Oteil Burbridge & Lamar Williams Jr. Discuss New Album, Tour & More

The resume of Oteil Burbridge reads like a road map through the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Under the tutelage of Col. Bruce Hampton, Burbridge became a founding member of the Aquarium Rescue Unit and then, as Col. Bruce once put it, Oteil got called up to the majors.

In 1997, Burbridge began his run as the longest-serving and final bassist of The Allman Brothers Band and just a year after they called it quits, Burbridge was invited to hold down the low end for Dead & Company, a new ensemble featuring the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann as well as guitarist John Mayer.

Although the group put an end to touring a few years back, they continued to perform high-profile bookings that included a lengthy pair of residencies at the Las Vegas Sphere as well as a trio of shows in Golden Gate Park celebrating the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary. As fate would have it, these turned out to be the final live performances of Bob Weir.

With Weir’s passing this past January, the Dead & Company chapter in the Book of Oteil appears written, but that hasn’t stopped him from performing with Dead-adjacent musicians like keyboardist Melvin Seals and guitarist Steve Kimock.

Additionally, he’s just put out an album, The Offering, alongside Lamar Williams Jr., son of the one-time bassist for The Allman Brothers Band. Lest you think this album is a trip down memory lane, it’s the farthest thing from it. In addition to showcasing the beautiful, crystal-clear vocals of Williams, it finds Burbridge taking on banjo duties for the first time in his decades-long career, performing catchy, structured songs that are no longer than six minutes.

Oteil & Friends is once again back on the road, performing songs by the Dead and the Allmans as well as material off The Offering. Prior to soundcheck at Royale in Boston, Oteil and Lamar sat down for an interview with JamBase that touched on the new album, Burbridge’s playing the Sphere, coping with loss and his aversion to what he considers to be a false sense of security.

JamBase: Tell me a bit about The Offering, its background and how it got started.

Oteil: It was a long time ago, probably almost 13 years now. I was living in Atlanta at the time and Lamar had moved there and beat me by… how many years?

Lamar: Six years or so.

Oteil: So since we were both in Atlanta, we were getting together to write music and around that time my wife moved to Africa, which is why I picked up the banjo and started writing those kinds of tunes. But we also wrote stuff like “Hush” that wasn’t necessarily banjo-based. But then all this other stuff happened [like], the pandemic, and it didn’t get done. We didn’t start playing it live until three years ago, so it took a long time [laughs] but it was worth the wait.

JamBase: How did you put it all together?

Oteil: I had these banjo exercises to help me understand the chord shapes, harmony and scale sequences, right-hand exercises and they became songs. I asked Lamar if he heard words or melodies in them and he did!

So I’d send him these recordings and he’d do these vocals and email them back to me as a finished song, and I was like, “Oh man!” I remember my wife saying, “This guy’s voice is just amazing.” It was immediate. So I said, “We’re def going to keep going,” which is what we did.

JamBase: Lamar, what’s your experience been like playing these songs live?

Lamar: It’s been great. The band is so good and everyone is at full power. All the nuances are coming out and it’s good we’re getting reps in at it. We hadn’t played together since New Year’s Eve, so coming together has been really powerful.

JamBase: Who all is in the group?

Oteil: Me and Lamar, Steve Kimock on guitar, Melvin Seals on organ, Steve’s son, Johnny Kimock, on drums and Jason Crosby on keyboards and violin.

JamBase: So it’s a family affair.

Oteil: Totally. With Melvin, I always try to touch on some Jerry Garcia Band material. I try to touch on The Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead and originals. Actually, we have originals from every single member of the band now!

Lamar: Yes!

Oteil: The other night I was writing a setlist and didn’t realize it until halfway through the first set on stage that the entire first set was original songs. I should have thrown in something people know, [laughs] but everyone had a great time.

JamBase: You can tell by the look on the crowd’s face if they’re feeling it?

Oteil: I can tell by their butts [laughs]. If their butts are moving, it’s working.

JamBase: I was listening to the album and I’m thinking “This reminds me of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones,” and from there I start thinking about something [Flecktones bassist] Victor Wooten joked about years ago: only Oteil should play chords on bass!

Oteil and Lamar: [laughs]

JamBase: Correction — he didn’t say that to me. This was during the first ever Masters at Sea program on Jam Cruise and he said that to the entire class!

Oteil: [Laughing] Wait a minute, he plays chords on bass all the time! Well… that’s a compliment I guess. I think everyone should play chords! We’re all playing chords anyway — if you’re playing more than one note at a time you’re playing chords, but I’ll take the compliment!

