The Rest of Both Worlds Online

The Lizard Meets John Wesley

Author: The Lizard
First published: December 1999

Grabbing him shortly before he was due to go to Gatwick airport to return to Florida, ROBW’s resident reptile managed to ask John Wesley a few questions…

Wes has been many things – a member of a touring band, session musician, Marillion guitar tech, Fish’s latest guitarist, solo performer… So, I asked who the real John Wesley is and what he does. “Hmm. My actual name is Bob and I’ve got a fine future in the food service industry…. Um, who is the real John Wesley? A guy who is addicted to music and will do anything he can to play it and perform it. If it means guitar teching, playing clubs, playing as a side man, playing as a solo artist – anything I can do to play”

I pointed out to Wes that a lot of people tend to think of him  as an acoustic guitarist, which he agreed with, but those of us that have seen him play electric know that he’s not too bad. In response to whether he had a preference, Wes said electric. Why?

“Um – it’s always been more me. I wasn’t really a singer for a long time. I pretty much was a side man guitar player up until my late twenties and it weren’t until the band I was in broke up and I actually had to sing to make a living that I started singing. And it was at that point that I took up the acoustic guitar in the way that I have, because it was easy to get gigs just playing and singing acoustic and – excuse me <sneezes> oh excuse me! You got that on tape! Um it was the easiest way to get gigs around home and then, when I first went out with the Marillos as the guitar tech thing, part of the reason I did so many gigs with them was that it made sense – it was an opening act that people seemed to like and it made sense for them because they didn’t have to change the set once the monitors were set it was fine and it worked really well.”

After Wes laughed at a question regarding playing any other instruments, I decided instead to pursue Wes’s musical heroes and influences. “They come from such a wide variety, because I have two sides to me. There’s the one side that used to get … used to express himself on just the guitar. I used to be … I used to think I was a frustrated singer –  I didn’t think I could sing – and so when it came time to take a guitar solo, it was almost as if I was singing. I actually - when I do play a guitar solo -  I’m actually humming it as I’m playing it.”

I commented on this, and Wes pointed out that “it can be obnoxious some times I’m trying to cut parts in the studio and I’m humming the part, but ah….” And laughed! He went on to explain further.

 “Yeah, but I actually hum when I solo, so for a long time that’s how I actually expressed myself. I used to write lyrics for the singer of the band I was in and he would sing the lyrics and then I would express myself through the solos. And then, when I started singing, I got “the Best of Both Worlds”. But then I was doing so much acoustic work that I wasn’t able to go back and do the solo stuff on the electric.”

 I pushed him on the influences. “Oh yeah, definitely. I think the obvious ones are David Gilmour… but he was a later influence. Early influences are guys like Ace Frehley of Kiss, but then at a very early age I stumbled across three Cream albums in a garage sale – Eric Clapton – and he was the first big one. And then I got a Clapton greatest hits record and it had Bell Bottom Blues on it and a couple of other tunes that just, you know, knocked me out. So Clapton was the first real guitar influence and then there was Steve Howe for a while and, er, then it was Jeff Beck and Jeff Beck is still to this day one of my, you know, biggies – Jeff Beck and David Gilmour. And Mark Knopfler, of course, and some guy you might have heard of called Rothery or something – also a later influence.”

 “Talking of Rothery”, I asked Wes, “when Rothery took your guitar off you and sat down and played Sugar Mice with Fish at Chigwell, did you get the same buzz that those of us in the crowd got?”

 “Well, I guess I got a different kind of buzz. I wasn’t a real – I mean it didn’t harken back to an era for me like it did to a lot of people, because, when I met everybody I’d always known them as separate entities and I mean and I’d only had a real vague knowledge of Marillion when Fish was in it. You know – I’d seen the videos and I’d heard Incommunicado and Kayleigh – those were the two biggies that got played in our area, where I lived in Florida. So for me it wasn’t a big nostalgia thing – for me it was here were two guys that I really liked and was good friends with that had been estranged in a way for years, getting together and playing again. So that was the thrill for me, rather than some kind of nostalgic point of view.”

However, he also went on to add “Then again I really like a lot of the fans and through the years I’ve always listened to a lot of the fans say ‘Well, you know, this has been important to me and this was an important part of my life’ and so for a lot of people – I mean there were people crying in the audience – so I enjoyed it from that aspect, that this really means something to a lot of people and so it was a double-edged thing.”

Wes mentioned the fans - Steve Hogarth has described the Marillion fans as the greatest in the world. Fish dedicates The Company to the fans at the end of each concert. Wes has been up there on stage with both of them – what is it like, being on the other side of that? “The Marillion and Fish fans create such a great vibe that it just pushes you on to play. And I mean they make you want to work harder for them.” He goes on further to explain “Because they’re giving so much, that you just want to give it right back and it goes in ten-folds, you know. I know with me as a performer, if the crowd’s giving fifty I end up giving them, you know, a hundred and if they’re giving a hundred, I’ll work to hit two hundred. The Marillion fans are just always, always, always driving you to that.”

