Wayne's World

"Wayne's World"

Living in the studio, hoping for a break.
A look inside the making of a
Birmingham band's new album.

by Darin Powell

       It's 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning ... Rodney Reaves, singer and guitarist for the Birmingham rock band Wayne, is sound asleep on a couch in the living room of Synchromesh Studio in Tarrant.
          Reaves, dressed in khakis and a Radiohead t-shirt, is wrapped in a blanket on the couch closest to the television. Drummer Jon Hornsby, also sound asleep, is sprawled on another couch a few feet away. Guitarist Kevin Harrison is awake, roaming around the kitchen as he waits for his bandmates to shake off their slumber.
         You can't talk about Wayne without talking about Synchromesh. It was the studio, after all, that gave birth to the band. Over the years, it has served as the group's headquarters and, in some cases, a home for its members.
          The living room at Synchromesh is filled with the kind of clutter you'd expect to find in the home of a rock 'n' roll band - empty ice cream cartons, drumsticks, sheet music, cell phones, Mountain Dew cans, guitar magazines, and stacks of CDs. Harrison turns on the TV, and the sound stirs Reaves to life. He sits up and smiles.
          A few moments later, Reaves slides a disc into the DVD player. It's a video of songer/songwriter Jeff Buckley, recorded live at a concert in Chicago a few months before Buckley's untimely drowning death in 1995. Buckley was a major influence on Reaves and the other members of Wayne, and Reaves watches the screen intently as Buckley, standing alone onstage with an acoustic guitar, performs the tender love ballad "Hallelujah."
          "This just breaks my heart," says Hornsby, now awake.
          "Watch what he does with the guitar here," Reaves says.
          Halfway through the song, Buckley plays a haunting guitar solo, a series slow, mournful high notes. The audience is absolutely silent, so quiet that it seems like Buckley is playing to an empty room. But when the song ends, the applause is loud and enthusiastic.
          "Man," Reaves says. "That is absolutely amazing."

***

          May is shaping up to be a busy month for Wayne. Earlier this month, the group released its self-produced debut CD, Music on Plastic. A record deal is in the works, although they can't talk about the details yet. They've been getting wider airplay on WRAX 107.7 The X and are performing this week at the station's annual X-Fest concert. Next month, they'll play at City Stages and at the Birmingham Weekly's summer concert series in Brother Bryan Park. "Shooting at the Stars," a track from Music on Plastic, is also being used in the soundtrack for the upcoming indie film The Haven.
          "At times, it's seemed like slow going," Reaves says. "But then you realize it hasn't been that long since we actually started doing this stuff. We've been lucky."
          One of Wayne's biggest fans is Scott Register, host of "Reg's Coffehouse" on The X. Register was playing tracks from Music on Plastic long before the album was officially released.
          "I think they've got some really smart pop songs and a really great sound," Register says. "Rodney's voice has a kind of Tom Petty quality, and I really like that. And the production of the record is amazing. Every time I listen to it, I hear something new.

***

       Fifteen minutes later ... All five members of Wayne are sitting on the floor in one of Synchromesh's recording rooms. They're joined by producer and Synchromesh proprietor Jason Elgin, who had a large hand in shaping the sound of Music on Plastic.
          Recorded almost a year ago, Music on Plastic is an album of emotional, mild-tempo rock songs combining the intimacy of a confessional singer-songwriter with the power of a full-fledged rock back.
          "The majority of stuff that ended up on the record, they were completed as songs, but as far as how they were presented, we worked long and hard with Jason and everyone else to really flesh them out," Reaves says. "We didn't push them, but we spent the time we needed on each song and each part. And when we start writing again, it's going to be a lot easier. It's natural progression. We have five songwriters in the band."
          As the band's vocalist and chief songwriter, it's Reaves who sets the tone for the group. But the end result is very much a collaborative effort. Reaves wants to ensure that Wayne is not the work of one person, but a band in the truest sense of the word. And that's not just because he's camera shy (The fact that he's looking down in the photo on the opposite page is not by mistake).
          "I could go out and just play acoustic stuff, but it's just not as much fun as playing with these guys," he says. "It's the right mixture."

