Interview | Around The Horn With Warren Haynes
By Team JamBase Dec 18, 2014 • 8:10 am PST
Written By: Chad Berndtson
When Warren Haynes is involved, there’s no time to waste –there’s simply too much to talk about with the man whenever we’re fortunate enough to grab his time.
Following another epic Christmas Jam, and with Gov’t Mule’s New Year’s Eve shows and a tour with John Scofield coming up as part of a typically action-packed year ahead, we went around the horn with Uncle Warren:
JAMBASE: Warren, another Christmas Jam in the books. How was it from your vantage point?
WARREN HAYNES: I really thought it was excellent. I thought the music was wonderful, and everyone rose to the occasion.
JB: Vince Gill couldn’t make it, but obviously the show must go on. Was it the plan to do that Marshall Tucker Band set with him?
WH: Yeah, originally we were going to do several of Vince’s songs and then a short Marshall Tucker tribute with Vince and his keyboard player as well. When we got the call that he wouldn’t be available, we decided to do it anyway with Jack Pearson and Danny Louis. We had a short rehearsal and it came out wonderful.
JB: What was your favorite collaboration moment of the show?
WH: Wow, that’s tough. I enjoyed all the stuff we did with Marshall Tucker, the Neil Young stuff with Jackie, playing with Billy and the Kids was really cool. You know doing “Helpless” with myself and Jackie and Jason Isbell and Neal Casal trading verses was really cool. That was going to be Vince instead of Neal originally, but Neal filled in and did a wonderful job. The whole night, though. It was a lot of jamming, but it didn’t get too esoteric, which is to say it came off well for the crowd in a way that was both cool and experimental.
JB: From a personal favorite standpoint, it’s always fun to see you with Jack Pearson I have to say.
WH: Yeah that was great. I’m so glad Jack played. His band played the Orange Peel the night before and it was great.
JB: It seems in recent years you’ve moved away from doing kind of a big, pile-on finale and opted for a more organic fade-out at the end, just a last song usually from the Mule. Accurate you think?
WH: You know every year is a little different. We wanted to give Billy and the Kids a nice long set. They came a long way to be with us and they like to play a long time. The obvious thing would have been to have them close, and I do think it’s nice when someone other than Gov’t Mule can close the show. Speaking selfishly for me –I’m still punching the clock until Mule’s done! [laughs]
But it has to make musical sense, too, and it has to be a connection with the audience that makes sense. Kreutzmann doing the Dead stuff kept people jumping and dancing — that’s really nice. Mule has closed it so many times, so it was nice to do something different. Originally we were going to do a few more original songs but again, having done that many times, it was cool to do that short set of Neil Young covers with Jackie and then the stuff with Audley [Freed] and Caleb Johnson –a couple of rockers.
JB: I understand you and Caleb Johnson met only just before the show?
WH: We met the day before, and he’s a really nice guy and a great singer. We had talked on the phone before that about some song selections but we didn’t actually meet face to face until the day before. He really fit the Christmas Jam spirit well I thought.
JB: Well let’s look ahead. You have New Year’s with the Mule coming up and a lot of dates already on the books for 2015. Folks have been buzzing about these Sco-Mule shows and we’ve talked about the long-awaited album release of course. What format will these take? Is John going to play with Mule the whole show?
WH: It will probably be the equivalent of one set with and one set without John. It may vary from night to night, maybe he’ll play in parts of both sets. We’re going to expand the repertoire far beyond what we’ve done with him to date. I mean John and I have worked together in Phil Lesh & Friends so we can tap into that catalog a little bit, tap into his repertoire, tap into Gov’t Mule, tap into outside instrumental songs or non-instrumental songs…the sky’s the limit. We’re getting better at figuring out how to approach it but the chemistry between us was there at the very beginning.
JB: You’ve shared your stage with a lot of guitar players. What’s playing with Scofield like for you?
WH: He’s one of my absolute favorites. He’s really pushing me to bring my A-game and pull out different parts of my musical vocabulary that maybe I don’t normally focus on as much. But I think we push each other to play differently. The first time we played together he played a little bit more rock and bluesy and I played a little bit more jazzy and experimental. We keep leaning toward each other that way. It’s a real honor for me to play with him.
JB: Will there be more Sco-Mule dates beyond what’s been announced?
WH: I hope so. You know one reason it’s taken until now to release this record is because we always wanted to do a tour to promote it. That’s not the only reason but one of the reasons, and now that we’re embarking on that finally, we will look at the possibility of more.
JB: Warren, you’ll be doing AC/DC over New Year’s, and you just did Neil Young again at the Christmas Jam and it sounds like Dark Side of the Mule will make a return at Mountain Jam. Now, I know you can’t please all of the fans all of the time –and yours are a prickly, opinionated group sometimes –but I think it’s accurate to say there are some who think the covers sets have been too much and just want good old Mule more. How would you respond to that?
WH: In the sense of the Halloween and New Year’s shows?
JB: Beyond that, just that there have been so many covers-centric sets lately and you are releasing a lot of material focused on covers.
WH: Well, we’re opening up this pipeline of archival releases strictly and uniquely based on it being our 20th anniversary. That makes total sense to me, it wouldn’t be something we would normally do. If someone stumbles into a Mule Halloween or New Year’s show and didn’t know they were going to be part of a thematic evening, well, I guess they’re just discovering Mule for the first time. I don’t see an issue with any of it. To me, we have tons of material out there, and I think if you look back at the last 100 shows we’ve done, it’s probably predominantly Gov’t Mule.
