Nothin' Fancy poses with what's left of the van. Photo by Mac Newell.

Ah, the life of a traveling musician. Glitz. Glamor. Glory down every mile.

Well, those might be things to conjure up a good fairy tale — especially if you ask members of Nothin’ Fancy these days. The Virginia-based band, which last month won Entertaining Group of the Year honors from the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America, had a … shall we say, unique experience on the road last month.

Band member Mike Andes shared the story with his publicity firm, East Public Relations, which, in turn, was gracious enough to share this adventure with BluegrassJournal.com. The “Mac” referred to in the story is Nothin’ Fancy fanatic Mac Newell, who had the misfortune of picking this trip to follow the band around.

Since there are times that the original telling of a tale can’t be improved on, we yield to Andes’ blow-by-blow account. It follows:

Our schedule was, Waldo, Fla. Feb. 19 and 20; Bloomingdale, Ga., on Feb. 21; and Appomattox, Va., on Feb. 22.

I flew from Columbus, Ohio, to Jacksonville, Fla on the 19th. Chris (Sexton), who drove separately, picked me up at the airport. We met up with Gary (Farris), Mitchell (Davis), Mac and Tony (Shorter) in Waldo.

Mitchell told me the van was making some strange noises. Gary said, “She’s on her last leg.”

After talking about this, the plan was to nurse the ole girl along and hopefully make it to all the shows on time. I rode in the van from Waldo to Georgia and yes, she was making some death rattles.

The show at Randy Woods Guitar Shop was great. We went straight to the hotel afterwards and planned to get up at 4 a.m. We would be on the road to Virginia by 4:30 a.m. We are all right on time, even Tony, and away we went.

Within 20 minutes of our trip, Mitchell says, ‘There are flames coming out of the back wheel.” Mitchell was driving so he pulls off the road and Gary puts the fire out with ice from our cooler. We stand around for a while and decide to try and limp the van up the road to an exit ramp. Everything is going quite well. we stop a couple of times and check the wheel, It’s OK. We keep going.

Tony is riding shotgun, is glued to the mirror watching the passenger side rear wheel when he says, “There’s sparks coming out of the trailer wheel.”

Mitchell stops immediately. We check the wheel and agree to keep going as far as we can. Finally, we get off the interstate and pull into a service mart. We are trying to come up with a game plan. We check the wheels; they’re not overly hot, so we decide to go further.

While leaving the parking lot, Tony says, “The trailer wheel is really wobbling.”

So we drop the trailer and put everything we need into Chris’s vehicle. Chris is following the injured Nothin’ Fancy van. Now back on the road, I really thought we might make it since we weren’t pulling the trailer; I was wrong.

Fifteen minutes into the journey, I had just fallen asleep along side the bass and all kinds of luggage, when KABOOM! the van is listing starboard. My first question was, “Did Chris run over our wheel?” Tony answered, “No, our wheel passed us.”

Here we sit.

This happened right at an exit, so we took it on three wheels. Gary and Mitch walked up to the nearest store and called a tow truck. Mac, Tony, and I sat in the remains. We couldn’t help but laugh at the entire situation. Mac said, “It’s snowing in Virginia.” I replied, “We’ll have to put this thing in three-wheel drive.” We laughed even more.

Gary and Mitch are back, the tow truck is coming and a taxi is on the way to save the day. We have to be on the road by 8 a.m. or we will have to cancel our show in Virginia. The taxi gets there at 7:50 a.m.

We put everything from the van into Chris’s vehicle. What a sight. It looked as if Chris was running away from home. Here we go — the driver knows our situation and he’s not going to be to blame if we’re late.

We are in something like a Ford Explorer. Mitch is in front, Gary, Mac and Tony are squished together on the back seat and I’m in the very back lying with my legs draped over suitcases and stuff. But that’s OK, we only have five hours to ride like this. We’re still laughing about it all. I rose up once and saw the speedometer, I lay back down and start writing a song titled, “Lord Don’t Let Me Die in a Taxi.”

I must say the man could drive. We made it to Virginia right on time.

I learned from this experience, Nothin’ Fancy is something special. We worked as a team with our goal being our fans. Even though it was never said, I believe Gary, Mitchell, Tony, Chris and myself were dreading the thought of having to cancel a show and let our fans down. When it was all over, we sighed, “We did it!” and went on our separate ways to get ready for the next journey.

Additional photo’s from the trip are available on Nothin’ Fancy’s web site.