At home in the studio
          It began a couple of years ago when Reaves and Elgin met while working at a steak delivery place in Inverness.
          "In the course, we realized that we both were writing songs and stuff," Reaves says. "We ended up getting a house in Southside, and all we did was work and write songs. Then, we moved out here to Tarrant. Jason decided he wanted to start recording and began building this place."
          As Elgin began work on Synchromesh, located above a former thrift store on Ford Avenue in Tarrant, Reaves continued writing songs and began putting together a band. On of his first collaborators was guitarist Michael Swann, who at the time was playing for another Synchromesh-based band, the hard rock group Mars Electric.
          "We'd talked about putting together a band for years," Swann says. "But something always happened. Then, finally, Rodney called me one day and said 'We're practicing.'"
          Swann's affiliation with Wayne started as a part time gig, but after a year of playing with the band, he realized he was more comfortable with Wayne's low-key approach than with the stylized glam of Mars Electric.
          "The music, to me, fit my style of playing and personality more," Swann says. "Mars Electric was more of a glam kind of thing, that was the way they wanted to go. I didn't want to put on makeup and paint my fingernails. It's just not my personality."
          Drummer Jon Hornsby was playing in UAB's drumline when he met Elgin.
          "He asked me if I wanted a place to live," Hornsby says. "So I moved out here and met Rodney and Michael. Rodney and I would stay up for hours, jamming, and that's how I started learning his songs. Eventually he asked me to join the back."
          The band got its name at one of its first gigs at The Nick. Looking for a way to bill the as-yet-unnamed group, Nick owner Pam Stallings asked Reaves what his middle name was. It was supposed to be temporary, but it stuck.
          Wayne got the green light to begin working on an album when Reaves landed a publishing deal with EMI, thanks in part to connections Elgin made while producing the major-label debut of another Birmingham band, Virgos Merlot.
          "Normally, you get a record deal and then a publishing deal," Swann says. "But they decided to give him a publishing deal and finance the record, so we could make it with no interference whatsoever. They trusted Jason to do that. We had the facilities, we had the producer, we had the capability to do it all ourselves."
          The current Wayne lineup was solidified in November with the addition of twins Keith and Kevin Harrison. The Harrisons, natives of Dothan, had previously worked at Synchromesh recording songs for their own band, Sweetgum Head.
          "Keith and I really got involved with playing music later in life," Kevin Harrison says. "We were both involved in college athletics. Keith played football and I played basketball. When we both got through playing ball, Keith bought an acoustic guitar out of the blue. So I bought one too and we started exchanging ideas."
          As Wayne was finishing up Music on Plastic, the Harrisons were at Synchromesh getting ready to work on their own songs. "It just sort of blended," Kevin Harrison says. "We were trying to get our concept down, and the stuff they'd already done was right in line with what we wanted to do."
          The five-person lineup, with three guitar players, made it easier for the band to reproduce the layered guitars and vocals of Music on Plastic onstage. "There are so many things on the record, with guitar track and vocals, that we wouldn't be able to capture in the live show if we didn't have them," Elgin says.
          The members of Wayne say the role of Synchromesh as a home, rather than just a recording studio, had a definite influence on the sound of the album.
          "Even down to the songwriting," Reaves says. "A lot of it was done here."
          "Synchromesh has it's own gravity," Elgin says, laughing. "A lot of things get sucked into it, whether it's people, songs or a sound."

Words on paper
          Like many songwriters, Reaves gets shy when asked about his craft. Musically, Wayne is very much influenced by the emotional honesty of Jeff Buckley and the textured pop of Radiohead. But discussing his own songs is a bit more difficult. Elgin steps in with an explanation.
          "He's answered that question really well before," Elgin says. "He's really good at taking a moment, an event, things that happen around him, and translating that into a philosophy, his perspective of life, and tells a great story about that particular event."
          That approach is obvious in tracks like "Whisper" and "Letterbox," both of which feature lyrics about intimate moments filled with a larger meaning. The songs often start with just Reaves' voice and guitar, then build slowly as other instruments work their way in.
          "Every song, you start with the smallest whisper, and it builds to this incredible climax," Kevin Harrison says. "The first time I heard 'If You Leave,' I was just blown away. And it carries through on every song."
          The band constructed Music on Plastic with an eye towards creating an album, a body of music with an ebb and flow, an overall listening experience rather than a collection of random songs.
          "It's definitely a mood album," Keith Harrison says. "It's one of those albums you can put in and just let play, and it takes you places."
          Most of the recording was done during the summer and fall of 1999. "We started working on the record in early Jun last year at a dirty old warehouse on Southside," Hornsby says. "It was really, really hot. We recorded the basic drum tracks there for a month. Then we moved up here and finished it up by October."
          They didn't work on a forced schedule. Instead, they worked when they felt the moment was right - another luxury of working in a studio that also doubles as a clubhouse.
          "Sometimes we'd start early, other times late," Elgin says. "We didn't want to force it because we knew once we started, we weren't going to stop until we'd accomplished what ever it was. Every say was like that. We worked a lot of 16 hour days."
          So far, the band has been satisfied with the results. The band's live shows have started to attract a loyal audience in Birmingham, and the record has received mostly positive reactions.
          "Of course, nobody's going to come up to us and tell us they hate it," Swann says. "But we've gotten a lot of help from people who we didn't ask to help us. The guys at Noise, (and) Don VanCleave at Magic Platter has helped us immensely. And Scott Register. He's been playing it for months. That's how a lot of people found out about us."
          "It seems real loyal too, which I love," Reaves says. "We see a lot of the same people at our shows. We had almost a 10-car caravan traveling with us to Huntsville the other day."
          The band keeps in close contact with its fans through an e-mail discussion list and through its web site, www.waynemusic.com, with Swann and Hornsby maintain.
          Obviously, the band is hoping that the positive reception Birmingham has given the record will lead to bigger and better things. But they're not stressing about it too much. At least, not yet.
          "Right now, we're just enjoying it," Swann says. "There's no stress, no pressure. We're just having fun."