Willie Wisely & His Belle Bottoms at Pan-O-Prog, Lakeville (July 12, 2025)

The city of Lakeville, Minnesota is at the very southern end of the Twin Cities metro and wouldn’t be a place I would normally find myself. But since 1967, the city has an annual festival called Pan-O-Prog, short for Panorama of Progress. Lasting over a week, there are a lot of local businesses being highlighted, and all sorts of events including a lot of live music. On this last weekend of Pan-O-Prog 2025, I caught local troubadour Willie Wisely performing.

Wisely is a veteran of the Twin Cities music scene for over the last thirty years, though he did have a roughly decade where he was living and working out of Los Angeles. He’s done nearly all of it: singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer, film composer, and more. He has nearly twenty albums ranging from his early days as the Willie Wisely Trio, to his solo career, to any number of one off or short-term bands he puts together as needed.

On this pleasant Saturday afternoon, he was playing as Willie Wisely & His Belle Bottoms. Playing to the crowd, Wisely and the band were all covers starting with The Rolling Stones’ Beast of Burden. The Belle Bottoms were guitar, bass and drums, while Wisely held down vocals and occasionally on harmonica, tambourine, or guitar as suited for the song.

Ever the performer, Wisely had his usual unique stage presence, lead guitarist Ryan Smith (lead guitarist for Soul Asylum) took over for singing duties on Should I Stay or Should I Go. As expected, Wisely was all over the stage, hitting his version of the rock lead singer motifs, including dropping to the stage and rolling back to a standing position. And while the theatrics were fun, it’s also musically well above average, as each of the band were excellent musicians. Pinball Wizard has a rapid-fire set of lyrics and Wisely nailed it. We got the requisite Replacements song with Can’t Hardly Wait, which was well sung by Smith. A short interlude of jokes got us back to the music and close to the end of the first set (the band was scheduled from 2-5 pm).

Due to popular request in the intermission, Wisely (after a costume change!) and the band started the second set with an early original, Raincan, with Wisely on acoustic. An introduction of the band, and the band started Heart of Gold, with a soft but effective Neil Young impression.

Completing the new look with a cowboy hat, the song Honky Tonk Women worked with the western get up and an extended harmonica solo. After a little guitar tuning, the band played another Wisely song, Too Quick to Love, allowing Wisely to really belt it out. A broken string from Smith was quickly replaced and he took lead vocals on There She Goes. The band steadily played on, ranging across a variety of rock genres impressively. Finishing up the second set with the title track from Parador with an epic guitar solo from Smith, Willie Wisely had absolutely killed it in Lakeville. While I couldn’t stay for the third set, Willie Wisely and His Belle Bottoms had certainly entertained the Pan-O-Prog crowd with some extremely talented musicianship.