In what might be seen by some as a controversial comment, Wes added “Both Fish and the Marillion guys can work an audience into… well, just a frenzy! I mean, I’ve been on both sides of it and that… well, I don’t think there’s anything like it, it’s just a great rush.”

Wes has had to play guitar parts written by or for a whole load of other guys, so I asked how he goes about maintaining some sort of faithfulness to the original, whilst taking the part and making it his own. “Well, that’s a real art form in itself. When I was in college, we learned the whole concept of interpretation, and through different bands I’ve always done covers of this and covers of that, to make a living, as well as doing my own solo stuff. And what you try and do is capture the spirit of the piece. When you’re trying to emulate players as distinctive as Robin Boult and Frank and Steve and Steve, the first thing you have to do is really learn the piece. You’ve got to learn it just like it is on the record and then you have to make it your own. You listen to the whole thing – you listen to the song as a whole and you really try to interpret the spirit of it. Like there’s no way I’m gonna play a guitar solo that’s gonna sound like Steve Rothery or a guitar solo that’s gonna sound like Steve Wilson, or Frank, BUT you can capture the essence of what they do and communicate that. You now, I had like the worst time doing that with the Frank Usher solos, because he’s extremely technical and there was two ways to go about it – you could either copy him note for note or you were gonna have to work very hard at retaining the essence of his solos. The Steve Rothery and Steve Wilson stuff I fall into kind of naturally, because I think I’m stylistically along those lines. So I really had an easy time – not of learning it, because it was difficult – but an easy time of interpreting it.”

Wes goes on to explain in more detail “With Frank, what I found I had to do was, like on the Just Good Friends solo, he created chord changes behind the solo, that you actually have to do licks from his solo – you actually have to connect the… it’s like playing connect the dots. I would open with a bit of my own and then connect it into one of his licks and then there would be a musical transition and I’d have to… I’d bridge the gap with my own stuff, which was different every night and then tie it into one of his licks, bridge the gap again to tie it into one of his licks. And it was the same way with the Clutching medley – some of the stuff that Steve Rothery plays on the different solo sections are so distinctive that it’s not a guitar solo any more – it’s a melody in the song. It’s like it’s as important as a vocal line. So at that point you’ve kind of got to interpret which one are the most important ones and you fill in the gaps with your own stuff. And that’s kind of how I approached it – I tried to find out what was most important about all of that, and it took a lot of work. I mean, I spent a lot of hours. You know, I remember learning bits and pieces of it one way and then going back and trashing it because I wasn’t… I didn’t feel I was faithful enough to the vibe and then I relearned a whole another way.”

Enough of other people’s music – what about Wes’s own music. I asked him, “Why is it all so bloody depressing?” He laughed, and replied “Well, that’s a good question. I always tend to listen to music that moves me, and the music that seems to move most people are sad passionate type songs. Did you ever really hear a happy Pink Floyd song? No.” “Even after Rog left…” I replied. “Yeah, even after Roger Waters left. It’s not unhappy, but a lot of it is very passionate and I lean towards that. And then, I would say a good ten year period of my life – from my mid-twenties to early thirties – were just a rough time emotionally, you know. Divorce, single dadism – you know, I’m a single dad now – trying to find new relationships and going through all the challenges associated with that. I must have sorted through the entire psycho ward of several women’s prisons – you know, I must have dated them all at some point!” At this point Wes laughed again, rather disturbingly, but then pointed out “So that makes good writing, you know! So it was a ten year run of bad luck… so I have experiences to draw from and, you know, people need that. People need catharsis and so I felt that was what I could offer with my songs. And also, they may be sad, but all of them – if you really dig into the lyrics – all of them, on the back-end, offer hope. They present maybe a despairing situation – something you might be able to relate to from a sad point of view – but in the back end there’s always a way out. And to me that’s most important – yeah I may present a really sad song, but there’s always hope at the end of it, always light at the end of the tunnel.”

Wes’s songs come across as very personal, but a lot of people relate to them. Why does Wes reckon that is? “Because I think as human beings, living the human condition, we all share a lot of the same experiences. I don’t know many people fortunate enough to have never been hurt in a relationship or fortunate enough [not] to love somebody that didn’t return the love, or to be in love with somebody that maybe took advantage of that and hurt came out of it. So a lot of us share in those experiences. You know, I met a guy last night at the Porcupine Tree gig that had heard Thirteen Days and thought it was a pretty nifty song and he had kind of covered it, but then months later, when a certain even happened in his life, it acquired a whole new meaning for him, and he actually thanked me for writing the song. And it was like cool, you know! He got it – he got the intent of the song. That was the intent of the whole exercise so to speak, and there’s a lot of songs like that on all the records, or on my records anyway. You know, certain people listen to Pale Blue Eyes and go “You know – I went through that”. I remember, the first time I actually mixed Pale Blue Eyes, I hadn’t really played it for any of my friends and I played it for a certain friend of mine who was a musician, and he heard it, and by the end of it, I mean the guy was sitting there – he was almost in tears. Well, he was in tears really. Not because of what I’d been through, but because he was going through exactly everything that I’d just written about.”

