Back from Recording, The Steel Wheels Rock and Roll into Virginia Beach

Whenever the The Steel Wheels comes to town, the rubber hits the road with a rolling, fricative sound – a pushing forth of melody and movement with the vocal fix of lyrics layered in magic. Recently, the band, led by Trent Wagler, played two energetic sets at The Barry Robinson Theatre and Fine Arts Center in Virginia Beach, VA, hosted by the area’s prolific Americana programmer, The Tidewater Friends of Acoustic Music (formerly The Tidewater Friends of Folk Music).

The band was fresh back to Virginia after working in Maine on a new album. They were greeted with a home-cooked meal by the Friends’ prodigious talent booker and multi-tasker Brenda Barkley, a senior looking like a junior who’s been booking acts since she was seventeen. Band leader Wagler thanked their hosts and kicked off a memorable show for their sold-out audience, beginning with Fire from their latest album Leave Some Things Behind followed without pause by the rousing instrumental Findley’s Gap.

The Steel Wheels revolves around Wagler, who sings and plays guitar, banjo, and percussion. Relatively small and compact, he’s dynamic as the band’s centrifugal and central and very distinctive voice and lyricist. Each song radiates out from his center – lead vocals and grooving, energetic body- surrounded by his talented and versatile, harmonizing bandmates, Jay Lapp on vocals, mandolin, guitar, and steel guitar,  Eric Brubaker on fiddle, and Brian Dickel on stand-up bass.

They are a true ensemble, and appear to be, as Trent says, the best of friends. The guys have known each other since meeting while attending Eastern Mennonite University in the early 2000s. They all still live near each other in the beautiful countryside around historic Harrisonburg, VA, where the band was happily headed after its VA Beach appearance. Eric lives with his family in a house he built himself.

I noted that the lovely deep brown guitar Wagler usually plays is made by Harrisonburg luthiers Hass and Dalton, and the fellows sell at their merch table coffee brewed in and Steel Wheels coffee mugs made there as well.

These brothers in music included some exciting new songs that night, largely from the album in production. In one, the song’s narrator is likened in his singularity and aloneness by the railroad tracks before him. It’s a lovely delving into a lonely, yet ultimately hopeful place.

Another highlight was the energetic Breaking Like the Sun, one of my favorites, a tune that has the band jumping about and many of those of us in our seats doing the same thing to the extent we’re able. “Oh, there they go again,” the tune says, “breaking like the sun when the day comes in.”

It was largely an older crowd (me included), though the band should and sometimes does attract a broader audience. I was surprised how many in the crowd were members of the sponsoring organization. That’s a great thing, a notable achievement in itself, but it begs the question what audience size and variety might be if a way could be found to reach a broader audience. (They already do a good job of marketing, I would add.)

The show moved along with other favorites of the numerous fans in the crowd, such as Rescue Me, Virginia and Kiss Me Like a Stranger, featuring their trademark harmonies and lively staging. The guys crouch and leap, and kick their legs high at times, depending on the mood and tempo of the piece.

An outstanding example of Wagler’s songwriting skills, the latter song goes “Won’t you kiss me like a stranger I haven’t seen you for so long,” Trent sings, “Won’t you hold me like it was the first time and sing me a sweet song/ I wanna travel many miles, I want pleasure and I want pain/ I want the starlight as my window cause I’ve got comets through my brain.

“Kiss me like a stranger,” he goes on, “kiss me so strong/I’ve got two hands to hold you, two feet to carry on/I wanna hold you like it’s winter/I want to warm you like the spring/I wanna kiss you like a stranger/till the autumn comes again”

Speaking of their leaping and crouching, the band is in fact an athletic group, sometimes having toured hundreds of miles on bicycles, riding bikes all day and playing gigs at night, sometimes performing though intense exhaustion.

Trent shared stories of the bicycle touring and other adventures, tribulations, and triumphs of the road. I hadn’t remembered how good, how entertaining a raconteur he is, though my wife, who couldn’t go that night, said she did.

Another of their songs I long for is Red Wing, a ballad full of heart, rich in soul and poetry, breathing the deep breath of the Blue Ridge Mountains home of these Steel Wheels. Trent arranged and added lyrics to this tune his grandfather sang for him during some valued time the two spent together in the singer’s young adult years. Red Wing, thankfully, was also on the night’s set list, written on an erasable white board at Trent’s feet.

“In the summer sun , in 1981/the day was long till I heard the song,/whistle like the wind/And I was standing there, dust was flying in the air/Like days before when we believed in things we couldn’t see/Oh my red wing, take me softly/To my home now, to my family/Oh my red wing, hold me closely/Take me under, the brightest sun”

Red Wing is also the name the Wheels gave to their delightful summer music festival that takes place in July in Mount Solon, VA, at a county park, Twin Chimneys, a lovely area featuring twin, natural stone chimney structures with surrounding woods, where my wife and I camp during the festival, and clearings featuring four stages.

It’s a great series, with many top acts such as Dawes, Hayes Carll, Shovels and Rope, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, The Lone Bellow, Dom Flemons, and Aoife O’Donovan. A hands-on labor of love, I’ve seen Trent on the festival grounds literally doing manual labor during the final stages of festival preparation.

The band closed with two encores that included Rain, another song showcasing the group’s mighty harmonies, with the entire band sharing a mic and featuring the basement deep voice of fiddler Brubaker, who had brought his two super cute little daughters Norah and Lydia to the show, and with Trent playing the band’s colorful, musical pole that has tiny cymbals up and down its length that clash like rain as they sing.

The Wheels rolled out of town in a solid, new-looking van as midnight approached, another successful songfest from this traveling medicine show, a musical feast that often felt revival-like to me, leaving me with that warmth of renewal and refreshed belief.

Leading off the night had been Acredale, a local trio doing often self-written country-folk songs, led by Brent Gable on deeply resonant vocals and guitar, Michael Munden playing masterful mandolin, and  Gable’s lovely daughter Coleman Senecal providing sweet-sounding, twangy vocals and fiddle. A solid performance, highlights were the harmonies of Gable and daughter Coleman and the quality of Gable’s original songs.