Dave Manning July 18, 2009

Here’s a switch: Dave Manning’s
1965 Volkswagen microbus is running
fine but his Web site needs to be rebuilt.
Manning is the guy from Alaska who
travels in his van from town to town
playing one-man shows in small bars
and clubs. He brings along a well-worn
but always-tuned piano which he plays
between stories about Alaska and life on
the road.
“So a spider walks into a bar ...”
Don’t be surprised if you hear one
spinning out this way if you happen to
be at the Fresh Ketch on Wednesday.
Manning was in Jerome, Ariz., last
month for an annual VW bus convention.
The mining town has a feeling of
the old West. It sits on the side of a steep
mountain on highway switchbacks.
Almost any window you look out looks
down on the roof of the next building
down, he said.
Seems like a funny place for a VW
bus convention.
“When I was told about it I asked do
they have a stall halfway up the mountain
selling engines?” said Manning,
who missed the slow drag race because
he was playing in one of the town’s two
bars that afternoon.
Along came a spider
After his show, he walked to the other
bar.
“This guy walks up to us with tarantula
on his arm,” Manning said. “I
thought they kept it in a cage behind the
bar and brought it out to freak out the out
of towners. He’s half drunk and he’s got
this guy crawling up one arm, across his
neck and down the other arm.
“I thought it must be somebody’s pet.
Then the bartender sees it and says get
that thing out of here. It had walked in
the bar on its own. I’m trying to think of
a punchline.”
Manning, who by the time he was 20
years old had been to each of the Lower
48 states, is an observer of people, an
Americana folk artist, Jack Kerouac
with a piano. He has a sharp wit, but his
delivery is so dry people might miss out
on the humor. If the audience isn’t
engaged, or perhaps too inebriated,
Manning will simply play more piano
and keep the stories short.
He was based in Reno for a while, but
his girlfriend has moved back to Alaska.
So Manning is in the bus full time now.
He toured Montana and Idaho over the
summer, and played several shows in
Tahoe, mostly on the North Shore. Next
month he’ll be in the Bay Area.
“What I like best about this whole
being on the road thing is I get to see old
friends and make new ones,” said Manning,
33, who also earns gas money by
tuning pianos.
During a stay in Arizona earlier in the
summer, Manning met some folks who
let him park on their acre spread for
seven days.
Noah of Arizona
He described the owner.
“He’s a scuba instructor which is an
odd thing if you’re living in Arizona,” he
said. “On top of that, he has a 30-foot
boat that he has completely disassembled
in the back yard of this place. I call
him the Noah of Arizona because he’s
building this boat and the nearest water
that could actually float that boat is hundreds
of miles away, but he’s out there
every day working on this boat.”
“Noah of Arizona” sounds like the
title for another one of Manning’s songs,
but it won’t be on his next CD, which is
nearly complete and will be released in a
couple of months.
“It’s 79 minutes, 30 seconds long,” he
said. “If I’m going to go to all the effort
to put out a CD, I’m going to put as
much on it as I can on it. Also, if people
are going to put out the $14 for my CD I
want them to get their moneys worth.”
The album will include six tracks he
recorded with his band in Anchorage
and three or four with band in Reno.
“The rest is mostly me and the
piano,” he said, adding there will be no
storytelling on the album. Folks will
have to see him live for that.