Wes is getting married in January – I asked if that means he won’t be writing any songs for a while? Surely he is not going to surprise us all and produce the John Wesley Happy ‘Album’… “Erm, no! I tried to write a happy song, and you heard that [Showing Happy to the World, as yet unreleased] – I failed! Well, the thing is that I’ve got a lot of experiences to draw from over the years – a lot of experiences that I went through that I haven’t written about yet. And, everyone always assumes the songs are about me, and a lot of the situations are, but in a lot of the situations it’s characters created out of people I know or that I’ve seen, and things I’ve seen friends go through – incidents that other people have lived. I’m very good at putting myself in their place and kind of living that experience through their eyes. You know – walking a mile in their shoes, and then writing about it. That’s what a lot of it is.

So, to the next album – I’ve heard a couple of songs – Velvet Dream, Showing Happy – but has he enough for a whole album yet? “Well, at home I do, but I don’t, because I’m still in a writing mode. When I get back, and I’ve kind of let my head cool down from the Fish, er, journey, I’ll start working on it, but not quite.” So when does he think that is going to happen? “I want to have the new record out by early summer – that’s my goal. I was actually talking to different people about trying to get that together.”

I turned my attention to the nearer future and asked him about WesFest, which prompted the following response, “Can I take a break? I’m just gonna run to the toilet… and don’t print that!” Clearly a stressful situation for him! When he returned, he told me “Ah yes – WesFest. A few fans, mainly Rob Galardi and JJ and a couple of other guys came up with this idea that they could book a club in New York, and I could come up and play it, and it would be a lot of fun. Cos you know how they have the Freaks Meets and the Garden Parties and all that kind of stuff – well they thought wouldn’t it be neat if we could do something like that and have me play at it. A lot of them are really dedicated fans to the music, so I said ‘Sure – I’d love to do it’. And we were mainly thinking maybe 35 or 40 people would show up. So we go last year and we had a hundred each night I think it was. So that’s where that kind of came from. A lot of people caught onto it…. we recorded it, so we made a little recording of it – made a CD of it – and that’s kind of how we financed the whole thing, by selling the CD of it, t-shirts, and… And we’re gonna do it again this year. And this time, we’re managing to sell enough that I’m gonna pay for my whole band to come up – fly everyone up and do that. So that should be pretty neat.”

Talking of his band, the drummer is going to be playing with Wes on the Fish tour… “Yeah – uh, Squeaky is involved in another project right now, so he’s gonna be tied up doing that for quite a while and we want to do these dates in America – we didn’t get to do any American dates and it provided a way for Fish to bring the family over and a couple of members of the band that wanted to come to the wedding. It provided a way to finance that and give shows in America in enough places that, if you’re a hard-core fan, you can get to a show. The only problem is we didn’t go out West, cos it’s just not feasible   - it’s not financially possible – but we’re playing enough dates up and down the coast to where most of the die-hard fans can get to a gig and so it works in a double way, you know – Fish and the gang get to come over to the wedding, but at the same time he felt so terrible about the cancelled US tour from last summer that this kinda is gonna make up for that. He’ll be able to get to, you know, the hardcore fans. And, since Squeaky can’t go, the drummer that’s played with me for eighteen years, Mark, is gonna play with Fish. I’d kind of recommended him, but you know, Fish didn’t really listen to me as much , because you know – I’m recommending one of my best friends, so I’m not too biased, but it was Squeaky who’d heard all my records, who said to Fish ‘This is your guy – this is the guy that can do the gig’. Squeaky really admired Mark’s playing and so it was really Squeaky that put Mark up for the job more than me. So, he’s gonna be doing those five shows with us, and that should a lot of fun – I can’t wait for that.”

Which led me on to ask what the other members of the band do, when they are not being the John Wesley Band. “Well, Mark is a full-time studio engineer at one of the biggest studios in central Florida – he does everything from recording to ADR work with television shows (after dialogue replacement). He does it all - editing, mastering and then at the same time he’s also the guy that if a band’s just come in and spent $40,000 on an album and realised that the drums don’t work, he’s the guy that can walk into the studio, never hearing the band, run through a tape – I’ve actually watched him do it – they’ll put a computer screen up, showing the measures and how the thing changes and he’ll re-record the whole album to the music that’s already played, and replace the drums – that’s how good he is. I’ve seen him do that on several occasions and the producer’s pulling his hair out because the whole project has basically flopped, and Mark’ll go in and save the day. It’s really funny to watch actually and sometimes it’s done in secret – he’ll have to go in at like midnight on some Tuesday night or something and record all night because they don’t want anyone to know that he did it! It’s really kinda funny.”