JamBase: If readers know Oteil from Dead & Company or the Allman Brothers and haven’t heard this album, but are thinking “I have the Oteil music I like. I don’t need more,” what would you tell them to give this album a shot?

Oteil: This was accidental — I’m not trying to pat myself on the back or anything. We accidentally did something unlike anything else. It’s not even like Bela. It’s its own thing that came from out of the blue. I was not intending to write songs on banjo. I just wanted to understand it. Not even master it. We ended up doing something completely different by accident. So I’d tell them if you think you know what I sound like, listen to the record, because it will prove you wrong. There’s no bluegrass in it other than I’m playing with three finger picks.

JamBase: I can imagine some of these songs being like out of Motown.

Oteil: “Hush” doesn’t have banjo and is very much like a Stax [Records], Muscle Shoals vibe and we love that stuff. Same with “First Born,” which to me is very southern — I don’t want to say blues, but bluesy. I think it’s cool.

JamBase: One of your biggest projects in recent years has been Dead & Company, and I can guarantee that everyone reading this is familiar with Bob Weir and are likely mourning his loss. I was trying to come up with some questions about Bob, but then I got to thinking about that Masters at Sea program on Jam Cruise with Butch Trucks and your brother Kofi Burbridge, who passed in 2019. I want you to know this comes from the most empathetic place possible, but it hit me that for a guy your age, you’ve lost a lot of bandmates. Col. Bruce, who passed in 2017, was in the program too…

Oteil: So many, it’s unbelievable when I count it up. I have a list on my phone somewhere that is buried down in the notes because I don’t want to dwell on it, but if I really started to count it up, it’s pretty long.

It’s true that the older you get, the more it starts to happen, especially in rock ‘n’ roll — there’s more of that, people dying young. The Allman Brothers used to have this song, “No One Left To Run With” and when we’d play that, they’d play these videos of all their friends who have died. You remember?

Lamar: Mhmm.

Oteil: And it goes way back to the ’60s. They were dying pretty early. Janis and Hendrix. And I thought, “These poor guys.”

Now of course, I was 30 then. I’m probably 10 years older right now than Butch was when I joined The Allman Brothers. So now the shoe is on this foot. I can go back to Widespread Panic guitarist Mike Houser, bassist Bob Sheehan from Blues Traveler. We can go way back, but the recent ones have been like dominoes. It’s been a lot.

I couldn’t say it at the time, but when I did Lovely View Of Heaven, this collection of Hunter and Garcia ballads — because it’s not the way to market a project [laughs] — the album’s primary purpose for me, and it’s proven for other people too, was to help process grief. All the loss I experienced went into that record. My brother, my dad, Colonel Bruce, Greg, Butch, Dickey, it was just on and on. [Saxophonist] James Casey. People dying younger than me!

And still many more under the threat of death, where they’re battling through whatever, trying to get healthy. It’s a lot, but ultimately, it makes me more grateful for the most boring moments. Your most boring moments are such gifts because you’re not going through some cliffhanger or have just gotten some awful news. Instead of saying “Oh man, I’m bored!” you should just think about how lucky you are.

JamBase: There’s that Chinese proverb: May you be cursed to live in interesting times.

Oteil: [laughs] And may you be blessed to be bored as hell. The refugee fleeing political violence would love to be bored!

JamBase: My favorite way to remember the people I’ve lost is to tell a story to keep their memory alive. So in that vein, when I did that Masters at Sea program on Jam Cruise with Butch, Kofi and Col. Bruce, Butch let loose that Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes were leaving the Allman Brothers. He was on record and this information wasn’t public at the time…

Oteil: Shocker! [laughs]

JamBase: So after class, I asked your brother…

Oteil: [Butch voice] “Let me tell you something!”

JamBase: It was for sure a classic Butch moment. But since Butch had said Derek wanted to focus more on the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and Kofi was in that group, I asked your brother how he’d been feeling about it, and he said, “Well, that was news to me!”

Oteil: [Laughs] That’s how we find out a lot of things. That’s how I found out Bob died. I was like, “Died? What the fuck? What happened?” Nobody told us he was sick. So we’re used to being the last to know.

JamBase: These folks we’ve talked about — your brother, Col. Bruce, Bob Weir, Dickey Betts, Greg Allman — for my readers, these guys have basically composed the soundtrack to their lives. They’re powerful figures. Are there any stories you’d want to share to remember them?

