Dave Schools

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sense Podcast.
My guest today is Dave's Schools. You know him as
the basis for Widespread Panic. He's a record producer, remember
the hard working Americans and a great guy to boot Dave.
Great to have you here. Thank you for having me, Bob.
How you doing. I'm doing well. You know an email
you said you wanted to talk about the Beatles documentary

(00:31):
Get Back. So what did you have to say about that?
You know, I could say so much. We don't want
to burn all of our time on it, but it's
it's so important. And I watched it all in one
fell swoop over Thanksgiving weekend, and I mean I was
just blown away. And I guess the primary thing for
someone of my age. I was born in nineteen sixty four,

(00:54):
and I got turned onto the Beatles when I was
probably in third or fourth grade, single by single, uh
gigging into the past. And I went to see the
Let It Be movie at the late night midnight movie
when I was in high school, and I realized that
I feel like we've been kind of lied to about
the breakup the Beatles. The the editing of the original

(01:15):
Let It be movie created a cultural shift. Uh. You know,
the Yoko Ono thing became almost like a you know,
every band has their Yoko Ono um. And what I
thought was revealed in this Get Back documentary was that
it wasn't that way. It wasn't an acrimonious scene during

(01:35):
the recording of this. It was a It just made
me so happy because it was a band trying to
get back to something that they had left behind a
few years earlier, which is playing in front of people, um,
and they're trying to work up new material and they're
all getting along and yeah, they're testy and there are problems,
but it was just amazing to me. I'm like, so

(01:58):
this is normal. I mean, I've been a and we're
not the Beatles, but we pull songs together, we fight
like brothers, we uh strive to get out in front
of people. And yeah, they were boring parts and there
are parts that were okay. But when they get to
that rooftop, that is a band playing and freezing cold

(02:21):
the best they can to people they really can't see,
because they certainly couldn't see down on the street. They
saw people on rooftops as it went on, but it
was just glorious and I loved it, and I felt
like nearly fifty years of me thinking things went down
one way, we're literally washed away in six hours, seven hours. Well,
I agree really with everything you say, the you know,

(02:43):
the fact that you go through seven and a half
hours before you get to the rooftop. What astounded me
was how great they were on the rooftop, how they
kicked it up a notch. You know, I've been privileged
to be with you know, world class skiers. He can
skive them every day, but when competition, it's they don't freeze,
they get better. And then you know Paul twisting the

(03:05):
way he did, and then the way John Lennon kind
of bounces on its feet like a little bit like
a frog. It was wow. Really, you know, makes your
inside flutter. Yeah, you know, as a we agree about
the power of music, the power to unite people. And
there's something about a group of guys playing together on

(03:26):
stage or on a roof or in a studio. When
something magic happens can't be recreated by computers and production.
It's a human thing. It's a connection thing. And man,
it's just traveled across fifty some years of stored film footage,
and you know, the work they did restoring that film
and the audio is just it's fantastic. It was palpable

(03:50):
um and and it's funny because there's a scene where
Paul says, this is when we're at our best, when
our backs are against the wall. And then you can
tell that all the years of training in those little
nightclubs and those residencies and foreign countries and just being
together and and sort of suffering as a group, um,
that never goes away. You know, you might have to

(04:12):
like chip away, it's some stone to get back to
it after a few years off the road, but when
you find it, it's like a spewing fountain head. It's amazing. Okay, Well,
we certainly saw them in depth recording the what ultimately
became the Let It Be album. That begs the question
in your band, when you want to make a new record,

(04:32):
let's talk about white spread panic. Because you're involved in
a lot of different acts, both as a producer and
a player. Uh, how do you do it? Does everybody
come with songs already written? You work it out in
the studio like they did. Well, it's it's been you know,
we've been a band almost twelve thirty five years we've
been a band, and there's an evolution. You know, things

(04:53):
were different when we started um and we certainly weren't
ever the Beatles, with our own studio on Seve will
Row and you know, the best E M I engineers
at our behest. But there's an evolution to where the
first time you go into the studio it's just glorious
and you don't know what's happening. And the first time
you hear playback on something that you find acceptable, it's

(05:15):
shocking and thrilling um. And then you get into this
thing where we got signed. Uh. Well, you know, we
made our first record, Space Wrangler, with our producer John Keene,
in his living room of his house. Bit by bit,
we record a few songs, go out on the road,
play some gigs, get some more money to record a
few more songs, and we made the Space Wrangler record,

(05:37):
and then we got signed by Capricorn really quickly. And
what happens then is you're in the studio and you're
kind of under the gun. Budgets were certainly far inflated
back then, but you want to get it right, but
you don't have the experience to know that you have
to just chill and be a band. So for a

(05:58):
couple of records, it's get it and and you you
play a little fast and you make some sacrifices. Luckily,
our producer at the time on those early Capricorn records
was the great Johnny Sandlin, who had worked with the
Almond Brothers and all kinds of Southern rock stalwarts. UM
and that man was a groove detector, and he kind
of taught us to slow down and listen for that magic.

(06:21):
You know, the magic isn't in getting it right a
flawless performance. The magic is that thing that happens with
a group of guys who can listen and play and
respond something an X factor takes over. And so he
would make us do take after take and hold us
to slowing things down. So then we began to understand

(06:44):
what we were trying to capture. UM and it's elusive
and you could burn a lot of time trying to
find it. And then later, you know, as the nineties
war on pro tools came in and then all of
a sudden there was this he didn't really have to
commit drums again to get gritted out. Are we were
back with our producer John Keene, and we're like, you know,

(07:07):
I remember a conversation between Mike Howser and John Keene
where we were trying to play to a click track
and Mike Houser's tops to take and he goes, John,
I swear this thing slowing down, and John Keene, you
just hear this kind of like click, Mikey, it's a machine.

(07:28):
It doesn't slow down or speed up. And so, you know,
it's just always an evolution. I think, you know, there's
what a band can do as a group with the
tools of the studio, and then there's trying to keep
up with an interface with this incredibly quick modern evolution
of these tools. You know, with the digital thing, you

(07:51):
don't have to commit, you know. I try to push
young bands I work with to commit to like reach
down into themselves and find that thing that's elusive. But
so many of them coming here, like they sing one
chorus and they're like, okay, so yeah, you can just
fly that across the rest of the track, right, And
I'm like, yeah, but are you gonna do that live?
And maybe if they're gonna be playing the tapes, they

(08:13):
don't have to sing it, But most of us you're
gonna have to sing it, you know, let's do it.
We're here in a nice room with good sound. Let's
go ahead and capture the humanity. Well, the humanity is
what it makes makes it great, and the imperfections are
what given edges like velcro to get those little hooks
you want to get the loops. But okay, let's talk

(08:34):
about recent recordings. Do you come with the songs finished
or to what degree of those figured out in the studio? Well,
that's that's been a change too in the old days.
Once we stopped living together in the band house. You know, obviously,
when we're all living together in the band house, we
we're hanging out right in music and laughing our asses
off all the time. Uh. We were notorious for rehearsing

(08:57):
in front of audiences. Um, you know, and and okay, wait,
wait slow, what would you consider rehearsing in front of
the audience to be, oh, a gig that we charge
money for? No? I mean, how would that different. Let's
say I'm on the other side of the stage. Okay,
the band is playing, you know, the band might be jamming.

(09:17):
What would be different between that and what you consider
to be a rehearsal. Well, we probably wouldn't stop and
laugh in the middle of a stage rehearsal as it were.
But you know, we were jamming, and we took chances,
and and we played a lot of cover songs, and
as we wrote new material, we kick out the covers
that weren't that great or that cool, and and gradually

(09:41):
we just ceased to be a cover band, and we
kept a lot of the covers that we sort of,
like some people would use the word interpreted, I like
to sort of self deprecatingly say, we just weren't that
good at playing them, so we just sort of had
our way with them. But we still like a song
like low Spark a High Heel Boys. That is it's

(10:02):
right for improvisation. You know, as long as you sing
the melody, play that counterpoint music, then there are these
spaces where you can go wherever you want. And we've
always done that with that song. It's probably one of
the oldest covers we ever did. But so we'd be
living in a band house and cobbling these things together

(10:23):
and tightening them up on stage in front of people.
We took chances. It's where you kind of found the
sea legs of a song. We were able to get
away with taking chances. Our audience allowed that, and in
fact they expected it. They love the humanity of the band. UM.
There's pretty much nothing better than stumbling and catching yourself

(10:44):
with grace, and sometimes it happens if you allow that
to happen in live music. UM. But then people got married,
had kids, bought their own houses, and so when we
come to the studio with new material after that point,
people came with their own demos. UH. In relative states
of of finished nous. Mike Howser was had a tendency

(11:08):
to show up with literally three times more songs than
anybody else UM, and he just sort of play them
and show him to us. He might have recorded them
sitting on his back porch with his acoustic guitar, whereas
John Bell was he likes to try his hand at
home recording, so he'd play some bass and he'd put
a drum machine on it. But he never wanted to

(11:29):
steer anyone too far in a certain direction. Everybody really
respected the input of everybody else, whether it was in
our living room rehearsing, or whether it was with the
tape rolling in the studio. UM. And now that we
don't play as much on the road and we are
scattered all across the country, that sort of bringing a

(11:52):
more finished demo into the picture is is far more acceptable.
But everybody is all about plan can change. We can
pivot at any time someone drops a brick. Hey, that's
actually sounded pretty good. Maybe that's our middle four that
I didn't see coming. Okay, you're in the studio. One
thing that was kind of both tense and interesting watching

(12:15):
Get Back is the personalities interact. At first, you know,
Paul sort of the sleeve driver. Then John is kind
of retiring, and then John becomes were active, George Littley
quits the band. What about the personalities interacting in the studio. Well,
you know, I guess the lesson we all learned the

(12:36):
older we get is communication really is key, um. And
also familiarity breeds contempt. And thirdly, it's like a family
dynamic with siblings. So sometimes communication is the hardest part. Uh,
And sometimes it's hard to break through methods of communication

(12:56):
that have sort of solidified over decades. Uh. You know,
you can sense that resentment in George, you know, and
you can sort of sense the like power dynamic between
John and Paul where at one point it's like you
used to run the band, but I guess now I'm
the boss. And then at the end, at the end,
you know, he says, now we're the boss again, that's right, um.

