Issue #39

Peck Pack

Back to The Wheel

Husband, having been deprived of music-on-demand while on vacation, is once again blasting Vulfpeck on repeat. This is a fact, not a complaint.

Our kids have been fans for years, but Vulfpeck is a recent discovery for us. “Be the Wheel” was our gateway song, and now Husband is a hard-core fan and I am a glad-when-I-hear-it one. Vulfpeck is a funk-soul-jazz group founded in 2011 by four students at University of Michigan. I call Vulfpeck a group instead of band because they seem to group and re-group rather than banding together album after album till Yoko shows up. The cast of musicians is always rotating—members go off and do solo work and then come back together, and other musicians and vocalists pop in to collaborate here and there. It’s one long jam and you never know who’s coming down the basement steps to ask if the guys want a little clarinet in the mix. They’ve promoted and popularized themselves in a similar loose and improvised fashion. Vulfpeck has no agent or record label, and one time they financed an admission-free tour by releasing ten silent tracks (called “Sleepify”) on Spotify. Amazing that they’ve sold out at Madison Square Garden twice.

On vacation Husband coached me on how to sequence the “Put it in my pocket” lines in Vulfpeck’s “Back Pocket,” but now he’s back to his first love, “Be the Wheel.”

“What do YOU think it means,” Husband asks.

There’s always a danger of reading too much into lyrics—sometimes words are in place for how they sound and don’t signify much—but puzzling out a song’s meaning is the closest I get to discussing poetry with Husband, so I am all in. (There’s the added pleasure of nostalgia. These kinds of discussions carry me back to one afternoon when we were 17 and listening to The Who’s Tommy on his turntable. I had never heard of the deaf, dumb and blind boy who sure played a mean pinball, but he knew the album by heart. His explanations and enthusiasms were irresistible.)

So that you can join the discussion too, here’s the song

—and here’s the lyrics.

Knock on the door
Open the invitation
Lookin’ out for
A lemonade situation
Hold out your hand
It’s a lemonade stand, you see?

Thousands of years
Stuck to the ocean bottom
Out of the blue
Dayton, Ohio’s callin’
Next thing we knew
Man on the moon, you see?
Yeah

Here comes the hurricane
It’s blowin’, babe
And there goes the automobile
Don’t be the horse and buggy
Be the wheel
Be the wheel, baby

Watch the old ways
Fight for survival under
Solemnly sworn
Hands on the bible, while the
Continents dancе
Over the sands of time
Over the sands of time

Back at the ranch
Look for the golden teacher
Lie in the grass
Next to the water feature
Listen in close, maybe take notes?
Just sayin’
I’m just sayin’

Here comes the hurricane
It’s blowin’, babe
And there goes the automobile
Don’t be the horse and buggy
Be the wheel, eh, eh, eh

He, he, he, hel
The wheel
No, uh, uh, he, he
He, he, hel
The wheel
Yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah

Here comes the hurricane
It’s blowin’, babe
And there goes the automobile
Don’t be the horse and buggy
Don’t be the horse and buggy, yeah
Don’t be the next best something (just be the)
Don’t be the second coming
Just be that holy one thing
Be the wheel
Be the wheel, baby

I texted my daughter to ask what she thought it meant, and here’s her explanation:

“The horse and buggy, the automobile are all blips when you look at the scale of human evolution over time. The wheel is timeless, trendless. To me he’s saying be authentic, figure out who you really are outside of any cultural identities, and be that You that is so true you keep rolling through the dramas of the epochs. Don’t be the next best something / don’t be the second coming / Just be the holy one thing.”

I also texted my nephew-in-law who is a huge Vulfpeck fan:

“My initial thought after listening and reading was that the song was about moving forward, adapting to your situation and environment and understanding that progress and movement are inevitable. And then the last couple of lines make me think that you should always be authentic and true in your endeavor to grow, evolve, and adapt.”

I appreciate all that insight. Still, I’m stuck on the opening lines, the lemonade, the lemonade stand, and the middle verse when he’s back at the ranch looking for the golden teacher. “The golden teacher” is the name of a psychedelic mushroom but it could also refer to any experience that gives insight into the nature of the universe. The instruction to lie in the grass next to the “water feature” is hilarious and points to the silliness of modern verbiage and how we’ve distanced ourselves from nature. I’m trying to fit those thoughts with the ideas outlined above.

I will just add something that lead singer Theo Katzman said at a 2023 Boston concert when introducing another song (“The Only Chance We Have”). The quote doesn’t have anything to do with “Be the Wheel”—I just like it.

We were designed to be with each other. We were not designed to be looking at a phone trying to figure out whether we hate this person because they said some stupid stuff

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Free Wheeling

What I love most about Vulfpeck is how much fun the group has performing. They feed off each other’s energy and creativity, they don’t hold back, they’re in it 100% but still sit loose in the saddle. It’s a pleasure to watch men not worry about how they come across, men so comfortable in their own skins they can be playful together. They seem so free. Actually, they seem like guys who are The Wheel.

I’ll share a couple of videos so you can see what I’m talking about. In general I don’t enjoy live concerts (sue me, I feel awkward in large arenas and I usually don’t know the words), but if I had a chance to see Vulfpeck I’d surely change my mind.

(This is a long one, so if you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, at least go to the last two minutes. Antwaun Stanley’s performance is just so joyful, it’s not to be missed.)

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My daughter Anne Marie explained to me that”Dean Town” is especially great because the bass is usually a background instrument and here it’s the main event. No words and still the crowd sings along. (Bassist Joe Dart better have a good chiropractor—his neck gets a workout.)

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Last one. Vocalist Antwaun Stanley again.

I don’t think “1612” means anything more than the latest “6-7” meme, but let me know if you have other thoughts.

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