background music to party to, that I was done with it, my internal music making system went from play to pause.  My intention was to make spiritual music, but I had no idea what that meant.  Up to that point rock music was my spirituality.  The Thich Nhat Hanh tape lit the fuse on a whole different stick of dynamite.  But it was a long fuse.  It took me a while to get my bearings after I left the East Bay Drifters.  As a solo act I wanted my message to be different, but I didn’t know how to get there.  What I eventually figured out is that for me to move forward with any kind of spirituality I would have to first go back and heal what happened in the past.  That lead me once again to Christianity.

Do you consider yourself a Christian?

No.  Not at all.  Christianity has been used so often to justify hatred, intolerance, and religious persecution that many, many people the world over shut down immediately when they hear someone saying they are Christian, or speaking for a Christian organization.  I prefer to say I aspire to be like Christ.  To me that means I want to practice loving kindness, selfless service, and keeping my mind centered in Christ Consciousness.

What do you mean by Christ Consciousness?

Jesus worked miracles.  Healed the sick.  Fed the multitudes.  Walked on water.  In the Bible he very clearly says to the people that all the things I have done, well you can do them too, and you can do even more.  Meditate on that for a moment.  How can we do all that?  Well, our very nature must be like Christ. 

Will you walk on water for me then Wayne?

I’m not that much like Christ!  (Laughter)  Jesus was an expression of god in human form.  So are we.  Our spirit flows directly from god but it is filtered through our human mind.  God didn’t create us to be robots programmed to behave always in spiritual perfection.  Instead we were given free will to use our minds however we want to.  In the Bible Jesus says it is done unto us as we believe.  A popular new thought spirituality translation of this concept is: what you think about grows.  Think about love and you’ll have more love in your life.  Think fearful thoughts and you’ll experience fearful situations.  A simple concept to understand, but not an easy one to follow.  Why not so easy?  Because it is a struggle for us to move beyond our human fears and limitations in order to focus more consistently on loving thoughts.  Jesus was able to transcend the limitations of his human mind very successfully, so much so that his freedom from limited human consciousness brought him much closer to god consciousness than most people, and the miracles followed.  He was very good at living love, but he also held a high consciousness.  He deeply believed he was close to god.  So he was.  Jesus spread the word that we all have the potential to lift our spirits just as he did.  Have the same consciousness as he.  We all have the potential to deepen our experience of Christ Consciousness.

How?

There are many paths to the truth.  What works for me might not work for you and the other way around.  For me it was important to make peace with the past.  I made a point to visit “bible believing” small town churches in Ohio and West Virginia, just to see if my adult eyes and ears saw and heard what went on there differently than when I was a kid.  Whenever I visited my parents in the small North Carolina town they retired to, I always went to the Baptist church with Harold Wayne Sr. on Saturday morning for the men’s prayer circle.  Even though being born again in Jesus and going to hell often came up as opposite ends on a scale of certainty during these explorations, I reacted to this religious view unlike I had as a child.  I was unafraid and open.  Not so much open to the ideas I always felt conflicted about, but open to the people who worshipped in the way I was taught to do as a child.  They ceased to scare me.  I discovered that in the end they were a lot like me.  Most of them were concerned with finding support in a spiritual community and living more lovingly.  Noticing that was liberating.

 What else did you learn?

Follow my own guidance.  Be open to new ideas, listen to the wisdom of spiritual leaders, but only study the message that seemed to call out to me.  Certain books came into my view and helped me move along the path.  “Around the Year with Emmet Fox,” by Emmet Fox did a lot to heal my relationship with the Christianity of my youth.  Eckhardt Tolle’s “The Power of Now” helped me begin to control my thoughts.  I joined the East Bay Church of Religious Science in Oakland and studied, under Reverend Elouise Oliver, the teachings of Ernest Holmes and I am now a Liscensed Prayer Practitioner there.  Holmes’ “This Thing Called You” is a great introduction into the concept “what you think about grows.”  Prayer.  Meditation.  Yoga.  Helping others.  These are all spiritual practices I do to bring me closer to my true nature.  Love.  It helps to surround myself with people who are also moving closer to god.  And music of course.  Music is the healer.

Have you experienced any miracles?

Yes.  That I am playing music with my sister now is a miracle, as far as I’m concerned.  We didn’t always get along so well.  We’d argue and end up not speaking to each other . . . sometimes for years.  Back when I was trying to be a rock star I could be a pretty arrogant and hard to be around.  When I started living a more spirit filled life I made a decision to start loving my sister more authentically, deeply, and . . . well . . . lovingly.  I prayed every day to be closer to her, and also completely changed the way I treated her.  I stopped judging her for not being more like me, and instead took the time to get to know her better and celebrate what I found.  I asked her to forgive me for all the times I was mean to her.  That was big.  Over time we have become very close.  I even gave her our grandfather's fiddle on her 50th birthday.

How did that happen?

Ruben Haught played guitar, banjo, fiddle, and called square dances in rural West Virginia back in the early 1900’s.  I remember seeing the fiddle at Grandma Georgia’s house long after Ruben stopped playing.   She had put double sided sticky tape on the back of it and slapped the fiddle on the wall in the living room.  No strings or tuning pegs.  No bridge.  It must have fallen at one point because you could see where she had used some Elmer’s glue to hold the top in place.  There it stayed for a long time.  Unplayed.  A weird looking decoration.  Years later, after Grandma made her transition and her house was sold, I visited my Aunt Betsy in Parkersburg and out in her garage she had a pile of junk Goodwill was going to pick up.  On the top of the heap was Grandpa’s fiddle, in even worse shape than before.  I rescued it and brought it back home intending to have it repaired so I could learn how to play it.  Instead I hung it from a nail on the wall in my bedroom.  A decoration from the homeland you understand.  Every once in a while Annie would be over and say she’d like to learn to play fiddle with it.  I’d say, “No. No. No. It’s mine.  I’m going to learn to play with it.”  The years went by and there it stayed.  On the wall.  Unplayed.  Finally I understood that I was doing exactly what Grandma had done.  So I gave it to Annie.  She was thrilled.  We split the cost of repairs, and turns out it has a dirty old time sound in it, the way a fiddle made in the late 1890’s should.  I smile every time I hear her play it.

One last question, what is your favorite song on the Crying Kind?

I’m tempted to say the title cut.  I love the way I sing it.  But I don’t have a favorite really.  I like them all.  I do have a favorite moment on the record though.  It happens when we’re singing the second verse of “Catching Hell.”  Annie comes in with her harmony vocal on the line “I’ve been good a week or two, but now I’m catching hell.”  The way she sings the word good.  The tone of her voice.  The way she holds the note.  Every time I hear it I tingle all over.  She sounds like my Aunt Betsy or Aunt Frannie, dad’s younger twin sisters.  It’s the way folks enunciate on either side of the Ohio River.  She sings it like being good is never taken for granted.  There is deep knowing in Annie’s voice.  In her singing.  I am so happy she is with me in this.