Since playing the Fillmore East isn’t possible (barring the invention of time travel), I asked if he had any favorite venues he salivates over at the mere thought of playing. “Well, the Beacon is the place I’ve played the most. I’ve played [there] almost 200 times. Red Rocks is the place that everybody always points to as being the place you could never have a bad show. Between the audience and the picturesque setting it’s pretty incredible. I think there’s a spiritual factor [at work there]. Now, there are other venues in that part of the country – and I’m really looking forward to the Taos gig – that are similarly beautiful. The Gorge in Washington state is like that as well. Having said that, any place with a great audience is a great place to play, and I think it really comes down to that. I don’t mean to sound weird when I say this, but even more so for bands that improvise because the audience is part of it. We’re not capable of playing at the same level without an audience as we are with an audience and that’s just a fact. It’s not some cliché.” I didn’t think he sounded weird saying this in the least, but then again, I do live in Santa Fe, NM, home to a vast population of crystal-licking hippies. Cartman would hate it here.
I asked if he’d ever experienced an overdose of this kind of audience-performer biofeedback, and he replied, “One year at the Beacon the Allman Brothers were so hyped up for opening night that we decided to bring in the recording trucks…because the fans were so amped up. It was when [producer] Tom Dowd was still alive. After the show everybody was like, ‘wow that was a great show,’ and Tom said, ‘Not on tape. You guys played everything too fast. It was full of energy, but you weren’t relaxed and you weren’t in the groove.’ So there’s that. If the audience is completely over the top then you’re carried away in that moment, but that’s part of it too. I don’t think experiencing live music is the same as listening back to it on tape. It may feel great at the moment being really fast, but…at 4am on a tape or CD it may feel too fast. I don’t think that you have to play the songs the same tempo every night. We definitely don’t. I think you can discover the songs in many different ways by experimenting with the tempos. I tend to like it when it’s a little more laid back, but sometimes, if you’re at a big festival and there’s 100,000 people, the tempos get really fast because there’s so much energy there.”
Warren Haynes, for all his well-earned stature in the live music community, came off as fairly humble. “Down to earth,” my grandmother would’ve said. Whether playing with 3 band members or a dozen, whether for a few hundred casual fans or a mud-caked throng of tens of thousands, it’s obvious he just loves to perform. “This is what I love to do. Music is something that I feel blessed to be able to do in the first place and people that do anything they love for a living are very grateful, I think. Or should be. I’m very fortunate to be surrounded by so many great musicians. That’s the way you keep growing. That’s the way musicians remain students – by expanding their horizons.”
As Haynes’ band-mate Gregg Allman once wrote, when Haynes was still a young boy and not yet a member of the revived Allman Brothers Band, “The Road Goes on Forever.” I get the feeling that, for a road warrior like Warren Haynes, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
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Chris Diestler has been “performing” his weekly, free-form, jam/roots/festival showcase Toast-n-Jam – with and without co-hosts – for nearly 5 years on KBAC-FM in Santa Fe, NM. He still enjoys discovering new songs, as well as revelatory versions of songs he’s already heard a hundred times.
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