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Widespread Panic: Against the Grain

by Bob Makin

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After 15 years and thousands of shows, Widespread Panic has proven that hard work matters more than radio and MTV play.

The Athens, Ga.-based band sells out arenas in the South and theaters everywhere else but has yet to produce a gold record. You may remember that Phish, a fellow founding participant in the HORDE, was in the same boat until "A Live One" in 1995. Widespread also has released a live disc, last year's double "Light Fuse Get Away." But sales remained slim.

That may not be the case with "'Till The Medicine Takes," the group's most dynamic and well structured studio effort to date. Featuring guest appearances by gospel diva Dottie Peoples, Big Ass Truck DJ Colin Butler, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band's horn section and Anne Richmond Boston of The Swimming Pool Qs on backing vocals, the group's seventh release on the ever-nurturing Capricorn Records was produced by John Keane, a mentor who is to Widespread what Tom Dowd is to the band's older brothers from Atlanta, The Allman Brothers Band.

An eclectic outing ranging from hip-hop beats and scratches and unstoppable New Orleans funk to soulful gospel vocals and a twangy bluegrass banjo via Keane, the disc's inclusive depth and brightness could cure the ailing, widget-peddling music industry if only it would bother to swallow the medicine.

In the meantime, Widespread vocalist-guitarist John "J.B." Bell, keyboardist-vocalist John "Jojo" Herman, guitarist-vocalist Michael Houser, drummer Todd Nance, percussionist-vocalist Domingo S. Ortiz and bassist-vocalist Dave Schools will continue to slug it out on the road, including a jaunt to Europe. I spoke with Schools about the band's love affair with its fans, its music and its musical influences.

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BM: Earlier this year, you broke Phish's attendance record at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. That's an indication that you'll jump to larger venues soon. How do you keep that kind of growth from screwing up your head and turning away your oldest fans?

DS: As far as screwing up our head goes, I don't think it's going to happen. We've been doing this nearly 15 years. You learn to understand the kind of progression that comes with going against the grain of musical fashion and trying not to be the flavor of the month. You learn to wait. And we try to take care of the older fans with plenty of V.I.P. access. After 10 years of struggling in nightclubs, you get to know the hard-core fans. The fact that it's never exploded has made that real.

BM: Most nights, Widespread does a three-hour show, so you rarely have an opening act. But the band loves New Orleans music so much that you occasionally tour with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Comment on what that's like and how it translated in the studio on ''Til the Medicine Takes.'

DS: As far as opening bands go, we don't like having them. If we are going to have one, it's going to have to be someone that we really enjoy. We do really enjoy The Meters and The Dirty Dozen and The Neville Brothers. All of them have opened for us and sent us scurrying back to our rehearsal room. We feel guilty about having them open for us. The main reason we have them is because we figure that if people like our music, which comes from our hearts, then they'll want to learn about the things that influenced us.

To me the whole New Orleans sound played a really big part in what we do. It's one of the few things that the whole band truly agrees on. You could put on a Dirty Dozen Brass Band record, and you're not going to get any complaint out of any band member. Whereas I could put on the latest Butthole Surfers record, and there'll be lots of complaints.

The Dirty Dozen opened our Halloween shows in New Orleans. It's just become a tradition. We've played Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition,' Talking Heads' 'Swamp' and Funkadelic's 'Red Hot Mama' with the horn section. We took the roof off the place. We're capable of stirring up energy, but these guys added that. An extra feature to The Dirty Dozen Brass Band that I'd not realize is that you can't stay mad for whatever reason the tour has gotten you down. So we can be in a really great mood every time we hit the stage. An instant way to get out of a shitty mood is to go and see The Dirty Dozen Brass Band play. I can't think of any higher praise for them. They're great guys, more than willing to come sit in us with night after night. It's such a blast.

BM: I think the theme of ''Til the Medicine Takes' and Widespread Panic in general can be found in 'The Waker': 'I'm married to my roots here. Still, I feel like I am free. Always searching for something new.' That's how I'd describe this record with its rootsy sounds combined with what for Widespread Panic is kind of experimental with hip-hop sounds and studio effects. How did your approach to songwriting and recording change with this record?

DS: We've had the same producer and mentor in John Keane. He's the kind of person who makes you want to please him. You work hard for him. We also come to terms with using the studio as a tool to create the best photograph of the band at that time. It's not a nightclub where you can just play or a big show with a crowd of 20,000 people egging you on. For us, it's been a long process of coming to terms with isolating the eternal truth that really is us. And John Keane has helped push us in that direction.

We've been really lucky to have met people Danny Hutchins, Vic Chestnutt and Jerry Joseph, who wrote 'Climb To Safety' on this record. 'Climb To Safety' was on a Jerry Joseph record from about three years ago, but it's one of those songs that we always felt like doing. We just did a few shows with Jerry out on the West Coast, and he was blown away.

The Brute record that we did backing up Vic Chestnutt, that's my idea of a great record. With that record, we broke out of the hippie band mold. But those are three of the most gifted songwriters I've ever seen in my travels, and we've had the opportunity work with all of them. While there's a change in your sound with scratching on 'Dyin' Man,' there's a bluesy organ on that tune. It's genre blending. It's the same with Medeski, Martin and Wood, Phish or Aquarium Rescue Unit. It's this melting pot of different styles. If you take Middle Eastern styles with a Western backbeat, it works. Music creates a one-world kind of vision. A unity. We may never be able to solve our political differences or our religious differences, but if we can agree that our various ethnic heritages sound good mixed together, that's a step in the right direction.

