On the eve of Widespread Panic’s twenty date co-headlining tour with the Allman Brothers Band, we thought it was a fine time to sit down with Dave Schools. Well over 200 of you submitted questions for the bass player when we put out our call a while ago, and Dave was quite generous with his time in addressing many of them. What follows is the first installment of a two part feature in which he takes on your queries, with plenty more to come…
Let’s start with a question that a number of people asked in a variety of ways. “When will the new Stockholm Album be out and what should we expect?” Joseph G.
The new Stockholm album is finished. You should expect a more cohesive effort as far as songwriting. It never was really a side project, it just seemed that way because life got in the way and the fight for life as far as Wally Ingram was concerned. And with Danny Louis on keyboards, there’s a whole new soul going on. We may put it out ourselves, we may ask someone else to put it out, someone may just be desperate enough to put it out for us. Either way, I’d look for it around the beginning of the year.
Stockholm has those three performances in early September. Will there be other dates before disc hits?
No, these are just, “Hi, we’re here” dates. And the date in the Santa Cruz record store, Streetlight, we’re going to record that sort of stripped down. This band is so well versed at doing that with Wally’s ability to make anything into a percussive device, Eric’s ability to play flamenco gut string guitar and mandolin, Danny’s a great piano player and I just turn down (laughs). Jerry’s great with an acoustic guitar and no microphone with his voice. That should be at CIMS stores, I believe. I’m not sure when but keep an eye out for that.
In terms of swapping Danny [Louis] for Danny [Dziuk], was that matter of logistics? I imagine it was challenging bringing him in from Germany.
Well, Danny Dziuk is very well-respected in Germany not only as a songwriter but also a composer, he does film scores. He is in the band of this guy Stoppok, who I’ve described as the German Prince, the Purple One. So he plays in his band and he’s plenty busy. We loved having him but it was always a part time thing. We were lucky to have him on the record and even luckier to have him on the road for that year when we were touring. And he loved it because he got to see the States. But Danny Louis is someone that I’ve worked with off and on since I first met him playing in Warren Haynes’ solo band back in 1990 or ’91. The crossover when I was still playing with the Mule and Danny joined up was a pleasure. We see eye to eye and now there are two bald guys in the band.
“I recently listened to some old Gov’t Mule with Allen Woody. His bass lines were just incredible. And to watch him on video, he had just such a big presence musically (Yes he was a big guy physically, but “big” musically too. That’s the adjective that comes to mind.). Can you share with us some of your thoughts/stories about dear Woody?” Geoff E.
I really can’t share too many stories because if he were still alive we’d both be hard pressed to remember many of things we did together. We liked a lot of the same kind of music and we loved to sit around and talk about the music we loved. Woody was also a prankster with a heart of gold.
Yes he was an amazing bassist. Not only could he play but he understood tones and he understood grungy bass tones and how they really fill in. We were really great friends so it was such an honor when Warren called and said, “Can you fill in at One for Woody?” That remains one of the best tribute type multi-band rock nights I’ve ever participated in. It was at Roseland and the Black Crowes played, Phil Lesh Quintet played, Lesley West from Mountain showed up. It was just a great night and I think about him all the time, he was such a sweetheart.
“Ever think about bringing back that standup bass you used to play in ’99?” Mike M.
I do think about it but the closest I ever get is sitting on the giant case that’s about the size of a coffin that is off to stage left. Sometimes I’ll sit on it because it’s so huge. We’ve thought about it and the opportunities we’ve had to do an acoustic thing with Panic in sort of Panic 3.0 or whatever you want to call it, haven’t been frequent. I really like to bring that thing out when the whole band is playing acoustic or as close as we get to it. I think it’s a good direction and everybody mentions from time to time how much they enjoy that stripped down thing, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that bass come out in 2010.
“What factors go into the deciding the songs for Jimmy to learn and play? I know he is a relentless player, who will practice rigorously to learn a new song, but I also know there are a lot of songs that haven’t been brought back into set list rotation, mostly from the Mikey era.” Al W.
Well Jimmy learned everything. He even learned songs we stopped playing when Mikey passed away, certain songs that John Bell just didn’t feel right singing. As a singer he likes to have some personal experience behind the words he’s singing. And some of the songs that have been on the shelf so to speak were really personal for Mikey. So we’ve sort of let those be a bittersweet memory.
But Jimmy learned everything and he’s relentlessly attentive to detail. He takes his opportunity and I won’t call it a job because I don’t think any of us looks at it as a job but he takes his opportunity so seriously that it rubs off on the rest of us. This guy uses every possible minute to think about and create music. So as far as the songs we chose, Jimmy asked about some of the others: “What about this one?” And we we’re like, “Gosh, we forgot we even played that.”
