PORT ANGELES — On tour with country singer Nikki Lane, Ben Eyestone and Eric Whitman are playing San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, Cleveland, Detroit and Vancouver, B.C., among many other North American cities.
This Friday night, though, is when the two musicians might feel a little stage fright.
“I’m not going to say I’m nervous,” quipped Whitman, 27.
“I’ve got to be on my game,” though, for a show at the Metta Room, that nightclub in his and Eyestone’s hometown of Port Angeles.
The Nikki Lane band will bring what’s been called “outlaw country” to the venue, 132 E. Front St., for a 9 p.m. show for the 21-and-older crowd. The rock band Clear Plastic Masks will open. The cover charge is $5.
For the past year and a half, Whitman, a guitarist and bassist, and Eyestone, a drummer, have been traveling with Lane, whom they got to know after they moved to Nashville, Tenn., in 2010.
From the Peninsula
The two, who began their careers while they were in high school with the band The Lonely H, are living the life musicians dream of.
One Sunday in April 2014, Eyestone, 26, happened to run into Lane, who had just released her album “All or Nothin’” to good reviews from outlets including Rolling Stone magazine and NPR.
“I need a drummer,” she told him.
“I had no thoughts that I was going to go out on the road with her,” Eyestone recalled.
But Lane’s next remark was along the lines of “Can you go on tour with me, starting Tuesday?”
Eyestone got his next bartending shift covered at the 5 Spot, a Nashville nightclub, and let his boss know he had this opportunity, so some other shifts would need covering, too.
Boss was supportive, saying, “Right on. Where you going?”
It turned out Lane also needed a bass player, so Eyestone contacted Whitman. Never mind that Whitman was a guitarist; he picked up the bass and taught himself, much as he had done with the guitar as a young boy in Port Angeles.
Off they went across America, then to Australia and New Zealand — “super fun,” said Eyestone — and back to the States for a swing across the Midwest, the Mountain West and the Pacific Northwest.
Port Angeles was not on the itinerary at first. But last time Lane and the band played Seattle, they drove out west and did some visiting with family in Port Angeles.
It was Lane’s idea to do a show here, Eyestone said, and she, for her part, is promoting the gig on her Facebook page.
‘Intimate party’
Reached on her cellphone while driving across Montana earlier this week, Lane said this Friday night is “for the boys to check in and show their town, ‘This is what we’re up to.’ We want to make it an intimate party,” with a rough-edged country soundtrack.
Eyestone “is pretty much a full rock ’n’ roll drummer,” Lane added.
As for Whitman, “he’s a fun one to watch. Listen to the parts he writes. He’s not doing it from a traditional bass background.”
Lane knows what it is to come from a fairly small town: She grew up in Simpsonville, S.C., outside Greenville.
Spending your formative years in a community such as Port Angeles, she believes, gives you time to explore your talents, test things out, sculpt yourself.
“You can tell they had time, growing up, to develop really strong personalities,” Lane said of Eyestone and Whitman.
Then again, “you know everybody, and everybody knows your parents,” Whitman added. His are mom Gay Whitman and stepfather Tony Steinman, while Eyestone’s folks are Laura Eyestone, a singer and Port Angeles School District music teacher, and Paul Eyestone, a musician and the owner of Eyestone Building Design.
Whitman estimates he’s known Ben Eyestone since they both were 4 and on the same soccer team.
The Lonely H
They started hanging out together in middle school and, barely into their teen years, began gigging and recording with The Lonely H, which included singer-keyboardist Mark Fredson and Whitman’s older brother, Johnny, on bass.
The band played Port Angeles’ Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts, at the Experience Music Project’s Sound Off! competition in Seattle and the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
The band also recorded four albums, but broke up awhile after moving to Nashville. Fredson is now a solo artist, while Johnny is an art director at a Nashville advertising agency.
For the two players in the Nikki Lane band, these days and nights on the road are sweet.
“My goal has always been to make a living as a drummer,” said Eyestone.
“I’m technically homeless right now,” Whitman added.
“That’s kind of cool.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