(13:19):
And there's also with the end of realizing that the
end is actually closer than they might think, and it
looks like Paul is crying and it really gets me
and I I it's it can be triggering in a
lot of ways to watch something like that with myself
having thirty years of history. You know, we are a

(13:39):
band of brothers. Widespread panic. Um. We've lost two of them,
they've passed away, and so whatever communication problems or challenges
that John Bell and I might face, we're constantly trying
to work through. And there are times where it's more tense,
and especially after like taking the COVID time off. You know,

(14:03):
we when we reconvened in Athens, Georgia at the Georgia
Theater to rehearse um. And you've probably noticed this too
with people, stuff kind of comes out sideways in unpredictable
ways after being sort of cooped up and subject to
pressure all the various outside pressures. We were all sort

(14:23):
of suffering in solitary UM and it got weird with communication.
It's palpable, but we've been together for a long time
and it's worth working through. But those are things that
definitely they come up in the studio, and the studio
tends to turn the heat up a little bit. You know,
that tape might be rolling, or ones and zeros are

(14:45):
spinning by, the lights are on, Mike's are on, uh,
And no matter how hard you try to lose that awareness,
you're always aware that what you say might not land
the way you intended to land UM, and that can
be tough, you know, to get back thing it's I

(15:07):
thought that it was amazing. I literally saw a cameraman
maybe three times until they got on the roof. I
literally forgot. I felt like I was a fly on
the wall, you know. And then how did those guys
go from I can understand being in a movie studio
like Twickenham is not an ideal place to to reconvene UM.

(15:29):
But once they got into their home turf, no matter
how new it really was for them, they seem to
have just they forgot those cameras were there. And we're
not talking about little digital cameras mounted on a stick,
hidden away. We're talking about big cameras that need film change,
sixteen millimeter all the time. Uh. It was amazing to me.

(15:49):
Although at the very end, during the credit when they
show the clapper and then you start to you know,
realize that the film crew was more intrusive than you
thought they were in the beginning of the the documentary.
But let's go back to being in the studio. You know,
we live in a world of compromise. Everything's about business
getting along. But in the movie, especially Paul, he'll really

(16:15):
drill ree all three of them and say I want
it like this, I want it like this. And you're
certainly after George leaves the man and Baul starts acting
that way, especially in the third uh episode, you start
to wins and say, hey, this guy is gonna react,
you know if you keep pushing him. So as a
band member, to what degree can you stand up and

(16:36):
say no, this is the way I need it to be,
or at what point do you say compromise goes Sometimes
someone has a different opinion. Other times you just feel
like you're pushing them. Yeah, I think I think that
in the case of the Beatles, there's a pretty high
bar that they were always trying to top, so that
maybe their end goal was a little different, you know,

(16:57):
as far as like success and relative value of what
they're doing would make someone push Uh. But I think
it's a it's a philosophy and a lot of times
it's it's the way it's delivered. Like for Widespread Panic,
John Bell is a guy that just wants to get
his idea into the hands of everybody else, and what

(17:19):
everybody else changes about it or provides that's unique to
them musically thrills him. Whereas Mike Howser would. I mean,
he told me one time, He's like, hey, when it
gets to this part, can you play this B chord
instead of what you've been playing? And that's you know,

(17:40):
it depends on the delivery system, Uh, the way that
communication was asked. UM. A great example I'll jump to
when I was playing with Government Mule and Chuck Lavelle
was playing keyboards and I had known Chuck for a while,
super sweet guy, one of the nicest, most gent heel
people in rock and roll UM, and we were working

(18:03):
up the song compared to what you know that song
Eddie Eddie Harris song with that amazing extrapolated intro, and
Schuck wanted to play it and he could certainly could
play it, you know, and we had played at a
time or two rehearsed it, and we debuted it the
night before, and then the next night we were you know,
at some theater somewhere and sound checking and we're kind

(18:26):
of running through the intro and Chuck looks at me
and he goes, hey, you know, Dave, when it gets
to this part, da da da, I wish you would
play this. And I was just like, you know, your
wishes by command, you know, which is different because you're
right when when Paul starts sort of telling George how

(18:47):
to play the way he's delivering that, it's making me WinCE.
I'm like, you know this this is a powder keg.
You could feel it, and certainly with widespread panic it's
been that way. Um. But we're learning as a family,
you know, whitebread panic. Everything was d I y. We
were against the grain. We didn't sound like any other

(19:07):
Athens band at the time. Uh, you know, we no
one really cared about a weirdo band from the South,
So we had to learn how to do everything in
our own way, including simply how to be a band.
And for us, being a band was learning how to
play together. You know, you can you can have the
way that you play your instrument, and you can be great.

(19:29):
You can have chops, you can be academically schooled. Um.
But the worth of a band and the sound of
a band comes when four people come together and learn
how to play together and whitchpread panic. You know, we
all just sort of taught ourselves, and then we came
together and we taught ourselves as a group, and I

(19:51):
think that's why we pretty much instantly had a sound
that was unlike anyone else. I look at a band
like you two, and if I could be a fly
on a wall and hear them rehearsing before they got
put into a studio with a producer, I bet it's
four guys learning how to make that sound of you
two together, probably completely unaware that that's what's happening. You know.

(20:14):
That's the sort of thing where I realized it about
widespread panic after a few records and looking back and
hearing other bands talk about how they crafted their sound
or how a producer helped them find their sound, and
I was like, huh, I think we just sort of
we just lucked out, you know, we just showed up
knowing what we knew, and then the unit, the hive mind,

(20:37):
sort of took care of everything else. Um and I
think that there's an evolution in that you can see
some of it and get back. How revelatory is it
when Paul sits down and starts strumming that after bass
like it's a rhythm guitar and pulling the words to
get back out of the atmosphere. It was like alchemy,

(21:00):
although I'm not sure that I believe that's the first
time he did it. Well, you know, was that Phil
Walden said to us, it's all spoken mirrors boys, mirrors,
that's for sure. So just talking to you for a

(21:22):
minute or two, not only are you very verbal, you're
very intelligent. And what's it like interacting with other musicians?
You know, Bob Dylan had that song Darre Loan Landlord
Wich says each of us has his own special gift,
and you know that was meant to be true. And
if you don't underestimate me, I won't underestimate you, which

(21:44):
I've really uses my mantra. Since people have intelligence in
different ways, there are people who can barely speak, but
are unbelievable at their instrument. But what's it like for
you interacting with musicians? Generally speaking? Rock music is not
a highbrow endeavor. It's not, but it is. And you're

(22:06):
absolutely right, you know you nailed me. Verbal is a
very nice way of putting it. When I've gotten in
trouble working with bands, I think it's because I talked
too much. You know, uh, if we're gonna string get
back all the way through. I think that there's a
lot of great information in the way that not only
Glenn John's is sort of just allowing the band and

(22:28):
capturing it, and the way George Martin is it's just
like laying on the floor writing the newspaper in his
suit until you know the one clip that I love
the most, he's you know, Glenn's like, Okay, so the
idea is we're gonna just capture a song and and
and it'll be sort of live. And then George cuts
him off. He's like, here's what we'll do. We'll rehearse
it and we'll play it. And then he goes in

(22:48):
the joke Bode and he's like, we'll play it again
and again and again. We're not gonna edit it. Um,
I talked too much. It's always been my thing. Um.
I don't know if it's intelligent or anxiety or what,
but I've learned when working with bands, to give the
thing the space to happen. Whether it's an artist like

(23:10):
Todd Snyder that will come in and just he wants
to just kind of spew his ideas, he wants to
just throw this haystack. I called it like a haystack
of golden needles, and we're looking for the platinum one
in it. Um, why instruct that guy, We'll just enable it. Um.

(23:33):
Other artists need a little more. What they need is vindication. Uh. Jason,
my engineer, we were talking about a session we had
here at the studio and the artist came back a
week later to throw some keyboards on and there was
no one around to sort of vindicate what he played.
And he was sort of looking out of the control

(23:53):
room through the glass at Jason while he was enabling
the recording. Um, you know, is this cool? So some
artists want just maybe the eye contact or a little
bit of a smile like yeah, that's great. Um. And
others want to be what their hands really held and
sort of pulled. They want someone to push them or

(24:14):
help them separate all their ideas. Uh, maybe me being
so verbal is me trying to sort through to what's
most important. Um. And so for the artist that has
a lot of ideas, maybe they need to spew them
all and have someone go, hey, that one there that works.
It works for me, does it work for you? I

(24:36):
just I want to continue to evolve, bob and and
I love it when people give me honest feedback because
it helps me get better at what it is I'm
trying to do. And all I'm trying to do is
get better. You know, it would be great if I
could win a Grammy. It would make my mom happy,
you know. But really, when I hear an artist say

(24:59):
that there pleased with what we captured in the studio,
or that that's it to me, that that makes me
really happy, it's almost as thrilling as what I was
saying earlier about hearing my band on the first time
on playback in the studio. It's like, Wow, it's a
great feeling. Okay, there's you know this mantra that no

(25:21):
one can tell a hit. I don't really agree with that.
Never mind, commercially, if you do something phenomenal, you know. Actually,
my favorite story on this So I was talking to
Al Cooper, who's telling me the story of recording Sweet
Home Alabama. And it was recorded a year before it
came out, the first album just come out. I said, out,

(25:41):
did you know it was a hit? And he says
it was Sweet Home Alabama? You know. So the question is,
do you know when you're locked in and something is transcendent? Yeah,
it's uh, it's unlike. It's not unlike the zone that
athletes say they get into. I mean, you're talking to
someone that isn't a band that sort of specializes in

(26:03):
not having hits. We have catchy songs, and we have
short songs. Um, but really what we're after is the
word you just used as transcendence. It's a transportation was
it Jerry Garcia that famously said the Grateful Dead is
isn't in the music business or in the transportation business. Uh,
that's to me, that's the thing. And so if I

(26:26):
was to be interviewed after a concert like an athlete
after a game, I would hope that more times than not,
I'd be like, I don't remember what happened. It must
have been good. And it wasn't because I was fucked up,
you know it was. It was because I was lost
in the moment of of that transcendent zone. Um. I

(26:46):
think me being a huge led Zeppelin fan. And they
talked about when they took the p a outside and
cranked the mix of Dancing Days and everybody was dancing
on the grass. That's the kind of moment, you know.
It's like true. When I heard that song when I
was in fourth grade, I it. I couldn't believe it.
It was like a trip to another world. Well, the

(27:08):
funny thing is, no one ever talks about that song
from Houses Holy. A lot of people think Houses Holy
the best album. I don't agree. But they mentioned all
these songs, Dancing Days is the one for me. It's crazy.
I mean, here's a little story about me. I went
to Vermont in fourth grade for the summer with one
of my friends and his older brother and his friend came.

(27:31):
And this was the days where even if you're going
to Nag's Head for a week, you bring the whole
high five system and a creative LPs, and so there's
this whole moving in ritual and everything, and and the
older boys would go off and do what they did,
and us younger guys, we'd sneak in. And they had
a stash of the National Lampoon magazines, which were hilarious

(27:53):
and kind of edgy for us. And then they had
to they had their albums, and I remember a Goodbye
Yellow Brick Road. I knew Elton John I had his
greatest Hits record, and I had Beatles records. But I
saw that houses the Holy cover with all those little
blonde babies crawling up that apocalyptic landscape. What's it? The

(28:14):
giants causeway um And there's no band name on it,
there's no information whatsoever. I'm like, this looks weird. Let's
put it on. And my friends brothers friend's sister had
written her name in the top corner of the record
in weird calligraphy, and her name was Lisa whole Grave.