I remember when I interviewed him soon after he began performing with Panic, Jimmy explained that on occasion, he’d learn the wrong parts and show up having prepared JB’s parts rather than Mikey’s, which to my mind is a credit to both of them and the richness of your sound as whole.
That’s one thing that he did, learning the wrong part but a couple of times he learned both parts. He’d show up at rehearsal and play this amalgamation of Mikey and JB, which just led to the band falling to the floor in both laugher and amazement, because if anyone can play two things at once, it’s Jimmy Herring.
He’s certainly brought an infusion of energy.
It’s an infusion of energy and an infusion of enthusiasm. The way he approached the music isn’t the same as those of us who have been playing it for over 20 years. He approaches it from a different angle and an academic standpoint and then he gets the spiritual thing behind it.
The all-inclusive free-for-all thing comes later and that’s really what we’re getting now and it’s coming more and more naturally, which is the way we like things to happen. It’s the closest we’ve gotten to us at our previous peak and it’s been happening more and more lately with improv jams and free-for-alls. I liken it to a stagecoach out of control where the rider’s lost the reins, the horses are galloping like mad and the wheels are about to fly off but somehow we get down the mountain.
“On different nights it seems that one band member will have more influence on the jams than others. The most dynamic seem to be when it is obviously a SCHOOLS night. When you are in the middle of improvisation, how does the band decide who is going to lead the jam? Eye contact, hand signals, just listening to each other and deciding what sounds best in the moment?” Stephen S.
The third option, the listening, is always key and the listening depends entirely on how well we’re hearing each other. On nights where everybody is hearing everybody really well, that’s a really good start towards having those kinds of moments.
I appreciate what the questioner has said about me. There’s a lot of things that JoJo and I worked on when Mikey was in the band that we did to elevate what the band was capable of doing, and they did involve some hand signals and some eye cueing. That’s e-y-e cueing because none of our IQs are that great (laughs). That way when we’re in the middle of the maelstrom we can connect and call a chordal change. And Jimmy has taken those kinds of elements into a larger arena because of his academic strengths as far as theory and modalities are concerned. We don’t have to call direct key changes with hand signals or anything. We can make a minor key jam and go to Lydian mode and sound real pretty and Beatles-esque. That’s his influence.
So really on the best nights everybody can hear and everybody feels really good and that X factor is going on, where the thing you can’t put your finger on is happening. It descends upon the band and the audience like a cloud and that’s what we all live for, that’s why people keep coming back and that’s why we try to leave a lot of loose ends lying around so that thing can happen.
“Has the crowd ever influenced your thunder…..brighten your day or ruined your day?” Daisy B.
All of those. Absolutely. Sometimes the crowd acts as one and it’s physics. You know how they say you should never march a platoon across a bridge because the cadence will makes the bridge collapse? Well that doesn’t happen in the live setting. If those guys out there are listening and they’re linked up then it really takes things to a whole new level on our end. It becomes this tennis match of energy back and forth and back and forth between the audience and the band and those are great nights.
And then there’s nights where I won’t say a crowd can ruin the night but one bad apple can sure as hell do it by throwing something up on stage or splashing a bunch of gear. We try not to take it personally because we’ve all been young and we’ve all been at rock shows and thrown things or done stupid things and we know that in most cases it’s done with enthusiasm but still, it can fuck things up.
“Do you guys still throw darts to pick songs?” Tim C.
That was a B roll prank we filmed. That was on a DVD from Austin, TX from ’03. We have a master list we work off and someone thought it would be funny if we had a huge one printed out at a poster shop, a six foot high master list and have band members throwing darts at it (laughs). It was probably our booking agent because the shoe is on the other foot sometimes and we wonder if they’re maybe sitting around their booking agent office with a giant map of the US throwing darts at it.
Speaking of which, any number of people from various parts of the country wanted to know when you guys would be playing their town but I thought one person did a good job of touching on the larger question: “I’d be very interested to learn how much input the band has in deciding the tour schedule?” Corey D.
Really, not much at all. If we do take a role, it’s because we’re extremely enthusiastic about something like where a big gig like Halloween, New Year’s or Thanksgiving might be. Or it’s because we’re extremely unenthusiastic about playing somewhere. I won’t name names, but maybe we played somewhere before and they didn’t have their shit together and it was a weird night.
We like to leave that stuff up to the people we’ve worked with for a long time who are professionals at doing it. They have their reasons for doing things or not doing things just like we have our reasons for playing songs or not playing songs.
