Singing about the real world
Bobby Lane brings his storytelling style to the Nyabinghi tonight
By Beth Nardella
Associate A/E Editor
With a voice that will not let you doubt the truthfulness of his lyrics, Bobby Lane sings to a new cult following in the Morgantown scene.
Bobby Lane says he hails from Lawrence, Kansas, but more recently from Connecticut. "I've lived all over the place," he said. Lately he call Morgantown home. "Morgantown's a nice, cheap place to be an artist," he said. "It's a good place to be a freak because no one cares."
It seems, however that people do care. Unlike any other show at the Nyabinghi, for Bobby Lane, people sit down on the floor and really pay attention to what he has to say. One minute he's singing about some woman named Dolores, the next he's singing about the people you see around town. That's part of the charm. "It's nice to have people into it," Bob remarked. "It finally seems to be catching on."
Bobby Lane plays solo with a guitar, two tape recorders and a delay pedal on the mic. He uses the pedal because of a Lou Gehrig speech he heard at Yankee Stadium. At the baseball games Gehrig's voice would echo and fill up the ball park with sound.
"Today (today, today) I consider (consider, consider) myself (self,self) the luckiest (luckiest, luckiest) man (man, man) on the face (face, face) of the earth (earth, earth)." He wants to emulate that sound in his music.
For the tape recorders, he has drummers come to his house and play beats which he tapes and then play on a loop. He also likes atmospheric sounds. Things like traffic noise "add a nice background, he said. He especially likes the trucks struggling up the hill in the morning and drunken fights with their crazy energy. He often plays by the window where he lives above the Nyabinghi with a tape recorder to capture these sounds and their energy in the background of his music
"You get new energy from different audiences," he said. "That's how things tend to change." He tapes all his shows and goes over them to see how they change. What seems impromptu live is actually a lot of hard work, revision and listening to his music.
His approach to songwriting stems from Woody Guthrie who said, "You can only write what you see." So, he pretty much writes what he sees. "I always keep an ear out for something crazy," he said. "Sometimes I change the names."
A lot of songs are from past experiences. One song is about meeting a married woman. He said she would take him out and treat him like her husband. But, he said, "I wouldn't knowingly be with someone else's wife." He also sings songs about his ex-wife. There is some debate, however, whether he was ever married.
The song that pinpoints and defines the Morgantown scene is "Turn It On." Bob said he was sitting in the Nyabinghi one night just being quiet and watching. Dina was playing pinball incessantly, Punk Rock Larry was playing pool and Jeremy was just out of it. Protocol. "The Real World" was on MTV (which doesn't play music anymore) and it just wasn't real. "Turn It On" taps the pulse of Morgantown. The real world is what you do and who you are. It's far less likely that it's a group of people stuck together in a house somewhere because of racial and sexual diversity. This song makes that point.
Bobby Lane is influenced by the Beatles and Johnny Cash. When I was a kid I saw John Lee Hooker," he said, "and he freaked me out. Since then I've wanted to be a solo entertainer and tell stories." It's a form of therapy. "If you sing about the things in you life, it helps a lot."
Bob became "Bobby Lane" while running open mic for the Nyabinghi. No on was showing up, so he had to play for hours. When you play solo, "people focus on the guitar and the vocals," he said. "It's self-indulgent."
Bobby Lane spews out his own personal form of entertainment tonight at the Nyabinghi with the Rev. Nick Barry.