“Tracey’s a music student and she’s also my duo partner when I play around town and the bass player that I am currently working with, Dave, is the one that played on the first record, and he’d actually played with Mark and I since the late 80’s – about 1987 was when we started working with Dave – and Dave is a civil engineer! When the band I was in, in the 80s, came off the road, Mark and I were the only ones that really kept up the music thing and Dave always played with us, but at the same time he went to college and got a degree in civil engineering.”

That’s the actual band – what if Wes could pick a line up of anybody, to have as a band, who would it be? “Well, I really like the guys I am playing with. Mark and Dave is a monstrous rhythm section and I love Tracey’s voice, so it’s a really unique combo. I mean there are other things I’d like to do – I really enjoyed working with Fish and I hope to get to record with him and all of those guys – Squeaky and Steve and Tony – and at the same time I’d like to work with h, and Mark Kelly and Steve Rothery, and we’ve all talked about it at some point. And Ian. It’s weird, because if I had my way, I’d be doing little different things with everybody – Steve Wilson, The Positive Light gang, all of them – a lot of talented players.”

Wes has had a lot of success with the people he has worked with wanting to work with him again, which must be nice in a way, but at the same time, is there some frustration that it’s not bigger names? “No, I mean the only frustration that I get is when there’s lulls – you can only do so much work with all of these people, so let’s say not bigger names, but different names. I’d like to do more work with different people – you know like the side man thing I just did with Fish is over now. Unless he does something, I don’t have that gig for a while, so I mean I’d just like to work with more people. And, if they are more people that just happen to make a lot of money, I could accept that, I could enjoy that.”

I know that Wes has a rather unusual set-up on his Tele, so I asked him about it. “It’s an old ‘71 Telecaster and I used to just play it stock, with all the old parts in it, but they’re old and they started wearing out. So – the pickups in it, I replaced as needed be and then I routed out a pickup in the middle of it and put that in there because I liked the combination of the first two pickups – that’s kind of a Strat thing. But it just plays better than any of my other guitars so I added that pickup in. And then, with the Fish thing, there’s a real need in quite a few of the songs to have an acoustic line doubling the electric line and I couldn’t figure out how to do that, then I remembered Reeves Gabrels, from the Bowie band, uses the Parker guitars which had a pizo pickup, which is basically an acoustic pickup in the bridge, and he combines that with the electric pickup – the magnetic pickups – and you send it to two different places. It’s like having two guitars. And then Steve Rothery had mentioned that Aziz, the guy that worked with h, did the same thing and I found out that a company called Fishman made a bridge that was acoustic as well as allowing magnetic signal. So I set the Tele up and it’s basically like you’ve got two different guitar sounds coming out. So I put that on right before I came back over and man, it was just fantastic during the tour. People would go ‘That guitar sounds really full, but I don’t know why’ because the acoustic was mixed subtly in with the electric in places, and it’d be great. Like at the end of Perception of Johnny Punter – at the very end – I’d be playing this raunchy electric arpeggio and I’d bring in that acoustic with it, and mix it together. You didn’t really hear it, but all of a sudden that whole part took on a new presence – it was really, really something.”

Wes is used to touring, but now seems to be continually backwards and forwards between Florida and Europe, mainly the UK. How is he dealing with that? “Er, Total Mental Control” he laughs. “It’s very difficult – I’ve been really good and I’m lucky that the woman I’m gonna marry is very, very sane and secure, and I’ve been away from her for three months now. As a matter of fact, when the Fish tour ended, at the Farm, I had one night of ‘I want to go home now. I want to go home right now’… but then I got over it and was better. The only way I can deal with it is the fact that she’s really good with it. She sends me e-mails almost every day saying ‘Come home now’. So that’s nice. It’s difficult, but I’m getting there.”

November sees WesFest, December sees Wes coming back to work on the Positive Light, January sees small Fish tour… Wes interrupts me to say “Wedding – don’t forget my wedding!” but what’s after that? “February? I don’t know. The whole time, during all of that, I want to be working on my new record, and in February/March Fish would really like to record another album and, if it’s financially possible, I’ll be a part of that – that’s just a matter of finance really. If Fish has the budget that we need, I’ll come over and play on that. I know he wants to work with Steve Wilson again, and I’m really excited about that.”

What are Wes’s favourite songs of his own? “I like The Emperor Falls a lot – that song – a song called Desperation Angel I like. Thirteen Days, of course, and there’s a couple of the new ones I’ve written, which you’ve heard. Ordinary Man is a big one – that’s a big favourite.”