Back to setlists, which again was a topic of interest to many people. Is there someone who spearheads it from day to day or night to night? Can you talk a bit about how that’s done?
Well we have that master list with all the songs and all the covers we’ve ever done. Our stage manager Garrie Vereen has a color code system where he writes down the set we just played and crosses those songs off in black and the songs we played the night before are in red and we go back four shows. So we have four colors and we try not to repeat any of the songs that are red and certainly not black two nights in a row. That’s a big jamband foul (laughs).
We do tend to play the new songs a lot but that’s not because we’re trying to shove them down people’s throats. It’s because they’re new and we really enjoy playing them. Also, in a lot of cases we’re allowing them to evolve on stage. So that’s why some songs get played more than others.
But as far as whose responsibility it is, it’s everybody’s. Some people take a more general interest in it from night to night: JoJo and myself. John Bell has been doing a lot of setlists lately. And we do try to do it a little sooner. We used to do the first set and play the first set and then come up with the second set in the dressing room. But that kind of stopped when Mikey passed away because first we had George McConnell and now we have Jimmy Herring and they both love a little extra time to woodshed. Jimmy really likes it if we can have the setlist to him before we even leave the hotel and we’re like, “Good luck, pal.” (laughs) But if we are sitting up and it’s a long bus ride, there might be time to pull out the list and go ahead and do tomorrow’s setlist and give him a chance to work on things because it just makes him comfortable. He doesn’t need the rehearsal but it makes him comfortable.
I also tend to take an interest in setlists in the Virginia area because I have high school friends or whatever. JB likes to take an interest in the Cleveland area, that’s where he grew up and JoJo has interest in the New York area. Things like that come into play but generally anybody can do it.
“Panic credits all of its original songs as ‘by Widespread Panic,’ and I realize that all the members of the band contribute in some way. I was curious, however, if there are any songs that you have personally written the lyrics for?” Chad S.
Lyrics? No, no way (laughs). If I did, you’d hate that song. My services are best utilized on the musical end.
“The Band is obviously well read, what are some of the favorite books, and/or authors that accompany you on the road?” Collin S.
I’ve been enjoying Cormac McCarthy. He’s someone that Mike Houser turned me on to but I never got around to reading the book he gave me until a year ago, which was Suttree. I’m very excited to see this movie of his book The Road which is probably one of the most depressing reads with an uplifting ending that I’ve ever suffered through.
JoJo likes to read a lot. He likes science fiction, Philip K Dick and stuff like that.
I remember for a while Mikey was reading all the classics because his son Waker was getting to be knee high and he thought it would be a good idea to get a grip on the classics. So he actually read War And Peace while we were on tour one summer (laughs). I told him, “You’re a better man than I.”
“During the process of signing off on the music for the archival series do you listen back to archival shows and if so, what have you discovered?” Eric B.
You know I haven’t really listened to do much weeding. That’s why we trust Horace Moore and Chris Rabold because between the two of them, we have all the bases covered. They’re both inside enough to know what a good performance is from the individual members and inside and outside enough to pick up on whether the band’s performance was really special. And Chris has the engineering knowhow to take a look at the sound quality because these are multitracks for the most part, they’re not Betty’s reels [Betty Cantor-Jackson of Grateful Dead recording fame] that were mixed down to two track on the reel to reel while the show was happening.
So these are multitracks and all of the things that are inherently problematic with the media you won’t discover until you pull out a 12 year old multitrack tape and realize there’s no kick drum on the first 3 songs. Things like that all come into play.
And what they’ve been doing is taking all things into account from those perspectives, including what the hardcore fans are looking for, the people who have massive collections of shows. What we can offer them is much better sound quality than even a soundboard because we have the ability to mix these multitracks down. So what’s not out there or what’s out there that is so great that people suffer through a terrible audience recording to get to whatever happened on stage and can we offer a better version of that? We’re really just getting rolling.
I know you had an interview with Horace [Editor’s note: stay tuned]. He’s a terrific guy and he really cares because he’s a fan. He’s an insider who’s been around, I met him right after I came to my freshman year of college in the early 80s. We’ve been friends ever since. He really cares and because he is a fan and he is an insider, he’s got a great grip on it. He really likes receiving wheelbarrows full of emails from people who care enough to voice an opinion and he listens.
So they weed out most of the stuff and we get down to the two or three shows. Sometimes I’ll pop one in and most of the time I’ll remember the show. Like that Carbondale, the first one we released, I remember it being a great night all around. Even though it was almost 10 years ago, I just remember walking off the stage going, “Wow, we knocked it out of the park.” So I just listened to a few things, thought John Keane did a great job, Chris Rabold did a great job, my memories were correct and let it go.