(28:37):
And so I put the record on. Dance of Days
comes on, Robert Plant sounds like a girl. I'm thinking,
who is this Lisa whole Grave? They rock And I
remember going to UH it was the best products show room.
You're an East Coaster, you might remember this. This place.
It was like a catalog place you could go into.

(28:59):
They had a record department was some very disinterested clerks,
and I came in there with my dad and, you know,
my six dollars to buy a record. And I walk
up and go, do you guys have that Leasa Whole
Grave record? And they're like, what are you talking to who?
And I said, you know, it's this weird record with
these all little naked blonde girls crawling up this red thing.

(29:21):
And they're like, oh, yeah, that's sled Zeppelin. So that's
my weird story about dancing days. And and I seem
to have a weird history of listening to classic records,
starting with Side Too, and it informs the way that
I forever hear the record. I don't know why I

(29:42):
started with side to the first time I heard Sergeant
Peppers it was on cassette at a little sleepover party,
and uh, for years I thought Within You Without You
was the first song with Sergeant Peppers. If only it was. Boy,
what an amazing piece of music. Right, So you are
upbeat and low quasies. You ever get depressed, you ever

(30:07):
get down, Bob. You know, I'm a I grew up
as an only child of latch Key Kid, so my
best friends were books and records. And yeah, I get depressed.
I get lonely. I grew up thinking, man, if I
just had siblings to to torture me, or if my
best friend lived a little closer. Uh, you know, I

(30:30):
could ride my bike and hang out. And so I
sat around and and it's funny because my stasis is solitary.
You know, when I need to recharge my will, I
need to do it solitarily. But at the same time,
my nemesis is being alone, if that makes any sense. Um.

(30:50):
So it's sort of a weird push and pull with me.
And as you know, like on a tour, buser's no aloneness.
The most alone you can get is to crawl into
your bunk, pull the curtain and hope that the air
conditioning stays on. UM. So it's it's funny, and it
can be really really exhausting. But yeah, I get depressed
and and uh, I gotta tell you that social media

(31:14):
exacerbates it. For me. I look through Instagram and what
started as a neat way to see what my family
was doing and eating, um, and then catch up and
keep up with bands that I love, friends that I
have in in bands that are always traveling around. Uh,
since they started doing the ads, and the AI took

(31:34):
over what you saw and it stopped being instant as
an instant Graham, I'm like, I'm missing my god daughter's posts,
you know, because the AI doesn't she doesn't post frequently enough.
Whereas you know, quest love is is. He's a good
poster post a lot and a lot of it's amazing information.
But a lot of times now I just get depressed

(31:57):
and uh, and it's funny. It's sometimes times it makes
me want to give up music. I can't tell you why,
but that's my own personal down a little bit, Okay,
the feeling of given giving up music? How much is Instagram?
How much is this being overwhelmed by social media? How

(32:20):
much of it is feeling powerless? How much is feeling
that there's no context? Tell me a little bit more.
It's it's all of that. I mean with the social
media thing, I think it's an unintentional comparison syndrome. Um,
it's really because everybody's putting their best foot forward. They're
showing you the thing they're most proud of. Very few

(32:40):
people get on social media and show you the thing
that they're least proud of, or they're not going to
post when they're having a bad day. Um, But everything
else you said, it's true. I think with me it
can be burnt out. Um, sometimes it's I'm not doing enough.
You know. If I can get into my happy place
in the studio and work with somebody, it refills my will.

(33:04):
I'll never get tired of it. I might get exhausted
at the end of a really long day, but I'll
never get tired of it. Um. I do kind of
miss the exhaustive touring. I missed six and eight week
tours in a in a nostalgic way, we put it
that way. But for instance, Neil Cassal was someone that

(33:25):
when I met when we started the Hard Working Americans,
we were instant kindred spirits. Were both studio rats. You
put us in a control room and we're gonna just
it's like a two kids in a sandbox. We have
so much fun. And and we also he had such
great taste, you know, the people that he had worked with,

(33:47):
the training he got from people like Jim scott Um
gave him a real great bullshit detector. So we'd have
so much fun. And after he left Hard Working American,
we stayed in touch and we always wanted to work together,
and we're always throwing our projects back and forth at
each other. And uh, I would tell him, Neil, I'm

(34:07):
I'm burned out and I don't know if I have
anything left to contribute. Uh and he'd go, don't even
think that way, man, the world needs what you have
to give. Um. So, when he committed suicide and I
read his manifesto, uh, he was talking about a lot
of the same things, and I was just kind of pissed.

(34:29):
You know, there's those five stages of of death, grief,
five stages of grief and uh. So I was angry
with him. You know, it's like, how dare you give
me these pep talks and keep me going when I'm
having some self doubt or or just burned out and tired, um,
And how dare you do that? Uh? And and so

(34:52):
I think it's it's important to realize that these are
natural feelings. Uh. It's important for me to realize their
natural feelings, and that there are people that I can
talk to about it. I don't have to sit there
and ruminate and fester because my natural stasis is an
only child whose friends live too far away to like

(35:15):
just show up. So it's it's something I'm always learning,
and it was it was really easy to substitute things
on the road. Start feeling bad or down, you know,
there's always the next gig. It's always exciting. Uh, there
are certainly substances I've been down that road. Um and

(35:38):
in the end, it's really just me trying to be
honest with myself. But those words of Neil ring in
my head. It's like, you can't give up. The world
needs what you have to offer. And uh, okay, let's
just stop there for a second. You recently produced, very
recently just came out a multi album tribute to Neil,

(36:02):
So can you tell us how that came together? Also
what the expectations might be. I mean, even if someone
has no idea who Neil is, it's very hit to
use word palatable because it's not, you know, positive enough.
But even tribute albums for the best acts tend to
be unlistenable. And if it's an act you don't know
and you don't know the material, usually you know you

(36:23):
can't find your entry point where. That is not the
case with this project. So tell me about it. Thank you,
and and this is all I believe me. You're I've
read you for a long time, as you well know,
and and uh, we don't have the bandwidth to listen
to things we you know, you want me to listen
to your record, send me the best song on it.
Um So I understand that a forty one song tribute

(36:46):
record for a relatively unheard of artist is you know,
a daunting task. But basically the genesis of the project
was Neil sadly committed suicide in the fall of twenty nineteen,
and wasn't too quickly after that that his longtime friend
and manager Gary Waldman called me up and, uh, you know,

(37:08):
what can we do? And I know that I had
had fourteen demos sitting on my desktop for a few
years of Neil, and I was just after him to
get in the studio and do them. And Gary's like, well,
you know, Neil, he made twelve fourteen records in the
nineties and none of them ever got the attention they deserved.

(37:31):
So we began to put together this idea for a
sort of attribute record, and we thought we'd maybe make
a double record, two LPs, one c D, maybe eighteen songs.
Find some people that Neil worked with, some people who
respected Neil, and we began to cobble together an idea.

(37:51):
And my contribution to the idea where you say tribute
records are unlistenable. And I know that you're probably saying
that because you don't know half the artists on it,
or it's too long, or for whatever reason. But I
find tribute records to be unlistenable because they're recorded in
a very scattershot way. Uh. You know, this artist recorded

(38:13):
in a fancy studio in New York, and this other
artist recorded it in his bathroom on his iPhone, and
it's there's no continuity across the sonic landscape. Um, people
are gonna needle drop one song by the artists they know.
I was like, well, what if we get a bunch
of artists that most people don't know, and what if

(38:34):
we bring them all to Jim Scott's studio in Santa Clarita,
And what if we provide them bands made up of
people that played with Neil Um. So, for instance, I
called up Marcus King and said, how do you feel
about doing one of Neil's songs? And here's the plant,

(38:54):
Come to Jim Scott's and take your pick. We can
put basically Jackson Brown's band behind you was Neil's band
on his first record, Fadeaway Diamond Time, So that's Don Heffington,
Bob glob and Greg Lease. Or you can have Circles
around the Sun Neil's band, or you could have the
rhythm section from the Chris Robinson Brotherhood Neil's other band.

(39:15):
Or you could have the hard Working American's Rhythm Section
Neil's other other other band. And Marcus like, are you
saying that I could basically have any of those groups
or any combination of those guys, and I could pick
any of these songs I want And I'm like, that's
exactly what I'm saying, And he was like, bang, I'm in,
And that's basically what happened. The first artist we had

(39:36):
in was Billy Strings, and we put him with Circles
around the Sun and he did an amazing version of
All the Luck in the World, one of a very
I mean, boy, what a delivery. Billy is a true
national treasure. He really is. He's for real. But him
being the first artist and our little experiment working that
way was the green flag we needed to to be like,

(39:57):
we can do this um and we didn't have any
problem getting people. People actually started blowing us up. Can
I participate? I love Neil? Can I do this song? Uh?
And we we find you know, we're like, well, we're
at five LPs now I think I think this is
the headstone we need. Um. We probably could have kept

(40:17):
going if it wasn't for COVID. And it's an amazing
testament to the artists who are involved that once they
got over their fear of COVID, they found their sea
legs and they were able to remotely record and all
those tracks came back to Jim where he mixed them.
So we have that sonic continuity. And what we hope

(40:38):
is that someone will drop the needle on the side
one here Aaron Lee Tashan and just you know, listen
to the whole thing. It's a daunting task, but really
what we're trying to accomplish is to further Neil's musical
legacy because it was underserved and it is fantastic when

(40:58):
you hear Shooter Jennings deliver a song like maybe California,
It's for real. Neil was a songwriting master. Um, there's
a lot of songwriting masters. Maybe he'll get his due now, um.
But the main thing is we are We've started the
Neil Kasal Music Foundation, and this record is sort of
an audio calling card, and what we want to do

(41:21):
with that foundation is put musical instruments into the hands
of children in high schools where Neil grew up in
New Jersey and New York, and we've been able to
do that. And then the second thing is to be
able to support resources for mental health. We did a
big concert at the Capitol Theater um. It was sort

(41:43):
of the genesis of a lot of the songs on
the record, and we were able to give a nice
sizable donation to Music Cares. UH back Line dot Care
started in the wake of Neil's suicide and they are
blowing up and they're one of the people we want
to work with provide support too. Because in Neil's letter,

(42:04):
he talks about feeling like he's existing on the outer
rim of the galaxy, looking in at all this exciting world,
whether he's traveling the world with Ryan Adams and the Cardinals,
or you know, having fun in the studio with the
hard working Americans or Chris Robinson brotherhood. He felt like
an outsider. It's that impostor syndrome maybe, or some hole

(42:25):
in him and we've all felt that way. You know,
a little while ago I was I was telling you
how I felt that way in my own way. And
there's a there's a real stigma to reaching out about
one's mental health, and we want to sort of dissolve that.
We want to destigmatize that and make it okay to
talk about the way you feel. It's hard, but that's

(42:46):
the point of the record, and thank you for asking. Okay,
let's go back, and it's really ties in and you're
talking about being on the road for six or eight weeks. Uh.
Musicians are notorious for getting hooked on drugs and odin
into a great degree. It's the pressure. So you go on.