The whole concept of doing a few covers works for a band like us that does a 3-hour show. If we were doing 75-or 90-minute shows we probably wouldn’t do that, but our normal show is really long. It’s nice to throw a few curveballs in there, and I think we see that in the entire scene we’re part of as well. But these releases –Stoned Side, Dark Side, Dub Side –these are for fans who want that sort of thing. If people don’t, there’s plenty of Gov’t Mule material out there, too.
JB: Do you plan on there being a lot more touring with the Mule in 2015?
WH: Yeah. I know we’re going back to Europe. We’re also filling in the gaps on places we haven’t hit recently in the States, but we have covered a lot of ground over the past year. I’m also working on a solo record and Matt and Jorgen are finalizing the second POA [Planet of the Abts] record. Danny and I are both on that. So yeah it’ll be a busy year.
JB: I wanted to ask, with the wind-down of the Allman Brothers, that’s calendar space you haven’t had free in a long time. Do you fill it with something else? More Mule? Family time?
WH: [Pause] Let’s start from the beginning. The whole confusion about Derek and I leaving the band is something that I still don’t think has been cleared up yet. For about three years now the Allman Brothers Band had been having meetings about making the 45th anniversary the final shows and discontinuing touring. That’s something we all agreed on.
Some of us, especially Derek and myself, had made a lot of plans based on that, but at least one member of the band started getting cold feet. I think most of us, if not all of us, in the long run still feel that this is the best decision. I don’t speak for Derek, but for me it was never intended to free up time, so to speak. I’ll enjoy having as much family time as I can get, and I have a lot of projects on the horizon that we can talk about when the time is right. But this decision was made by the entire Allman Brothers Band.
We will all miss it. That’s been such an enormous part of my life, musically speaking. The Allman Brothers Band is the only band capable of doing what that band does, musically speaking. So it’s very bittersweet emotionally. But I do wish it had been portrayed in the press a little bit more accurately, as far as the hows and whys.
JB: Were you happy with the final shows? You personally?
WH: I thought the very last show as about as good as that band has played in a long, long time. I was proud of us individually and collectively. It was a very emotional show, and we were all on the same page, so I think that was a great way to go out. The shows leading up to it had some amazing moments, but none was quite as good as that last show as a whole.
With the Allman Brothers Band, every show is going to be different. There will always be some extreme highs. I’m not sure my interpretation of a show is always the same as even the audience’s interpretation, because what I’m looking for is probably a little different than what members of the audience might be looking for.
JB: What did you guys do immediately after that last “Trouble No More” and you left the stage?
WH: Well, we had a little party a couple of blocks away. We wound down and we had a lot of family and friends and stuff around. I think I got home probably around 6 a.m.
JB: And I understand it was Butch’s idea to play “Trouble No More” as the last song?
WH: It’s something we talked about at rehearsal. “Trouble No More” was the first song the band ever played. What we had started talking about was doing three sets and seeing if everyone was up for it. I think Derek at one point had mentioned “Trouble No More” to me and then in the middle of a conversation Butch walked up and said, “We gotta go out with ‘Trouble No More’.” Butch was already pushing to do three sets and go well past midnight.
JB: Right on. And I know Gregg told a reporter before the shows there would be no guests. Made total sense to have the core band, of course, but guest musician sit-ins were such a part of the Beacon experience, especially in the last 10 years. Was that a full-band decision?
WH: Yeah, I think we all felt like, there are only six shows, four of which were makeup shows, so it’s appropriate to make those shows just the band. I think once the concept got brought up, everyone was in full agreement.
JB: While we have a little bit more time, I wanted to switch gears toward your solo album. Both you and the guys from Railroad Earth have talked a little about those sessions you did in New York a few weeks back. I remember being at the show you did at the Capitol Theater when many of them sat-in to support you –it was a very interesting lineup and more of a folk and singer-songwriter and even country thing that your fans don’t get to see a lot of from you. It begs the obvious question: Will you play some shows with Railroad Earth or a similar setup?
WH: I would love to see some stuff come together like that. Right now we’re doing a lot of recording and seeing where it all leads. But it’s fantastic. I love those guys and it’s a real honor to be in the studio with them. Todd Sheaffer and I wrote one song together and I’m hoping we get to write some more. He’s sung and played some guitar on some of the tracks. Each track is a little different, and not just instrumentation-wise. Some are more stripped down and some have a lot of instruments and a lot going on. Marc Quinones and Oteil came in for a few tunes, as well.
Right now I’m just trying to get all this music recorded that I’ve been wanting to record for a long, long time. Some of these songs go back decades. Some of them have been written in the past month. I figure once we get everything on tape, I can start trying to figure out where it all belongs and what to do with it.
JB: Last time we talked you went back over a lot of the things you’ve always wanted to do, from that acoustic singer-songwriter thing to a jazz-fusion instrumental type of thing. Is 2015 the year more Warren Haynes projects come to the fore?
WH: I think I’m going to continue working on this for a while. We have 19 songs recorded and at least 10 more I want to record before I make the decision of what to do with it all. I’m also looking forward to starting another Gov’t Mule record at some point. We’ve talked about it as a band making it completely different from probably anything we’ve ever done before. It’ll definitely be way different from Shout! but probably also way different than anything in our past, as well –not in a drastic way, but just trying to explore some new directions, especially instrumentally. As far as other solo projects, the instrumental, jazz-influenced record and a traditional blues record are things I’d love to get started on in due time. I don’t think they’re in the immediate future but it’s all stuff on my list.
JB: Speaking of other projects, can you comment at all on speculation that you’ll be part of the Grateful Dead 50th anniversary?
WH: No, but I look forward to anything that happens. I really hope those guys decide to do something, and if I’m part of it, that’s great. I love playing with them when the opportunity arises. But at this point there’s not anything to comment on.
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