Pat Sansone has played on some of the best-known stages in the United States.

As part of Wilco he has performed at venues like Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden. The group is scheduled to play the legendary Ryman Theater in Nashville, Tenn., two days after the group’s appearance here on March 15.

But since he was 4 years old Pat has wanted to play the Hamasa Shriners Temple Theatre in his hometown of Meridian.

“My earliest dreams of being a performer were dreams of being on that stage,” he said.

Since joining Wilco about 18 months ago, he also has played tour dates in Europe and Brazil, but for Pat, the performance scheduled Wednesday in Meridian represents things coming full-circle. It’s a particular picture that is being completed in his head.

Where it all began

He said the Temple Theatre is very important to him. It is where he grew up in many respects because the Temple is where his father, Tony, booked many acts, particularly as part of Meridian’s Lively Arts Festival, which ran from 1968, the year before Pat was born, until the mid-1980s.

“It was an intensely important place for me. I was able to see legendary people and I absorbed that,” Pat said.

The Temple is where he watched the performers show up as “regular people” in their everyday clothes backstage and then saw them transform on stage — people like Tony Bennett, Gladys Knight, Ray Charles, Carl Perkins, The Four Tops, The Commodores and many country music stars.

When Pat was just a baby Tony said he would carry him around in the Temple like a football. It’s the same theatre where Pat’s mother, Karen, performed as a singer in a group that opened for many of the shows booked there. It also is the theatre where Pat’s grandmother Sansone won a talent contest when she was just 4 years old.

“We would book what we thought were pretty big name acts,” Tony said.

But, he’s proudest of Wilco coming next week.

“It’s not often a small town boy gets to come home and perform in the theatre where he grew up in a band that performs coast-to-coast,” Tony said.

Two bands

As a performer Pat enjoys the best of both worlds.

As a member of Wilco all he has to do is show up at the venue when it’s time to play and all of his equipment and thousands of adoring fans are waiting.

As a member of The Autumn Defense, the band he formed with Wilco bassist John Stirratt in the late 1990s, Pat still gets to deal with bookings and hauls his own equipment into small clubs.

And while his role in Wilco — which is mainly a vehicle for the songs of the band’s frontman, Jeff Tweedy — is mainly that of a support player, providing keyboards, guitars and vocals, The Autumn Defense is the vehicle for Pat and Stirratt’s writing.

“As far as the performance goes there’s not that much difference at the essence of it. It’s being able to perform on stage and connect to people you’re performing for, whether it is 10,000 people or 35 people,” Pat said.

Although he avoided being in rock bands for quite a while, because he enjoyed the freedom of playing with different musicians, he calls his place in Wilco and The Autumn Defense “a very unique situation and a very healthy situation.”

He said Wilco is wonderful in that every member of the band is involved in their own individual projects and are supportive of each other.

Background

Pat, who attended the University of Southern Mississippi, left Hattiesburg in the mid-1990s to live in New Orleans.

Buffalo Nickel, the band scheduled to open for Wilco on Wednesday, includes some of his old college buddies from USM.

In New Orleans he started working at recording studios. He also got a lot of studio work in Nashville, Tenn., and eventually moved from New Orleans to Nashville, then to New York.

He relocated to Chicago, Wilco’s home base, over the past year.

“I spend a lot of my time sort of mining the music from decades ago,” he said. “There’s a lot of amazing music made 40 and 50 years ago.”

Pat also has been listening to a lot of Brazilian music lately, rock bands like The Flaming Lips, as well as jazz, hip-hop and classical.

“From the ridiculous to the sublime,” he chuckled over his varied taste in music.

He said Paul McCartney’s latest album, “Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard,” is one of his favorites that he has discovered lately.

Playing to the home folks

Pat said bringing Wilco to Meridian is his father’s doing. After Tony saw Wilco perform at Radio City Music Hall last fall he thought it would be a good idea to bring the band to Meridian.

“I thought it was great,” Pat said. “I told him he was just going to have to go through the same channels everyone does. He pulled it off.”

The Temple holds 1,500 people and there are only a about 100 tickets left. Tickets were not sold online. Tony said about 95 percent of ticket sales are from 100 miles away or more.

“We’ll have at least 1,000 visitors in Meridian that day,” he said.

Pat said his father gave a lot of himself to Meridian in booking legendary performers on the Temple stage, especially back in the 1970s and 1980s.

“The ability for people in Meridian to drive five minutes to see Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin was incredible,” Pat said.

On Wednesday it will be a five minute drive for many Meridian residents to see Wilco, an internationally acclaimed band, another musical behemoth, appearing on the Temple stage.

Suggesting that the appearance of a band of Wilco’s stature is an historic event for Meridian and the little theatre on Eighth Street, Pat said: “It is in a way. In a way not. It’s all happened before.”

For him it’s just come full-circle.