(43:09):
You're a band who you work with, a band mainly
wedgebread piano that plays for a long time. So let's
just say, for the sake of discussion, you play for
three hours. There's twenty one other hours in the day.
Some of that you have to travel. So you finished
the gig, let's say eleven o'clock at night. You can't
fall asleep at midnight. You're lucky if you can get
any sleep by three or four in the morning. Then

(43:31):
the sun comes up. You gotta do sound check. You're
with the same fucking assholes you've been with for thirty years.
How do you cope? You know, everybody copes in their
own way, and partying, for lack of a better term,
is one of the ways. I mean, And I'm only
going to speak for myself. Uh. I was an uptight

(43:54):
asshole and in a lot of ways I still am,
but without the siblings to beat up on me in
a love way, I sort of projected what I needed
onto my bandmates. UM, and I don't know that anyone
can really shoulder that burden. You know, no one's gonna
take that on uh in a in a good way.

(44:14):
And so one of my ways was to just be
the guy that was not partying all the time. And
it made me really uptight and it it I'd get resentful,
um and feel like an outsider. And one of the
ways to sort of break that wall down would be to,
you know, smoke some wheat. That's a that's a ritual,
passing the peace pipe around. Sometimes when things would get

(44:38):
dicey in the early days of widespread panic, we would
go to this little Mexican joint in Athens called Gus
Garcia's and it was mainly an excuse to the Mexican
food was a delivery system for things they served at
the bar, and uh, we'd have what we call tequila confessional,
and uh, we just get drunk and let it. I'll
hang out and we'd get through it later. Like when

(45:01):
you described the sort of endless daily rotation of being
not in a bus, you know, we weren't in a
bus until after the success of the first two Horde tours. Um,
it was a van and a truck, and before that
it was a car and a van, and before that
it was two cars. So yeah, it's a finish your gig,

(45:24):
go pack into a motel room with you know, if
you're lucky, there's two or three people in each room.
But then of course housekeepings banging on the door at
eight am, and then you got to get up and
drive another four hours to get to sound check on time.
Where you hurry up and wait for four hours, there's
a lot of time to find other things. And I

(45:45):
went down that road. I found all kinds of other things.
It's never much of a cocaine guy, but I sure
liked anything that would remove me from reality. Um, you know,
psychedelics were a little too intense, although I certainly had
my fun with those, But it was opiates that really,
you know, took me away and and they're insidious, they'll

(46:06):
get their hooks in you, and they did get their
hooks in me. Be a little bit more specific which opiates? Well, heroin?
You know, look a little little bit slower intelligence, relatively
educated guy. How do you start taking heroin? And did
you get hooked on heroin? Well? You avoid it like

(46:27):
the plague, because of you know, it's a rattlesnake. We
all know what a rattlesnake does if you pick it up. Um,
so avoid it like the plague. But then you start
with but with a little yellow once delatted, little yellow
cough pills, crush them up, stored them, feel good for

(46:48):
a little while, get some sleep. Uh, And then later,
you know, you play someplace, I don't know, a port
town like Charleston, South Carolina, or Baltimore, and someone shows
up with some little whack packets, some white powder in it.
Do a little hoover. I remember the first time I
did it, I'm like, this is great. I don't feel

(47:09):
like I want to do anymore. I remember thinking that,
and then I got in my own way later with
a broken heart and found a connection and went pretty deep.
I went pretty deep for a couple of years. I
would never shoot it. I'd always snored it. Sometimes i'd
smoke it. But it it got really bad, you know,

(47:30):
and it was it was a point of concern. There
was an intervention or two and uh, finally, you know,
being the kind of guy that I am, a loner. Uh,
my moment of clarity was just like, I don't want
to be a slave to something else. That really piste
me off when I realized that had happened. So I
saught help, and I went out to Anaheim, California, and

(47:54):
and got help, and then of course I left rehab
against medical advice and went right out onto widespread panic
tour the summer at two thousand and the first thing
they did was, Hey, you may or may not remember this,
but the we have a documentary film crew that's gonna
be up our asses the whole whole tour. So enjoy
your sobriety with that going on. And did you stay sober?

(48:19):
And what do you do now? Yeah? What do you imbibe?
If anything? Now? If anything? Now, I like a good bourbon.
I live out here in wine Country. Sometimes a drink
glass or two of wine and it tastes like the
way the earth smells on a dewey morning. It's really nice.
But alcohol was never my problem. Um, Like I said,

(48:42):
wanting to just be at peace and separate from all
the fault role and the feelings was my problem. UM.
I like micro dusting psilocybin. That really really helps. I'm
I'm a very positive guy about that. Um. It's not
for everybody, but I've found that it helps with the depression,

(49:02):
and it helps with when life comes at you really hard,
like it sometimes does. Uh. I feel like I'm prepared
to deal with it. It's kind of like surfing. It's like, well,
this isn't going to go away, you know, like the
fact that my homeowners insurance company just canceled, like they're
canceling so many people out here non renewing because of

(49:23):
the fires. Um, you know, me like being piste off
about it like I usually would isn't gonna help me
get re insured. Um. So I find the micro dosing
helps with that. Okay, let's go. Micro Dosing is a
big thing in the news right now. Michael Chaban's wife
is really into which we are Uh a lot about it.

(49:45):
Are you doing this under the auspices of an m
D or you're talking about someone has mushrooms and you're
just taking a little bit. Uh, well, it's it's measured
doses of ground up mushrooms and gail caps. I mean,
I am out here in a ful dead territory and
there are psychonauts out here. Um, and you know, I
don't feel like I'm gambling. I stopped taking LSD and

(50:09):
I stopped the big trip, saying, way back in the
early eighties, I felt like the key had stripped that
lock and I had learned everything I needed to learn. Um.
So I stopped for a really long time. And of
course after I got sober, you know, no, no, no,
I'm not gonna go there. It was very uptight about it. Um.
But lately I feel good and I love where I live,

(50:31):
and I love what I'm doing, and uh, it's very helpful.
What about ayahuasca? Have you done Ayahuaska? Yeah, that's that's
a funny story. Back in the way early nineties, maybe
even the late eighties, we used to play this place
called the Bayou Club in Washington, d C. It was

(50:51):
you could see the watergate hotel right down the canal
was under one of the elevated highways, and this dude
showed up with a bag of what looked like great
nuts and he's like, it's ayahuasca root man, you guys
should split this up and play your gig tonight. And
we're like, you know, we're not that crazy. Uh So

(51:13):
we played the gig and then we went back to
the room and took a tiny little bit of it,
and uh we called it the root and one little
grape nut peace or two got the desired effect. I
remember thinking, dat motherfucker. He just wanted to like drop
a match into a pile of leaves and sit back
and watch what happened when his favorite band got on fire. Um,

(51:36):
but that bag lasted the whole tour. And then we
had a Halloween party in Athens, played a gig and
and everybody at the party did the ayahuasca and it
was pretty fun. But yeah, I've never done any shamanic
experiences like that. Okay, you said it said a few
minutes ago. You're an uptight asshole. Go a little deeper there,

(51:59):
how dare you? Um, you know, I think it's it's
just do you want me to go deeper in respective
how the how the hychedelics have helped me overcome this,
because people that I work with have said, you've changed
what happened, and and it really it took the uptight

(52:21):
asshole away because I guess that I would just I'd
get triggered and my guard would go up almost instantly
about anything. It took me a long time and a
lot of therapy to sort of realized that I was
the one that painted the target on my back all
those years that other people weren't just shooting arrows at me.

(52:43):
I put a target there with my behavior. In fact,
I want to see a shrink who helped me get
over a lot of this stuff. And the first appointment
was three hours, and I took up almost three hours
unspooling the tape of my life story about how I'd
been done wrong and was so alone and boo hoo hoo,

(53:04):
and everybody's against me. And she very calmly listened and
nodded and took notes, and then at the very end
I finally ran out of steam and uh, I said,
I guess that's it, you know, And she just looks
and she goes and what part did you play in
all of this. Our time is up, I'll see you
next week, and off I went, going, Well, she just

(53:28):
you know, And it took me a long time to
realize that I was creating all those problems. You know,
for me, life doesn't have any ill will. The ill
will is like how I respond to things in life,
and I've tried to apply that listen to everything I do. Now.
You know, this band that I'm producing, they're not against me,

(53:51):
you know, this is like I'm having a hard time
rising to the challenge that they've presented. Um So I
try to find a positive way to work through it.
But that's a big lesson overcoming the uptight asshole and
realizing that I'm perceived as an uptight asshole and that's
my reality because of the way I respond in any
given situation. Tough lesson to learn. How many people in

(54:15):
the music industry actually get to learn that lesson for real? Okay,
micro dosing, how often would you dose and what would
inspire to take a dose? Well, it's it's more like
a routine. I started with, like, point to Graham, you know,

(54:36):
barely perceptible and do it like five days, take two
days off and work my way up to it's you know,
it's generally like a third of a Graham when I
do it, and I don't even really feel it, I
know that I did it. I'm not seeing colors out
of the corners of my eyes. I'm not hearing voices whispering. Uh,

(54:58):
the walls aren't breathing. Well, let's just assume there's no
supply and you don't have it for a month. Are
you what what kind of internal situation you're going to
be in. I'm gonna be just fine, you know, because
I I've learned what I've learned now from it, and
I don't think it's I don't think it's necessary. I

(55:20):
think like it's surfing. You know, you go out to
surf and some days you just don't catch any waves.
Are you a surfer? No, I'm not, but I love
the metaphor. I just I just spent six months working
with a band with are all surfers from vents, So
you see surfing metaphors. That's you can thank Farmer Dave

(55:43):
and the Wizards of the West. But no, I'm not
a surfer. I was a skateboarder. Okay, let's go back.
You know, one of the first things you ever told
me when we met backstage, if therapeum was that you
were adopted and you were meeting blood relatives, what went
on there and what degree do you think that's affected
your life? Wow, I mean got another hour. It was.

