Ray Benson’s Comin’ At Ya!
How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country or The Often Outrageous History of Asleep At The Wheel
Ray Benson is the leader of Asleep At The Wheel, America’s foremost exponents of Western Swing and the music of Bob Wills. Asleep At The Wheel has been performing for 46 years which is no small achievement and more than 100 musicians have passed through its ranks or more accurately ridden the bus.
Full disclosure: Ray Benson and I have been friends for most of our lives. Benson’s life has pretty much been spent on a tour bus and a year or so ago, he calculated the miles he traveled touring and it was a million.
The book is subtitled “How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country or The Often Outrageous History of Asleep At The Wheel.” Ray Seifert grew up in a suburb right outside Northwest Philly and was already playing music on major stages before he was 11.
He tells his story informally, leaving both the good and the bad in. The book never feels like a tell all because he maintains a sense of humor throughout. The prologue starts in 1979 with The Wheel playing a club in Lubbock on Grammy Night to virtually no one, and then trying to get paid. While waiting for the club owner to come up with the money, someone runs onto the bus and yells, “Y’all just won a Grammy!”
Asleep At The Wheel has actually won a lot of Grammys and they keep appearing throughout the book, and it seems that every time they win a Grammy, they got kicked off of whatever label they happened to be on at the time.
Asleep At The Wheel started out as a hippie country band, and they went way out in the country to the unlikely place of Paw Paw, West Virginia to do it. They were trying to both form a band and live off the land. which resulted in a lot crazy stories. After a year, encouraged by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, they move west to the bay area, finding a crowded house in Oakland and trying to survive on no money. One of the people they met on the coast was a country music fan named Van Morrison, who had them open a few of his shows, and more importantly mentioned them in a Rolling Stone interview which attracted the attention of record companies. (Three decades later, when Van Morrison decided to tour behind his country album, Pay The Devil, be borrowed a couple of Wheel members for his road band.)
The band signed with United Artists Records and at the invitation of Willie Nelson moved to Austin, Texas at the very beginning of the Austin Music scene. They’ve been on innumerable labels since, with their best and longest run on Capitol in the mid-’70s and been through bad times and good, but stopping playing was never an option.
The book provides a good glimpse at the inner workings of the music business. Benson doesn’t hold back from discussing contract negotiations and naming names. And while Asleep At The Wheel as long as they’ve been around, are pretty much known to those who know about them, always on the fringes of country and too damn weird for rock and roll. Benson has worked or toured with a lot of musicians including those not necessarily country like Bob Dylan. And he’s met a few Presidents as well.
If there’s a fault with the book, it’s a little too informal. There’s some things that probably should have been in acknowledgments and not in the book itself, but ultimately those are minor complaints.
Ray is generous, more talented than you think, and one hell of a nice guy!