Americana fits Waybacks

FOR THE OLYMPIAN | • Published October 23, 2008

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The Waybacks have “been erroneously pigeonholed as a bluegrass band,” the San Francisco quartet’s biography begins.

The band, playing tonight in Olympia, does include a fiddler who plays the mandolin.

“You could look at us from across a crowded club and see acoustic bass and acoustic guitar and fiddle and think we’ll be a bluegrass band,” said Joe Kyle Jr., the band’s bassist. “We have bluegrass elements, but we are as much of a rock band or an R&B band as a bluegrass band.”

The band also has been labeled folk, but Kyle said that is not as prevalent in the sound these days. The group has had some personnel changes, and singer-guitarist James Nash has been focusing more on songwriting, also a gift of new band addition Warren Hood, who plays fiddle and mandolin.

“Early incarnations of the band had more of a folk-music component,” Kyle said. “Now, we’re not a pop band, but the songwriting we’re doing definitely gives us a more modern sound.

The pigeonhole we wanted to put the band in was one marked “jam band.” They’re eclectic, they’re improvisational and they have connections with the Grateful Dead.

“The whole spirit of improvisation — that’s always been the cornerstone of this band for me,” Nash, a founding member of the group, has said. “The fun of this band has always been that in some ways I can do whatever I feel like doing at any moment.”

And the group is well-known for collaborating with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.

“It started very humbly at a wedding where we were hired to play music and he was one of the groomsmen,” Kyle said. “He got up and performed with us.”

Later, the Waybacks opened for Weir’s band and performed with him at a benefit.

“Then we started getting offers to do shows with special guest Bob Weir, which became known as the Weirbacks,” Kyle said. “We put on some legendary shows in San Francisco and at MerleFest in North Carolina, and based on those, we got ourselves a chunk of the Grateful Dead fan base.”

But Kyle said the jam label doesn’t stick either.

“We try to honor the tradition of jamming that goes on with bands we love, but we don’t indulge ourselves as much as some bands do,” he said. “Our songs tend to be shorter with plenty of musical dynamics and interactive soloing going on, but we tend to keep it a little more tightly wrapped.”

Kyle does come up with a label he likes, though, one that encompasses a sound touched by soul, honky-tonk, swing and blues: Americana.

“We are playing music inspired by classic American styles, inspired by bluegrass, by classic Western swing, by our favorite rock bands of the ’60s and ’70s,” Kyle said. “We are influenced by The Band, by the Grateful Dead, Graham Parsons, the music of our youth, as well as by music created before any of us was born. To that, we bring a modern sensibility. It’s fundamentally American music.”