(56:09):
It's a big deal because, like I said, so much
of what formed me was being that lonely kid, no siblings.
And the first thing that happened around was we were
playing We've been on tour with Blues Traveler, and we
finished the tour at the Roseland in New York City

(56:30):
and we opened up for Blues Traveler and looking at
the room, the ballroom was filled with people in costumes,
but there was this older woman and too young to
be there boy standing in the crowd. They stuck out
to me like a sore thumb. And I even met
them on the street afterwards and signed like a you know,

(56:52):
a poster or something. And finished the tour and I
got home and there was this big, thick letter amongst
my stack of mail, handwritten, and I kind of just knew.
I opened it up and this picture fell out and
it was that woman, that boy and a young female

(57:13):
and I just knew. I'm like, this is my birth mother. Uh.
And so I read the letter and that's exactly what happened,
and she detailed the way it worked, and I led
her into my life. She probably broke some laws reaching
out like that, and I had never wanted to find

(57:34):
out who they were. I was perfectly happy my adopted parents,
the schools is Bill and Frand did an amazing job
raising me. Uh. But now my interest was piqued, and
so I led her into my life and found out
I had a half sister and a half brother, and
that was amazing, and it was just it was thrilling. Uh.

(57:58):
But the one thing that was incomplete was where's the dad?
Where's the father? And uh, hamden hard And I was
finally like, after a year of asking, you know, she'd
be like, oh I lost touch with him and blah
blah blah, and uh. Finally I said, look, I can't
go halfway. If I'm gonna this is a sweeping life

(58:19):
change for me. You can't just come in and be
in my life and not helped me find my father.
So she finally produced an address and I wrote a letter,
and a couple of weeks later I got a letter
back and it was from my father, and of course

(58:41):
you've met him, you've seen him, and uh he's like,
imagine my surprise upon opening your letter on Father's Day
of all days. So it came to pass that Widespread
Panic was playing at the Ritz in l A. Was
it the Ritz? I think it's the Rits, right y

(59:03):
Roxy Roxy Roxy played the Roxy And that was my
time to meet my dad. And he showed up after
sound check and he had two little kids with him,
which was another half brother and half sister. But the
amazing thing about meeting my dad was finding out that
he'd been in the music business forever and ever and ever,

(59:27):
ever and ever and ever and uh So. The funny
thing was my birth mother was basically raised by her uncle,
Johnny Mercer in Savannah, Georgia, and who worked with my
girlfriends and we have we have a lot of connections

(59:49):
to the way the world doesn't draw smarter, smaller and smaller.
But my dad, you know, he grew up in Savannah, Georgia.
He was born in England. His first memories of music
are Spike Jones Orchestra being played during blitzes to like
help alleviate the fact that bombs are dropping on your city.

(01:00:10):
And then came to live with an uncle, and Johnny
Mercer would pick him up and hold him up so
he could look through the windows of the Baptist church
while the choir sang, and he remembers the jukebox split
into race sides and white sides, you know. And uh,
he he got my mom pregnant right when he decided

(01:00:34):
to moved to Detroit to start to produce records, and
so all of the himning and hawing between them and
between my birth mother and myself was simply about not
selling him out. She wanted me to have a fair
shot of meeting him, and they were afraid that if
he said I can't raise a son, I just moved

(01:00:56):
to Detroit. I'm sleeping on a sofa. Um that I
would hold that against him, and I really don't, because
giving me up for adoption was probably the best thing
that happened to me at that time. And then later
as a traveling musician, finding out that it's in your
blood is a real vindication, you know. And I remember

(01:01:17):
that show at the Roxy. I was playing like a
mad man. I wanted to impress my old man with
his musical taste, and he gives me. He goes you
play too many goddamn notes. But don't worry. Don't worry.
I'm gonna send you something to take care of it.
And so when I got back to Athens after we
first met, he had sent me that James Jamison book
um that had all the great people like McCartney and

(01:01:41):
Sting talking about Jamison, and it had a cassette that
you could plug in and if you move the speaker
balance all the way to the right, you'd hear Jamison's
baseline juxtaposed against the famous song. If you move the
speaker all the way to the left, you know you'd
hear Stings baseline his interpretation. And that was just that
was great. You know, my dad's got no filters and

(01:02:04):
I love him for that. And he wound up running
a studio and starting a publishing company. He published that
song the rose Um, and he loved playing music. I've
stumbled in on him playing a song one time when
I was visiting, and it was a song called Honky
read by this artist named Urray McLoughlin that he had
worked with publishing wise, and I said, what is that song?

(01:02:29):
And he told me what it was, and I'm like,
is it okay? If widespread panic records it and he's like,
please do and so we recorded it and put it
on our record called Street Dogs. Um. He's an invaluable
resource and he's seen it all because he mixed live
sound for Scott Richardson case opening for Led Zeppelin and
The Grateful Dead, and you know, had a horn band

(01:02:52):
called Rastus that was like competitive with Blood, Sweat and
Tears and Chicago and the horn band Realm. And then
he came out to l A in the early seventies
and work with Zevon. Um, you know, mixed for Bobby Womack,
all kinds of cool stuff. And what a beautiful gift,
What a resource. Okay, I have to ask you this

(01:03:18):
late date, Hey, when did you find out? How old
were you when you found out you were adopted? And
what did you think of that? And now with this
long extended family, your people who raised you, the birth parents, etcetera,
how does it all fit together? Um? I guess I
was probably when I talked to my adopted mom. I'll

(01:03:41):
call her friends schools, uh I. I I feel like
I was probably three or four when I was told
I was adopted. And she kind of refutes this, but
I'm not sure how great, her memory might be about it. Um,
But I remember a book. You know, I was a

(01:04:03):
really really early reader. Um, And like I said, books
and records were my best friends growing up. But it
was a book that was written for a very young
child to explain adoption. And then I was loved and
blah blah blah, and so I took it in stride.
You know, in my memory I never harbored any fantasies that,
oh you know, there was a princess somewhere that had

(01:04:26):
to give me up and it was all wrong and
if I could just find her, my life would be better.
My life was fine. Um. I got everything I needed.
I was provided for. I was allowed to experiment. I
was given music lessons, bas lessons, piano lessons. I went
to a private school from kindergarten until I went to
college at the University of Georgia. I was provided for.

(01:04:50):
I would never cared or really wanted to meet my
real parents. But like I said, once my mom got
in touch with me, then the the can of worms
was open and I just had to go whole hog.
And so suddenly I have four half siblings at the
age of and I got this extended family when I

(01:05:10):
got married to my wife, were like, how are we
going to do this wedding thing? You know, it's I
got adopted parents who are divorced and they can't sit together.
And I got, you know, the Savannah side of my
birth family and the Los Angeles side of my biological family,
and and we wound up just having a private little affair.

(01:05:34):
But when you ask what it's like, it's both wonderful
and terrifying because so many things that I had always wanted, siblings,
a family, a larger family um I suddenly had. But
suddenly having something like that is it's intense, you know.

(01:05:54):
It's I'd get calls for cousins I had never met. Hey,
we want to come see you play it Red Rocks,
And I'm like, okay, I really want to come see you.
Work at Morgan Stanley, you know, but I'm working. I
I don't have no time to meet you, and and
I don't have the bandwidth. And that was difficult. And
I've talked to a lot of people who have had

(01:06:16):
so many varying experiences when they find their birth parents
from like literally the I found my birth mother and
she's still married to my birth father. And I have
two full siblings. The reason they gave me up was
because they were in high school. I know a story
like that pretty well? Is it that a do you have?

(01:06:38):
What is that your story? No, it is not my story.
But friends, and now everybody gets along and the people
are accomplished. You know, at this point, you know, it's
all inherently strange because it all happened when this person
was an adult, that she ultimately found her birth mother.
But that it's just you resident. Obviously everyone's got a
different story. Yeah, you know, I mean, but it was

(01:07:01):
it was a long balancing act, you know. And I've
gotten it down to where I'm comfortable. My my biological
mother sadly passed away. Um, but I'm very close with
her husband, who famously said the night that she confessed
that there was a child that he did not know about,

(01:07:22):
and he said he got any more and more secrets
you want to share with me? Uh? And and you know,
my my my biological father, like I said, we're just
we're kind of very the same. I believe that. You know,
he was living in Van Nuys at that time, and
I went back to his house after that show at

(01:07:42):
the roxy I was talking about and I hadn't met
his wife, and we were in his sort of man
cave stereo room and just laughing our asses off about something,
and she had come in and the first thing she
said was I couldn't tell whose laugh was Who's um.
We have a very different speaking voice. He's got a
real wonderful baritone voice. He should he should do narration

(01:08:04):
and loop work or something. But uh, yeah, we're both cynical,
We're both crusty. Uh. I hope that I can be
as crusty and cynical and full of love and joy
as he is when i'm his age. And you know,
he he I met you with Chip Hooper. But I
do believe that it was my father that said you

(01:08:26):
gotta read this email blast. This was like, you know,
Windows era, When did you start the letter? I started
in eighty six. He didn't become an email bliss blast
till the year two thousand. But okay, yeah, I mean,
so this has been a long time and and he's
been around. I think you've probably met him a time
or two backstage. But incredible, I mean, just it. Like

(01:08:53):
I said, it's a balancing act. We all know, especially
since we're into the thick of the holiday spirit as
it were right now out how difficult that can be.
And you know, just like sort of the things we
were talking about with widespread panic and with the Beatles,
this sort of sibling thing and the dynamic that exists
across decades. Um, we're in the thick of it, and

(01:09:14):
so all that stuff gets multiplied when I let my
biological mother and father and their children and their extend
their extended families. You know, my father had the same experience,
my mother had the same experience. They were both sort
of raised by different people. You know, my father's father

(01:09:35):
was pushed out of the family during World War Two.
He wasn't good enough for the daughter, so he was
sent to like France or Germany to fight. And so
my dad was raised by his mother in a foreign country.
And there are British relatives and Irish relatives that are
close enough to be someone you might want to see

(01:09:57):
during the holidays, but it's just sometimes it's all too much.
I love meeting him. But like I said, my stasis
is solitude. That's kind of you know, when I go
back to the egg to recharge, I'm by myself, and
you know, my wife puts up with it. She's wonderful
in that respect. She gets it. You know, if I

(01:10:17):
come home from tours, she knows I need a few
days to sort of put myself back together. And uh,
that's when I'm really happy that there's a seven and
a half hour documentary that I can watch. Okay, So
when and how did you meet your wife? Did you
partake of the goodies on the road before meeting her?

(01:10:39):
What keeps you together? And how about the issue of children? Well,
I met my wife in l A. My half sister, Robin,
the daughter of my birth father, was dating my wife's
little brother, and she said, you gotta meet Andrea. And

(01:11:00):
so she brought her to a show at the Wiltern
and we went to Musso and Frank and had lunch
the next day and I was just I remember sitting
down beside her. She was the first one there, and
she's like, you might want to sit on the other
side because I'm left handed. We might bump elbows. And
I said, ah, I like it right here. If if
if your elbow gets in the way, I'll rip your
arm off and beat you with it. And she laughed.