BM: Like many improvisational rock bands, the show is the driving force of Widespread Panic rather than the record. You sold out enough shows to be one of the 50 top-grossing acts of last year. Yet you don't get a lot of radio or MTV play. You haven't sold more than 200,000 albums yet. With this record, do you think there'll be some kind of commercial breakthrough? And was any of the design of it in the hopes that there would be?

DS: As far as the relationship goes from Capricorn to the producer, John Keane, there's probably a lot of thought put into that. As far as John Keane to us, he knows who we are and what we are. He produced our very first record nearly10 years ago. He's watched us grow, and he's grown. But he did take a very different approach, more of a hands-off, ears-on approach. He sent us a letter with ideas for this project about using different sounds. He never sent us a note saying, 'OK, we're going for four-minute songs.' That's something that's always been in the back of our head, as long as the song could be naturally written that way. Certain band members write short pop songs and other band members write long ones with which we can more easily improv. There's a place and time for all of that.

So if you look at the relationship of the label down to John and the band up to John, and add in the fact that we had just put out a couple of live records with tons of jams, everybody felt really good about entering the studio with these songs. But this band never, ever cowtows, because if you do that, by the time your record comes out, your sound will no longer be the hot sound. Maybe some day we'll be in the right place at the right time, even though we'll have been there for 15 years. It's like Bonnie Raitt with an armful of Grammys a few years ago, saying, 'It feels great to have worked for 20 years to become an overnight success.' But we don't do it for that. We'd love to sell more records, because obviously it would keep our record company happy. And it doesn't hurt to sell records. But we sell tickets. That's been our lifeblood the whole time. Certainly if we sold more records, we'd sell more tickets, which scares the hell out of us. We have to make sure that 20,000 kids behave properly so that the band doesn't get banned from our favorite venues, like Red Rocks. Phish exploded and reaped a lot of benefits from that, but at the same time, the fans caused them to be banned from places like Red Rocks. I think that's a shame. I hope that never happens.

We've done everything on our own terms. We'll give a little in the studio, but we won't give a little when it comes to live performance. We've worked a long time to get promoters to not use an opening act. They let us have our hour-long first set, then our hour-and-a-half second set. Everybody comes out ahead. We're happy, the crowd's happy and the promoter makes more money. It took a long time to convince the powers-that-be that we weren't formulaic.

BM: That just shows how much you must love The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

DS: Exactly. These are heroes of ours. People we respect greatly. We feel guilty about having to follow them. The stronger caribou should get to lead the pack. Those guys are a stronger caribou of music than we are. We have something special with them and The Neville Brothers and Junior Brown, and our fans understand that. We can convince them that they're up here not because some promoter thought they should open, but because the band thought they'd be worth hearing. It's up to them to come see it. But they have caught onto The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. They come early, and the band loves it. They're happy. And we're happy. What more could you ask for than to be happy on the road?

BM: Your bio says that you want to shake free of the jam band scene. What does that mean?

DS: We want to shake free of that name, jam band. The jam band thing used to be The Grateful Dead bands. We shook free of that as hard as we could back in 1989. Then Blues Traveler came on the scene. All together, we created the HORDE tour, which focused a lot of attention on jam bands. Then someone coined the term jam bands. I'd rather just be called retro. When you pigeonhole something, you limit its ability to grow and change. If someone called Neil Young a contemporary folk artist, that's bullshit. Anyone who knows Neil Young knows that. People gave him the slack to do his electronic music. They might hate it. In fact, his record company sued him for not making the kind of music he was known for. What if Sting had never been given the chance to be a solo artist? We would have been robbed of some really great music. Or if R.E.M. had been forced to stick with 'Radio Free Europe' throughout? A good fan is going to like you for the reason that you are you.

BM: Having made a more structured record, what is the live show like now?

DS: We're jamming even more live. That's why they come back night after night.

BM: You contributed a great story song called 'One Arm Steve.' Who's 'One Arm Steve'?

DS: One Arm Steve is a real person. He was the door man who trained me to be a bouncer. Steve was in the Navy on an aircraft carrier. In an accident, he lost his arm. The band was selling out regular in Athens, and people would try to get in to see us any way they could. And Steve would get pretty upset about it. It made his job pretty hard.

When Jojo joined the band, One Arm Steve stopped him. He was like, 'No, no, no. I'm the new guy in the band.' And there was this old poster right there and it's got T. Lavitz on it. Steve's like, 'I don't see your face.' Luckily some one found out that Jojo was having a hard time. But Steve's a great guy. He's moved on from bouncing and has his own restaurant. But he's such a great character, so it makes for a good song.

BM: Do you think you'll do another Brute record with Vic Chestnutt?

DS: I think so. Vic says he has a whole record of songs that he wrote specifically for Brute. I'm sure that will happen. But I can't tell you when.

BM: What is Europe like for Widespread Panic?

DS: Nightclubs and festivals. It's different and it's fun and you're playing to a new crowd. The fun thing about Europe is having those people sweating right on your feet. At festivals, you're on a bill with Iggy Pop. It's like Woodstock, but people are well behaved. Even if Iggy is inciting a riot, it's all part of the show.

BM: Do you think at some point, you'll play arenas throughout the United States?

DS: I don't know. You have to prove it to these promoters that you can do it. A lot of them aren't willing to understand the way you view things as a band. They want to put you in this formula that works for someone else. Phish was lucky enough to be able to promote their own shows. They'd tell the promoter, 'Look, we'll make it work somehow. We have the ways and means to cover losses,' which is what they were able to do a long time ago and sort of get their foot in the door.