Oteil: I’ve got a funny one. It’s hard because a lot of the stories we tell each other, we could never tell publicly!

Lamar: Right!?

Oteil: But this one I have because I’m ready for it: Bob literally — this was the only way I knew something was wrong: he was taking so much time off. Nobody told me something was going on, but when I saw it was going to be eight months that he was off, I was like, “No way! That guy is on the road all the time. All. The. Time.”

To illustrate that, we were playing the Sphere and finally not on the road. We’re either at a hotel or someone rented a house and you just go from the hotel to the gig, from the hotel to the gig. We had no buses. The semis drop stuff off, load it and went away. There was no nightly thing. And how many nights did we play there? Forty-one nights?

But Bob had his tour bus there every night and he would go from the venue to the house on that bus! [laughing] I’d say, “Why does he have that bus here?” Because he just needs to be on the bus. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t on the road — he wanted to be on the bus. That’s like the funniest thing of all time.

JamBase: It was like a safety blanket.

Oteil: Well, yeah. He had his life set up around this routine and if I were to switch places with him, I’d probably do the same thing. But I’m not switched so I’d say, “Let’s ditch that bus as soon as we can!”

JamBase: Between residencies by both Dead & Company and Phish, everyone reading this has heard about the Sphere but very few of them have actually been there themselves. What do you think would shock people about playing in such a spectacle?

Oteil: I don’t think anything would shock them because people have seen so many videos.

JamBase: True, but we’ve never seen it from onstage.

Oteil: Well, there’s not much to see from onstage. But what would shock them is how impossible it is to hear from onstage. The sound is amazing from the audience but if you stood on stage it sounds like two bands playing one second apart from each other. [They’re playing the] exact same thing, but you hear two snare hits, two basses. Because of the way the slap back is, it’s the most brutal on-stage sound I’ve ever heard.

We were trying to do this part in “The Eleven” where half the band is playing 12/11s and the other half is playing 11/12s… something crazy like that. So it’s really hard to count, and one of my ear monitors fell out so I could hear that slap back and I had to stop the whole band. I said, “I can’t play right now. I have to put my ear monitor back in.” So as good as it sounds for the audience — and supposedly it sounds way better from the crowd than other venues — to the same degree it’s that much worse on stage [laughs].

Lamar: It sounded great to us!

Oteil: Yeah, but as soon as you stood on stage, bro, you’d be like “What the F?”

JamBase: With Dead & Company behind you and The Offering out now, is this how you see yourself spending this post-D&C era? Is this part of a plan or are you taking it as it comes?

Oteil: You can never really have a plan as a musician. I mean, I know that people do, but I don’t know. I think it’s fine to make plans [laughs] but I never have. We had our final tour, how many years ago? I was done with it back then [laughs]. So what do plans mean?

JamBase: I think that question is over my paygrade.

Oteil: My favorite quote is, “A false sense of security is the only kind there really is.” And that’s what your plans are, a false sense of security. But life doesn’t give a shit about that. And then one day it’s all different. My plan has been the same since I was 17 years old and that’s just to play music, so that’s what I’m doing.

JamBase: Lamar, what about you — any other projects on deck?

Lamar: I just finished an album with Alan and Neal Evans.

JamBase: Soulive!

Oteil: Yeah Man! There’s no ETA on it yet but I’m happy about that. It sounds amazing, Man.

Lamar: Thank you!

Oteil: Soulive was always one of my favorite bands. I met them when they were teenagers in Moon Boot Lover. It was a long time ago, before Soulive.

JamBase: As a kid from the Boston burbs I grew up on those guys.

Oteil: That was a great band but Lamar, with his voice with Neal and Al, it’s just so good.

Lamar: I love the way he works, man.

JamBase: Is there anything you wanted to talk about that I didn’t give you the opportunity to discuss, or that you’d want to say to the readers?

Lamar: Thank you for the opportunity and I love your shirt.

Oteil: It reminds me of some of the graphics that we had at the Sphere with Dead & Company.

JamBase: I love your Col. Bruce t-shirt too! I’ve got this green Les Paul that Bruce played on Jam Cruise and I really like to think his mojo vibrated its way into the wood.

Oteil: Oh, it’s in there! And let me tell you something: if nothing else, he sweated and his DNA is in there. But every person that walks through here leaves a piece of themselves. If you touched a tree, everything is communicating with everything else. If he held that guitar, it’s like, “I’m sorry,” and “You’re welcome.”

But yeah, I believe you are correct.