My Time With the Ben Daniels Band

It’s been awhile. Awhile from what, I’m not sure. Awhile from where we were to where we are now? Go ahead, and fire up your GPS and see if you can get directions. And know that it’s okay to be a little lost sometimes. When in doubt, take the back roads. You’ll be surprised what you find.

Recently, I came off a tour with my son, Ben. Together onstage from the opening song onward, my time with the Ben Daniels Band (bendanielsband.com) was and will always be a Life Highlight. I had no idea if fronting a bunch of talented 20 Somethings would work or not, but I damned the torpedoes and risked a high profile creative implosion in front of paying customers on a “16 Gigs in 19 Days Tour” as together, we traversed the back roads of the Upper Midwest in an RV and a Band Van. With great relief and a surprising sense of what it feels like to be young again, I’m here to say it exceeded even my loftiest expectations.

To see a guitar in my son’s hands, to turn to him and his band mates on stage after stage, in Chicago and Ann Arbor and half a dozen packed opera houses, killing it at the Marquette Blues Festival, recreating the “Big Bay Shuffle” in the famed Lumberjack Tavern where that drunken dance was born – to turn to Ben and his band and, before my very eyes, watch BDB explode into music that can only be theirs, dropping a stare-down-the-world creativity on audiences, making them listen, making them stay with something they’d never heard, something original, something new, something now; a prouder moment I can’t recall. I’ll take credit for getting a guitar in his hands, but the rest is him.

NEWSROOM airs its final season this Fall and come November I’m going to be at a theatre near you in “Part 2 of You-Know-What”. I will enjoy every minute of that extravaganza, but no matter how much fanfare I get, no matter how much exaltation and anointment comes my way, it will never top gigging through the Upper Midwest with my boy.

Jeff Daniels
September 7, 2014

Photo: Courtesy of Steve Lindberg