(01:11:21):
And so we forged a relationship that's based on comedy.
And humor. Uh, like we'd run our favorite Mr Show routines,
if you remember Mr Show with Love and David just
groundbreaking and wonderful, wonderful work. And uh we'd laugh and
laugh and laugh, and we courted in a very strange

(01:11:43):
way because I met her. Like I said, it was
set up. My little sister set it up. And I
was keeping a blog. Do you remember my Space? I
had been under the behest of one of the office
people at Widespread Panic headquarters, like you're a pretty good writer.
Why don't you keep a blog during this on our
tour and we'll put it up on our MySpace account.
And uh so I did, And that's what I was doing.

(01:12:06):
And I wrote about the experiences we had in l
A and and I said and head lunched with my
sister's adorable friend. And we had moved on up the
West coast, you know, on tour, and I kept calling
my sister, going did Andrea say anything? What she say
about me? What she say about me? And I was
getting crickets and I was like, oh, this is not good.

(01:12:26):
I thought I was I thought I thought we hit
it off, you know. And and finally I get an
email from the office guy at Brown Cat Widespread Panic headquarters.
He's like, I wouldn't normally share these types of things
with you, but I think you might be interested in
this one. And I opened it up and it was
from Andrea and the first line was, oh, so you

(01:12:47):
think I'm adorable A So we began correspondence. I mean,
we're talking courtship here, wooing. And so it was emails
back and forth, and by time the band got down
to Down from the Hook, down through the Rockies down
to Texas, we were having phone calls. And then I

(01:13:08):
got home to Georgia and the phone calls were longer
and longer across time zones. And then I'm like, well,
you know, we got these, uh three nights for doing
a radio city music hall, wink wink, why don't you
come out and uh come see some Panic shows. And
it was also Jimmy Herring's first shows with Widespread Panic,

(01:13:28):
and uh, we had rehearsed our asses off, so we
weren't rehearsing all day before the shows. I had days.
So she came out and she'd never really been to
New York before, and we just we had a great time.
We stayed, we walked, to the shows, get the van back,
eat some dinner, hang out, have a great time. And

(01:13:48):
we never really did anything New York is and uh,
it was time to take her back to the airport
and I had a day off. So it's like we
didn't do a carriage where I we didn't do anything romantic.
We didn't go to Barney's or the Russian Tea Room
or you know anything like that. I'm like, I got
it getting a yellow New York taxicab and I tell

(01:14:11):
the guy man, you gotta burn to LaGuardia because she
is late. She's gonna miss her flight. So the guy
put on the classic New York City cab ride, you know,
hawking at pedestrians, gunning his engine. It was thrilling, it
was great, and and I was it was the end
of the long cell for me because that was it.
And you talk about kids, and neither of us really

(01:14:34):
wanted them. You know. It's like, I'm a child of divorce,
she's a strange from her parents. We just want to
have fun together and so that's what we do. Um.
And I am not evading your question about the fruit
of the road as it were. Um, you know, I
might be an uptight asshole who's working on it. But

(01:14:56):
I'm also a silly old romantic and I so I'm
you know, my wife says, you and your dad and
your your your dad's kids, you all love love. And
I'm like, I don't know that we're in love with
the concept of love. I think that we're just we're romantics.
We like that feeling better than the other feeling of lust.

(01:15:19):
I'm not saying I refute the feeling of lust, and
I'm not saying I have not acted upon the feeling
of lust, but I you know, I want a partner.
I want someone that I can run through silly comedy
sketches with. I want someone that's gonna like have joke
wedding vows to a certain degree. Um. So, yes, that

(01:15:40):
low hanging fruit was available, and it was weird to me,
and uh, And I think things worked out the way
they did. I had great relationships that evolved and it
was time to move on. And I would certainly have
had fucked up great relationships and not fucked up relationships.

(01:16:01):
But we've been married for thirteen years now and we've
been through a lot, and it's worth it, you know,
it's worth working through it. Um, and it's I can't
say that it's easy. You were married once, weren't you?
Of course I was. We can tell my story off,
not that I wouldn't, but it will take up a

(01:16:22):
lot of time. Why do you live in northern California?
I fell in love with classic rock, you know. I
I did not get to be in San Francisco when
it was cooking in the late sixties. But I loved
all those bands. I saw The Grateful Dead a lot

(01:16:42):
when I was in high school and college early eighties. Um.
I was blown away with what they were doing, and
I was blown away with the spirit. But as close
as I got to that was you know, when I
could go see a Woodstock at the Midnight Movie, which
is way too long of a movie for a midnight movie,
by the way. You know it was on it was
on cable, and I got the Triple Record, and these

(01:17:05):
were the artists doing what they did on film. You know,
MTV was different. I liked some of the music. I
love the new wave, I love punk. I got it, um.
But you know when I decided what I wanted to
do was when I saw Jimmy Page working in his pajamas.
It's like that guy goes to work in black silk pajamas,

(01:17:27):
and that is a cool job. And then when I
saw John entwhistle, like, that's the pace player that I
want to I like that guy's style. So when panic first,
I actually ball backtrack. I came to see a Grateful
Dead concert New Year's Eve in Oakland. I went with
a girlfriend of mine who had met the people that

(01:17:49):
the grandson of or the son of the folks that
live in seventeen Ashbury, the Grateful Dead House. We got
to stay there because of that connection. She had gone
done to some or class at Berkeley, met this guy
c J. And they graciously allowed us to stay at
the house. UM. And I fell in love with San Francisco.

(01:18:11):
And this was the San Francisco of Hate Street was
still oh man Um. And then when widespread Panics started
playing out here, you know, we didn't just start at
the war field. We uh we played I think it
was called the full Moon Saloon or the Moon Saloon
or something like that. It was on Hate Street, UM

(01:18:34):
and other little places, and it just I always wanted
to be here. And then for a brief time in
like seven, I dated a girl and we lived in
the Sunset part of San Francisco. And then when I
met Audrey, she was going to school in San Luis Obispo,
and I was like, I'm ready to move, you know,

(01:18:55):
are you willing to to come up to the Bay area?
So we just started looking for properties. We found a
real estate agent. We're looking in North Marin and and
we kept drifting up towards Sonoma. Uh Sebastopol is the
town where I live. And one day the real estate
agent goes, why are you so interested in this area

(01:19:18):
West Sonoma County? It's got a real yeehaw factor, don't
you think? And I said, what do you mean by
yeehaw factor? And he said, oh, well, I just mean
you know, you see pickup trucks on cinder blocks and
people's yards and satellite dishes and stuff. And I'm like, motherfucker.
Alend in Georgia for twenty five years. I feel right
at home here. And so, you know, she's sort of

(01:19:41):
a city mouse. She grew up in Woodland Hills and
then you know, went to Santa Cruz and then wound
up finishing and slow and working there. Um, so it
took her a little getting used to because it's way
colder and rainier up here, but uh, man, we love it.
I love it up here. I feel right at home.
I've I've got a great life, and uh so, yeah,

(01:20:02):
not San Francisco kind of glad I don't live in there.
I feel like I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, a
medium sized city on the East coast. I lived in Athens,
Georgia for twenty five years. That's a big college town
on the east coast. And now I live between a
town of seven thousand and a town of two hundred,
and if I ever moved from here, it's probably not

(01:20:23):
going to even have a post office where I wind up. Okay,
you mentioned Athens. For those of us who grew up
in the Northeast, are real first exposure to Athens was R. E. M.
And we hear about the whole scene, etcetera. You know, certainly,
growing up in Northeast, like myself, you really don't know
that much about the South, although I did, uh live
with a woman romantically from Tallahassee, which is really more

(01:20:46):
Georgia than Florida. But what was going on in Athens?
Explain it to me, man, Athens is uh the best description,
and I can't say that I coined this, but I
don't know who did Mayberry on acid. Uh. You know,
I went to college there. I love the B fifty twos.

(01:21:07):
That was the first Athens band that I heard. And um,
but I went to college there because A I could
get early acceptance so I could be like done with
that whole college thing. And remember I went to a
prep school called Collegiate that was a thirteen year prep
school in Richmond. So by Thanksgiving of my senior year,

(01:21:27):
I had been accepted at the University of Georgia. I
knew that they had a music scene, but I think
what was more important to me at the time was
Playboy magazine had named them the top party college in
the country, and I had gone down there. My best
friend's dad was like an alumni rep, so he dragged

(01:21:47):
us down there to see herschel Walker play football and
uh a visitation weekend. And there's a place called Legion
Field where on campus they'd have the big outdoor concerts
and I saw the psychedelic furs and I was like, Wow,
this is really cool. And um. So there I was
Fall of eighty three, moving into a dorm and things

(01:22:10):
were cooking. Uh. The guy across the hall was listening
to w U O G the college station, and the
band Love Tractor was on there talking about their new record,
and I'm like, that is some alien sounding cool music.
Of course, chronic Town had just dropped the famous R E.
M EP bands were cooking. There weren't that many liquor

(01:22:32):
licenses downtown. There was a couple of places to play,
place called Tyrone's you couldn't get to unless you had
a car, and then there was the infamous forty Wi
Club and r M was cooking. In fact, Athens is
so hip that r M hadn't even put out their
second record yet, and the hipsters and Athens were writing

(01:22:53):
them off. Is too popular to be cool. That's how
cool Athens was. And it was a miasma of styles.
There was the thrist door hipsters, people that like literally
sowed their own clothing. There's the weirdo punk rockers, the
straight edge guys, and uh, what a great place, What
a great place. Everybody was in a band. Everybody was

(01:23:13):
in three bands, and it was time to have a job.
You got a job at a place like the euro
rap Um doing schwarma or the taco stand rolling burritos.
And your boss knew that you were an artist or
you were in a band, and so yeah, take two weeks,
go off and lose your ass playing playing your music.

(01:23:35):
That your job will be waiting when you come back,
you know. And I was lucky enough to stumble into
working the door at a place called the Uptown Lounge
um where I saw Black Flag, I saw Camper van Beethoven,
I saw you know, any number of bands that would
go on to become stalwarts of the alternative, the Lollapaloosa scene,

(01:23:57):
Chili Pepper's Meat Puppets, you name it, and man that
talk about something where you don't realize you're in the
midst of something that's cooking, but then you do and
then it explodes. That's kind of what happened. And so
Athens to me was this strange, little Mayberian acid kind

(01:24:21):
of town. And and it always will be. It always is,
no matter how homogenized they try to make it. Uh,
there's an independent coffee shop that exists right next door
to a Starbucks. You know, there's enough support because you've
got the kids from the college that will go to Starbucks,
and then you've got the townies and the the weirdo

(01:24:41):
kids from the college that will go to Espresso Royal
or whatever it's called um and I really I miss it,
and I'm glad that we go back there to have
business meetings, and we go back there to rehearse and
so forth. It's it's a very resetting kind of town.
A lot people don't ever leave, and it's it's very

(01:25:02):
easy to see why. Here's a little interesting story about
Athens in the two thousand and four election. You know,
George Bush was going for his second term and uh
and he won. We all know that. We all know
what happens the Athens Banner Herald that morning. You know
that Georgia has its counties. It's a lot of counties.

