Couple Motors Country Making Music
Being on the road is as much a part of American rock 'n' roll as guitars, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. Married musicians Dan and Vickie Dubelman, AKA, Betty Dylan, have taken this musical wanderlust to its extreme, jettisoning high-paying jobs and a comfy California condo to travel the highways in a 31-foot mobile home.
Before meeting in 1996, Dan and Vickie led very different lives. Dan grew up in New Jersey in an issue debating, rooted, East Coast family while Vickie's staccato upbringing saw her in 22 schools even before high school.
As a teenager, severe allergies to the family's pets forced Dan into in his bedroom, where he practiced electric guitar in the style of Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck.
In 1980s Dan pursued fiction writing at Cornell and Johns Hopkins, studied acting for a summer at Oxford, and spent much of his time on his music. Although he met with success in all of these educational and artistic endeavors, he soon had trouble finding a job in the real world.
The early 1990s found Dan playing music in New York, strapped for cash and descending the ladder of bad housing.
"The low point came when I was living with a punk band in Jersey City in a house with no plumbing," he remembers. Desperate for money, he took a job as Keith Richards in a Rolling Stones cover band.
Vickie's southwestern upbringing was volatile, to say the least.
"My parents were a little wild," she explains. "My dad was a redneck, alcoholic gambler." When Vickie was nine, her folks' "free-love" marriage ended in divorce, and she shuttled between them for many years before settling in Los Angeles.
Vickie's love of music and her singing sustained her and allowed her to tour the U.S. with her high school jazz vocal group. By 1987, 23-year-old Vickie she was living in Venice Beach, singing in a band and working as an assistant in the entertainment business.
Dan and Vickie's paths crossed in 1996 just after Dan sidelined his music career and moved to Los Angeles in search of a decent paying job. He worked as the manager of Online Entertainment for Fox Kids Network and then launched his own web development company.
"I quickly got the reputation of being an Internet auteur," he says. "When a company couldn't get a website done, they would call us up."
Vickie, meanwhile, was working in children's television development. Tasked with creating a website for an animated program, she called Dan.
"I heard his voice, and immediately, I was just melting on the phone," she says. The attraction was mutual, but Dan and Vickie's rapidly deepening friendship remained strictly platonic, as Vickie was married at the time.
When Vickie's husband asked for a divorce she was devastated.
"I went to the desert for three days," she says. "When I came back, I went to Dan's house and I never left."
The close friends then admitted their love for each other and were married in October 1997.
Dan and Vickie both played music on the side, and although they tried to stay out of each other's bands, they eventually started playing together as Betty Dylan, whose style is a unique blend of country, blues and rock. The band's name came to Vickie as an evocation of their combined "alternative country" style, a feminized version of Bob Dylan. When a record producer friend saw them play at LA's Roxy in October 1999, he told them they could make a living in the music business.
Dan and Vickie soon divided their lives between lucrative yet, increasingly unsatisfying Internet jobs in Los Angeles and exciting and inspiring weeks spent on the road with the band. They released their first album, American Trash, in 2001 created as part of Dan's novel of the same name, and their popularity began to grow.
While playing on the road to promote the CD, Dan and Vickie spun off the road in a Wyoming snowstorm. The accident in March 2002 led them to rethink their lives.
"We decided that, if we're going to do this, we have to do it all the way," says Vickie. The next month they sold their LA condo, and after attempting to live in motels, went shopping for a motor home. "It was a logical solution," says Dan. It was also a way of pulling up anchor and saying goodbye to the less creative half of their lives.
Today, the couple spends 12 months a year living in their motor home, with Dan booking Betty Dylan gigs as Vickie drives. Although they have no fixed address, they spend a lot of time in Bloomington, Ind., where they've found many talented musical friends and an agent.
The couple occasionally longs to put down roots, particularly when the highway leaves them tired. But the benefits, including seeing America and interacting with fascinating and friendly folks from all walks of life, definitely outweigh the hardships.
Life on the road has also changed the way they play music and write songs. "You hear the river, the sounds of the coyote at night? and you hear music differently," says Dan. Betty Dylan's latest album, Heart Land, merges country and blues sounds in a seeming tribute to the wanderer's life.
Visit Betty Dylan on the web at www.bettydylan.com.
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