BM: Like many improvisational rock bands, the show is the driving force of Widespread Panic rather than the record. You sold out enough shows to be one of the 50 top-grossing acts of last year. Yet you don’t get a lot of radio or MTV play. You haven’t sold more than 200,000 albums yet. With this record, do you think there’ll be some kind of commercial breakthrough? And was any of the design of it in the hopes that there would be?
DS: As far as the relationship goes from Capricorn to the producer, John Keane, there’s probably a lot of thought put into that. As far as John Keane to us, he knows who we are and what we are. He produced our very first record nearly 10 years ago. He’s watched us grow, and he’s grown. But he did take a very different approach, more of a hands-off, ears-on approach. He sent us a letter with ideas for this project about using different sounds. He never sent us a note saying, ‘OK, we’re going for four-minute songs.’ That’s something that’s always been in the back of our head, as long as the song could be naturally written that way. Certain band members write short pop songs and other band members write long ones with which we can more easily improv. There’s a place and time for all of that.
So if you look at the relationship of the label down to John and the band up to John, and add in the fact that we had just put out a couple of live records with tons of jams, everybody felt really good about entering the studio with these songs. But this band never, ever cowtows, because if you do that, by the time your record comes out, your sound will no longer be the hot sound. Maybe some day we’ll be in the right place at the right time, even though we’ll have been there for 15 years. It’s like Bonnie Raitt with an armful of Grammys a few years ago, saying, ‘It feels great to have worked for 20 years to become an overnight success.’ But we don’t do it for that. We’d love to sell more records, because obviously it would keep our record company happy. And it doesn’t hurt to sell records. But we sell tickets. That’s been our lifeblood the whole time. Certainly if we sold more records, we’d sell more tickets, which scares the hell out of us. We have to make sure that 20,000 kids behave properly so that the band doesn’t get banned from our favorite venues, like Red Rocks. Phish exploded and reaped a lot of benefits from that, but at the same time, the fans caused them to be banned from places like Red Rocks. I think that’s a shame. I hope that never happens.
We’ve done everything on our own terms. We’ll give a little in the studio, but we won’t give a little when it comes to live performance. We’ve worked a long time to get promoters to not use an opening act. They let us have our hour-long first set, then our hour-and-a-half second set. Everybody comes out ahead. We’re happy, the crowd’s happy and the promoter makes more money. It took a long time to convince the powers-that-be that we weren’t formulaic.
BM: That just shows how much you must love The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.
DS: Exactly. These are heroes of ours. People we respect greatly. We feel guilty about having to follow them. The stronger caribou should get to lead the pack. Those guys are a stronger caribou of music than we are. We have something special with them and The Neville Brothers and Junior Brown, and our fans understand that. We can convince them that they’re up here not because some promoter thought they should open, but because the band thought they’d be worth hearing. It’s up to them to come see it. But they have caught onto The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. They come early, and the band loves it. They’re happy. And we’re happy. What more could you ask for than to be happy on the road?
BM: Your bio says that you want to shake free of the jam band scene. What does that mean?
DS: We want to shake free of that name, jam band. The jam band thing used to be The Grateful Dead bands. We shook free of that as hard as we could back in 1989. Then Blues Traveler came on the scene. All together, we created the HORDE tour, which focused a lot of attention on jam bands. Then someone coined the term jam bands. I’d rather just be called retro. When you pigeonhole something, you limit its ability to grow and change. If someone called Neil Young a contemporary folk artist, that’s bullshit. Anyone who knows Neil Young knows that. People gave him the slack to do his electronic music. They might hate it. In fact, his record company sued him for not making the kind of music he was known for. What if Sting had never been given the chance to be a solo artist? We would have been robbed of some really great music. Or if R.E.M. had been forced to stick with ‘Radio Free Europe’ throughout? A good fan is going to like you for the reason that you are you.
BM: Having made a more structured record, what is the live show like now?
DS: We’re jamming even more live. That’s why they come back night after night.
BM: You contributed a great story song called ‘One Arm Steve.’ Who’s ‘One Arm Steve’?
DS: One Arm Steve is a real person. He was the door man who trained me to be a bouncer. Steve was in the Navy on an aircraft carrier. In an accident, he lost his arm. The band was selling out regular in Athens, and people would try to get in to see us any way they could. And Steve would get pretty upset about it. It made his job pretty hard.
When Jojo joined the band, One Arm Steve stopped him. He was like, ‘No, no, no. I’m the new guy in the band.’ And there was this old poster right there and it’s got T. Lavitz on it. Steve’s like, ‘I don’t see your face.’ Luckily some one found out that Jojo was having a hard time. But Steve’s a great guy. He’s moved on from bouncing and has his own restaurant. But he’s such a great character, so it makes for a good song.
BM: Do you think you’ll do another Brute record with Vic Chesnutt?
DS: I think so. Vic says he has a whole record of songs that he wrote specifically for Brute. I’m sure that will happen. But I can’t tell you when.
BM: What is Europe like for Widespread Panic?
DS: Nightclubs and festivals. It’s different and it’s fun and you’re playing to a new crowd. The fun thing about Europe is having those people sweating right on your feet. At festivals, you’re on a bill with Iggy Pop. It’s like Woodstock, but people are well behaved. Even if Iggy is inciting a riot, it’s all part of the show.
BM: Do you think at some point, you’ll play arenas throughout the United States?
DS: I don’t know. You have to prove it to these promoters that you can do it. A lot of them aren’t willing to understand the way you view things as a band. They want to put you in this formula that works for someone else. Phish was lucky enough to be able to promote their own shows. They’d tell the promoter, ‘Look, we’ll make it work somehow. We have the ways and means to cover losses,’ which is what they were able to do a long time ago and sort of get their foot in the door.
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