For the most part, I guess I learned it from Garcia, once we’ve played it, we’re done with it. That’s just the way I feel about it. That’s just my personal opinion but there’s obviously 5 other opinions that have equal weight.
So I don’t really listen to them too much. I’m happy when people are happy. The Huntsville release seems to have made a lot of people really happy. And I’m happy we can keep those people happy.
“Everyone knows that the members of Widespread Panic met at the University of Georgia in Athens in the early 1980’s. What some friends and I would like to know is a little more detail about those years. Where exactly did you meet John Bell or Michael Houser? What was your first impressions of them? What about Todd and Sunny?” Adam A.
(Laughs) Good one. The first time I met John Bell, here’s how it goes, here’s how 80s we are…I lived in a dormitory near the stadium called Milledge Hall. It was part of the Reed dormitory area and there was a big quad out front where everyone would throw a Frisbee, play Hacky Sack and sit around. Well I was playing Hacky Sack and this cat bops into our circle and kicks it around. We were wearing tie dye or something and he’s starting talking about the Grateful Dead, and then says, “You should meet my friend John Bell, he’s looking for a bass player.” I’m like, “Okay, cool, is he playing around?” And he told me he was playing this place called Abbot’s which is now above the Georgia Bar.
So Horace and I went down there to see JB play and I remember thinking, “This guy’s great but he really needs a band.”
So we met. JB came and picked me up and took me on the scariest six block drive of my life (laughs). We wound up at what was the band house at King Avenue and I met Mikey for the first time. He had just gotten a haircut to please his parents and his moppy hair was all piled up on top of his head, kind of like Eraserhead. I remember he drank a lot of Budweisers and we played a lot of music and it wasn’t that great but somehow we had a pretty good hang and came back for more. That’s how it went down…
The story with Todd was he and Mikey had played together outside Chattanooga. They both grew up in this town called Harrison and I guess they were a mutually bad influence on each other so their parents decided that they probably should not hang. So with that in mind we fast-forward to me and Mikey and JB always playing parties and whatnot and always having these rotating drummers. There was one who was really good and played with us really well but most of the time we couldn’t afford him. Then there was another one that would break down into tears. He had a Neil Peart drum kit but couldn’t play a “Not Fade Away” beat to save his life and he’d cry every night. And then there was a guy who played a vegetable steamer and a conga with a wooden spoon.
And finally we had the biggest gig of our career, we were going to play this benefit at a place called the Mad Hatter Ballroom with a bunch of other Athens bands and none of our drummers could make it. We didn’t know what to do but Mikey goes, “Why don’t we give Todd a call?” And we called his mom and she told us he lived in Atlanta. So she gave us his number, Mikey called him and he said, “I’ll be right over.” He drove a beat up old Maverick over and played some with us. Then he spent the night on the cat infested couch and he was allergic to cats, so that shows you the level of his dedication and I guess the rest is history.
Now Sunny was friends with Kyle Pilgrim who owns the Uptown Lounge in Athens where we played every Monday. And I guess he had gotten to the point of being sick of Austin, Texas that’s where they had played in a band together. So Sunny drove all the way from Austin, Texas and came straight to the Uptown. He arrived just as we were setting up our stuff and he said, “I’ve got some congas in the car…” And we were like, “Bring them up! Bring them on stage!” So he sat in with us that night and got a job tending bar at the Uptown for his old buddy Kyle. Then he would sit in with us whenever we played around Athens and we just kept saying, “Come on the road, come on the road…” And we finally got him to come to Macon or Greenville, South Carolina, these gigs that you’d get home to afterwards and then we finally suckered him out on tour and he’s still here. Lucky us.
“Are you guys going to entertain doing interlocking sets with the Brothers a la ARU/Panic jams from HORDE all those years ago?” Derek C.
When you use a term like entertain how can I resist? Of course we’ll entertain it (laughs). Logistically, we have 2 drummers and a keyboard set up on risers and they have 3 drummers so I don’t know if it’s logistically possible to interlock and do full band segues which is what I assume the question is talking about. It was a lot easier when we all had tiny amps. However, will there be collaborations? I would definitely say yes. We’re birds of feather, we’ve known each other a long time and we’re really looking forward to this, both bands. It’s been a long time coming and I would suspect that once we get a couple of gigs under our belts and get familiar with how our crews work, the sky’s the limit. I’m feeling pretty good about what’s going to happen.
Next time: Dave talks about the next studio album, Europe, Athens in the R.E.M era and much more…