(01:25:25):
And on the Athens Banner Herald that morning it said
Democrats sweep Clark County. And there's a picture of the
state of Georgia and it is read entirely all these
a hundred and some counties and this one little blue
dot Athens Clark County. Democrats sweep Clark County. That to

(01:25:48):
me sums up the attitude in Athens, Georgia. Okay, let's
jump to today. You work on a lot of records,
but needless just say, in the thirty odd years you've
been in this game, the landscape is complete. He changed.
You know. It used to be there were very few
bands cost money to make records was distribution was a
big bottleneck. You wanted to have widespread acceptance. What's it

(01:26:12):
like making a record today? Why even make a record?
You know? That is a question that I asked a
young band that I'm working with. And I agree with
a lot of what you write, A lot of it
um and sometimes I disagree, but this one I really
agree on. Um. You make an LP, it's a vanity project,

(01:26:32):
you know, or it's just because of what you do.
Widespread Panic has always made LPs. That's just what we do,
and we've done it independently. There have been budgets from labels.
We were one of the first bands to go with
Sanctuary Records in the late nineties, and so we had
a fifty fifty deal because we made all of our
money selling tickets and so sure, we'll pay for fifty

(01:26:56):
of the recording budget and we'll up what we get
on the end, and that's rate. But for a young
band in this landscape where all they're gonna make money
off of is selling tickets and merchandise. Do you really
have in your coffers enough money to record ten or
twelve songs? And then if you're gonna make money off
of you're not selling c d s. You're not gonna

(01:27:18):
get paid. Unless you really go viral on TikTok or
a stream, You're not gonna get paid that way. So
how are you gonna afford to press and make vinyl?
Because that is one way that if you can afford
to do it, you can sell it at your shows.
You can make some money on it. Why do you
want to do that? So I asked them, why wouldn't

(01:27:39):
wouldn't you rather just like take your two best songs
you're most confident in and record them really really well,
make them, use these tools of the studio, and and
let's just leverage what you got into an amazing recording.
You know, press a seven inch you can sell that
people will love. They'll they'll buy LPs and seven inches

(01:28:01):
even if they don't have a turntable, because you can
sign it and they can put it on their mantle.
Other people who listen to it. That's great. But and
I encounter it and a lot of a lot of
the younger bands get it. They get that it's gone
back to it's gone back to the kind of world
that we grew up in. You know. I'd go to
UH Standard drug store and they had a wall of

(01:28:24):
the top forty singles there, and my dad would give
me a buck and I'd buy whichever one I wanted.
Deep Purple createds Clear Order Revival, and then we got
into the LP world and it was a good world
for a little while. But we had gatekeepers. Um, we
had radio stations, some local, then the radio stations went national.

(01:28:47):
Heard the same twenty eight songs every freaking day until
you were tired of it, and then you heard it
some more. But I don't understand why a young band
would want to record any thing more than a song
or two in this day and age right now, unless
you're so incredibly confident and have such amazing material that

(01:29:08):
it's going to go deep. But is it going to
go deep, Bob, No, it's not. But going a little
deeper on this topic, how good a studio do you
have and how much does it cost someone to make
a record to come into work with you? Well, I
mean I'm in a really great place. Um, we're at
a studio right here. I'm talking to you from my

(01:29:30):
studio and my engineer Jason. It's we call it space Camp.
It used to belong to Kataro, the New Age artist.
He built it by hand and we took over after
he left. Um. We got a thirty six channel student
console in here. All kinds of great sense and instruments
and engineer that knows how to work them and record them. UM.

(01:29:52):
So you know, we work with people we want to
work with. Here. If you want me to produce your
record and you have a studio and mind, I'll come
and we'll talk about what it costs. I really when
I say I'm in a great position, it means that
I can pick and shoes. This isn't what I want
to do for a living. It's what I love. I
love the studio. I love working with artists. It's my

(01:30:14):
happy place. Making the Neil Kassal record with Jim Scott,
the eighteen songs we were able to do down and
stay on Korita at Pliers, his home studio. Some of
the happiest times in my life. I'm working with all
kinds of different artists. I'm meeting and working with heroes.
You know. I mean to sit around and talk base
with Bobby glob Come on to get to play base

(01:30:36):
with Don Heffington. God rest his soul, give me a break,
you know. To bring someone like Tim Hiecker and have
Jim Scott, you know, recording and have a handpicked band
supporting Tim is wonderful. It's the best thing in the world.
I don't need to get paid. Doesn't mean I'm not,

(01:30:58):
you know, it doesn't mean I'm gonna work for free.
But I don't get I don't want to get paid.
We can work something out on the back end, if
there ever is a back end, and I don't think
there's ever going to be a back ever again, really,
you know. But Jason and I we're here and we
work on stuff that we love. How far is it
from your house? Three miles? Oh far? Three miles? And

(01:31:22):
where did Qataro go? Why did he sell it? Uh? Well,
he had a divorce and he went back to Japan,
to his homeland, and then he got snagged there by
COVID when they're sort of they had pretty severe protocol.
He kind of got trapped there, couldn't leave. Um. But

(01:31:43):
here we are at space camp, and I'm talking to
you from space camp and you can see this old
art synthesizer right behind me. And yeah, I actually worked
on that my college. Yeah, um, we we have we
love old off. Jason is a circuit bender, built pedals,

(01:32:04):
worked able to enlive with Steve Kimok and also TechEd
his guitars and his amps. So you know, here we
are making music. I'm ready to make another record for
my own twisted devices and uh, you know, no commercial potential,
no hope at all. Just have some fun and make
some music for me. It's been like twenty years since

(01:32:26):
I did that. And uh, maybe it's a soundtrack to
a movie that hadn't been made yet. I don't know.
I don't really care. I'm about being happy, you know. Okay,
let's talk finances. You're in a band with multiple members.
You know, whatever publishing is is, there's not that much

(01:32:50):
and it's split, etcetera. How are you doing financially? Uh,
I'm really good. You know. Widespread Panic has been a
band that can sell tickets for thirty years. Um, there's
been eras where we're in the top ten concert grossing
attractions in Billboard. Now we're to a point where we
play maybe thirty five shows a year, and we go

(01:33:13):
and we do three three night runs, four night runs
and cities we love, and we get to play our
catalog and we play our music, and our fans come
in and they have a great time, and everybody's happy.
Everybody's happier than they've been in a long time because
we worked our asses off, Bob. You know, we we
There were years where we did two d fifty shows

(01:33:34):
and then there was a long stretch where we did
eighty a hundred shows. And that was the best part
of our career was being in you know, three tour buses,
three semi trucks, having a modular system where we'd go
play a shed somewhere that we could easily downsize to
play an arena or downsize to play a theater. And
I gotta tell you, I love these theaters. We placed

(01:33:55):
places like the Beacon, the Orpheum, the Riverside, and we'll
walk key. We just got done with a run at
the Chicago Theater. It's it's fantastic um, you know. I
remember we played two nights at Madison Square Garden for
Halloween in the year maybe two thousand and four or five,
I can't remember. But to walk out on that stage

(01:34:20):
and literally be on the X where Jimmy Page was
standing approximately when I saw that movie when I was
twelve years old on its first run in the theater,
where I had my revelation about tech guy works in
his pajamas. I want that job. That was one of
those moments, you know. I think in the end, our
lives are are just sort of a string of those moments,

(01:34:42):
don't you think, And that was a big one for me. Um.
But those big arenas, when you can pull them in
and make them small and unite the audience and get
into that zone, that is super special. That's what for
lack of a better label, jam bands f you know,
they can take a room that large and shrink it

(01:35:06):
into a nightclub and they might have an amazing light
show and the best sound system ever. Uh but that's
what we do, and that's amazing. And after thirty five
years to be able to go to a beautiful place
like the Chicago Theater or to a place like the
Riverside in Milwaukee where they just treat you so good

(01:35:27):
and it sounds so good and the people are right
up there in your face. Some of those faces I've
been seeing for over twenty five years. Um, it's amazing.
What a gift. And I think we just we did
it on the boards because we just toured and toured
and toured. You know, you asked me what I talked

(01:35:47):
about with young bands in the studio. There's a lot
of experience that I like to share with them about
how do you important it is? You know, I'm fond
of saying, this is a business of relationships and you're
gonna encounter the same people decade after decade. They might
all have different jobs than they did when you met him,
but we've all got each other's back in this whacked

(01:36:10):
out business if we maintain those relationships. And so for
a young band to go out and you know you're
gonna play those places where you're like, who the funk
booked us in this pizza joint? There's one guy there
that you changed his life that night. You make a
friend out of that guy, you know, give him a
give him a CD or a single, or get him

(01:36:32):
on your mailing list somehow. And you do that long
enough and the next thing you know, you've got a following.
You know, it's like, what is it? Arlo Guthrie says,
is you get three and you've got yourself a conspiracy
right right? To what degree did Phil Walden and Capricorn help?
And we're any big Phil Walden lessons or stories. Well,

(01:36:55):
the one thing we always wondered was how come we
never saw Phil Waldon and Names Brown in the same room,
because they had the same kind of charisma to us.
But Phil was a great mentor. I mean his son,
Phil Walldon Jr. Was our first manager. He saw us
playing a frat party that he was a member of
the frat. It was Phi Delta Theta. I think at

(01:37:16):
you g A and uh, He's like, you know, my
daddy's in the music business, and uh, maybe he'd like
to hear you guys, And you know he was. He
was reassembling Capricorn at the time. And Phil Jr. Managed us,
And I remember we played a place called Elston Square,
was a rock club in Nashville, and we invited Phil

(01:37:39):
Waldon to come see us play, and no one was
there except for Phil Walden and a couple of the
guys from R. E. M there in Nashville trying to
make their third record, and some of the guys from
Jason and the Scorchers, And we played our set as
best we could. And we sat down with Phil and
we and uh, hey, you know, what did you think?

(01:38:02):
And he just looked at he said it's a big country, boys,
which was like, oh, but he was right. You know.
What he was telling us was get out there and work,
and it is a big country. There's a lot of
opportunity to learn how to be a band seeing this
big country and gathering fans. And then when we made
Space Wrangler and it went Indie Gold, it was on

(01:38:24):
Landslide Records, and it sold a surprising number of copies
and cemented us as a viable touring force. That's when
they came after us. Um, Phil signed us and put
us with Johnny Sandlin and just let us do our thing.

(01:38:44):
He let us do our thing. There were great lessons,
but most of them really didn't apply to us. One
of the best ones was what did he say? Wait,
we're asking about the labels involvement in the Carter campaign,
and his comment was, we put a peanut farmer in
the White House Rick company out of business. Okay. What's

(01:39:09):
the status of the jam bam world today? It is
continually evolving. Um. You know, I I've always said that
I hate labels, I think they're more convenient for for
people who have a product to sell if they can
put a label on a cubby hole in a shelf
and put your product on it. Um. So, jam band

(01:39:30):
was never one that I thought applied. It's it's the
state of the jam band world. Is there are the
the original jam bands are? They're gone now for the
most part. The Almond Brothers gone dead and company still
kind of doing it, in fact doing it really well

(01:39:52):
in some respects bringing in the young people and getting
him onto it. But there's a whole scene. There's the
jam grass scene. I don't know if Billy Strings is
part of that or not, but bands like String Cheese
would certainly qualifies. They started out of the jam grass.
There's the sort of live tronica jam bands you wrote

(01:40:12):
about Sound Tribes Sector nine. They were actually on Landslide
Records too. They were a former Athens band. They're doing
amazing things. There's a new band called Goose that I'm
hearing a lot about that. Uh, you know, they can play,
they're writing songs. Um to me. You know, it's why
is it led Zeppelin a jam band? Didn't they do

(01:40:34):
improvisational jams? Well? Well, let's do the jam band. Let's
forget the term. Let's just say there are certain number
of bands that a R bands because most everybody else
is a solo act and they're doing in their bedroom,
B or c depending uh is. Guitar is not the
dominant sound in the dominant recording world. So what do

(01:40:58):
we know? If you look at the the road revenues,
the biggest numbers are pulled by the classic rock acts.
Some of them only have a few years left before
they're going to be too old to play. Okay. Then
we have the Spotify world, the Top forty radio world,
which is hip hop and pop, and it very rarely

(01:41:19):
intersects with guitar based band music. Ed Sharon kind of
bridges that gap, but almost no one else does. So
as we march forward, what's the evolution? What do we know?
In hip hop? It's really about who your friends are.
Beyond your record, you'll be on mine. And we have
now seen, unfortunately with Astro World and a lot of
other things, that they can actually sell tickets, although a

(01:41:41):
lot of people cannot. Of the big Top forty song.
So Adele comes in at this point. It's a force
of nature. But before it became this force of nature.
She's doing something completely different and being more successful than
anybody else. It's not that different if you plug her
back into the seventies. For today, it's very different. So

(01:42:03):
on some level, there's a band world, a guitar world
that is very healthy, live, but it doesn't dominate in
any other way. What's going to happen? Is it plays
out in the future. You know, that's a really good question. Um.
I try not to concern myself with it. And maybe

(01:42:23):
it's just because my own band and my experience in
widespread panic. Uh, you know, I don't I think we're
We're never going to dominate charts. I just don't think
it works that way. And I'm not sure what the
value of There's so many charts, what do they even mean? Um?
I think it's about but but let's talk mind share.
Mind share, that's what I was going to get to

(01:42:45):
the people. I think it's the people and the music
they want to hear. Um, why are the Beatles still popular? Sure,
there's a segment of younger people that are like, oh god,
that's what my grandfather listened to. Can't stand it. But
there are other younger people. I was talking to a
twelve year old young lady the other day that's like,
I like the Beatles, but she also likes the fruit Bats.

(01:43:09):
And I think that there is always going to be
a segment of society that listens to music for the
joy it gives them. Um, And no matter what it is,
for some people that's guitar based songwriting music, the predominant
thing is obviously hip hop. Adele is amazing. But what
was it you said the other day, the demographic that

(01:43:32):
buys an adele vinyl? You know, Um, I don't know
where it's headed. It is so fractioned out now, um,
and so heavily curated. Uh. I feel like I missed
the days of the gatekeepers, and we're sort of into
this world of tyranny of choice. So it's hard to

(01:43:52):
find something to listen to without a mentor. I mean,
I know how important that guy at Gary's Records and
Tapes in Richmond, Virginia was to me when he said,
are you sure you want to buy that status quo record?
Because why don't you try on this Ramon's record And
if you don't like it, you can bring it back
and I'll give you back your money. That guy was
super important to me. I don't know if I ever

(01:44:14):
would have discovered the Ramones at that early of an age. Uh,
there's a cultural phenomenon of of hip hop. Uh. Adele
is absolutely amazing, amazing voice, amazing career. Taylor Swift, you know,
it's music. I like all kinds of stuff. You know,

(01:44:35):
whatever it is, I'm personally seeking, I'm going to try
to find any way I can. It's hard these days.
There's a lot to sort through. UM, and I don't
even really trust the curated playlists. But you know, here's
the funny thing. In the Beatles documentary, we see them

(01:44:55):
passing around that Fender based six guitar, and I'm watching
Sean Lennon play and like, oh, that's that's great. I
always kind of want in one of those. And we've
been graciously working with Fender, who's donated instruments to the
Neil Kasal Music Foundation. And I write the guys and
I'm like, hey, you guys making those Base six is anymore?
You know? And and the response the first thing they

(01:45:18):
said was after that documentary, we damn well ought to
be you know, people are like, but Squire still makes them.
The custom shop will make them and the guys like
I would surely hope that would put it into production.
Apparently this documentary is having any effect on people. Um
and you know, you're very five redd time and time again,
and I agree. You know, the Beatles came to America

(01:45:39):
and everybody suddenly bought an electric guitar, and it began.
This thing that we grew up in began. And I
don't know, you know, like I said, it was so
important to me watching Sir Paul strumming that Hofner and
the seeds of get Back are coming out, like that's
that's a guitar. You know that base six is a guitar.

(01:46:01):
You can tune it, play like a baritone guitar, or
you can pick up an acoustic guitar. That's where people
start piano acoustic guitar. I don't know what the future holds,
but and I don't know there will ever be something
as important as of Rolling Stones or Beatles or Bob Dylan.
I think there will be lots of those, and they'll

(01:46:22):
be different kinds of those. They will appeal to certain
strata that like a certain type of music. You know.
I don't know, Bob, I just I know that there's
always music that I find that makes me happy. Um,
and who knows what's going to explode. Okay, let's go
back to something you said earlier, which is a string

(01:46:45):
of peak experiences. There's this woman, Deborah Tannon. I think
she's still at the University of Maryland. She's an academic,
so she's not a pop psychologist, and she wrote a
legendary book forty years ago called you Don't You just
don't understand differences in conversation between men and women. And
there are a lot of definitive examples that will lay
this out, but one thing she said is always stuck

(01:47:07):
with me with women, It's about all these experiences, etcetera.
Where men want a constant upward movement, they want to
get to a destination. What do we know really? Since
the explosion of social media, Spotify, et Center in the
last ten years, the top has been blown apart. The

(01:47:28):
top used to be very narrow. So I'm sure you
had goals. Wow, I'm I play this venue. Okay, I'm
on late night TV. I got reviewed in this paper.
I'm getting closer to the mental target. Then they the
target doesn't exist anymore. That's right, So you know, how

(01:47:48):
does this affect. You kind of cooks back into an
earlier question in terms of what you're doing to what
degree can you go along? So I'm just doing what
I'm doing, having fun or what degree in the back
of your mind, do you have a goal, want to
have a goal, and want to feel that you're progressing
to something. Well, you know, that's a question that's really
difficult to answer, and the only way that I can

(01:48:09):
think to answer it, honestly is to frame it in
age and how. And I absolutely agree with with miss
tannin Uh. There was a goal and it was sort
of elusive, but it was it came in steps. You know.
For me, my first goal was I sure would be
happy if I could pay my share of the long

(01:48:29):
distance phone bill. Hey kids, remember the long distance bill?
And then it was I should be happy I could
not have to have these roommates and have my own place. Wow,
I sure would like to buy a car. I sure
would like to buy a new car. Every it was
more like life type goals. The band was so entrenched
in doing what we did that, you know, we didn't

(01:48:51):
really get a rest until after Mike Hawser died in
the year two thousand and two. We had already, uh
you know, we'd achieved so many goals, but we didn't
ever stopped to look back. And we celebrated our twenty
five anniversary. Uh she's ten years ago or whatever it was.
And that was really the first chance that I sort

(01:49:12):
of had to cast back. Um, and I'm being honest
here doing interviews for the you know, it's like that
was the angle. So you guys twenty five years old
now and I'll be like, gosh, that's bone jarring. That's
that says Hunter Thompson would call that's a meat hook
reality right there. And uh so then I allowed myself

(01:49:32):
the chance to look back. Um. You know, John Bell,
our our singer, would often say, I'm too busy working
on the Pheasant and the future of widespread panic to
concern myself with the past. And I think that that's
that's apropos for me, but to place that the My

(01:49:54):
goals changed as I age and and literally that desperation
to chase something some elusive uh you know, watermark watershed
moment of Wow, we sold out Madison Square Garden, you know,
or we just played you know, our sixtie sold out
show at Red Rocks. You know, it's it's it's it's

(01:50:20):
kind of it's weird. You know, who who has a
career like this, who gets to still go out and play.
I'm about to turn fifty seven years old. Um, who
gets to go out and do something different every night?
I do. I'm in widespread panic, and it's amazing to me. Uh.
We've worked long and hard, so yeah, with the top

(01:50:42):
being blown off, as you say, and my goal really
is just to keep gathering experiences and learning. UM. I
love talking about it, you know, I love it helps
me put it in perspective when you ask me a
good question. I'm sitting here thinking, Wow, do I need
a goal? Maybe I should think about it. What can
I do? Like I said, I'd love to win a Grammy.

(01:51:04):
It would make my mom happy, you know. It's I
remember going to see a World Series game at Bill
Barry's house, the drummer for R. E. M. And in
his man cave, and uh, he had a little half
bath and I went in there to use the restroom
and lining the floorboard of the entire bathroom around the
toilet where all those little MTV Spaceman statuettes. And then

(01:51:26):
he had three Grammy sitting on the reservoir or the toilet,
and I'm not sure what that meant, if there is
anything other or maybe it's like I've got so many
of these darn things, this is the only place to
store them. But you know, I'd be happy. My mom
would be happy. She could brag to her Bridge friends
about her son, and that makes me happy. I like
making other people happy. I think if I can help

(01:51:48):
people put their music into the world and it provides
even just a modicum of the joy that music has
given me in my life, then I'm doing something good.
You know. I don't mean to sound as if I'm
giving this stuff away, you know, or but it really,

(01:52:10):
at my age, with everything I've done, it feels better
than anything. And on that note, I could literally talk
to you all day because you're a thinker and you
stimulate me, and that's what I'm looking for in conversation.
Will have to do this again sometime. There's so many
other things we didn't even touch on, but Dave, thanks

(01:52:32):
so much for appearing here today. Until next time. This
is Bob left Sex

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