Because of its size and scope, do you see Panic in the Streets as a turning point for the band?

It was one of them. I mean we work so much and we didn’t – it was always left up to other people, like writers like yourself or our management or a promoter to like say, “You’ve sold this venue out twenty times” to sort of put those notches in the gun belt as it were.

We were just constantly playing. It’d been a little more than ten years since we played our first gig, it had been a little less than ten years since we released our first record, and we were on the verge of releasing our fifth or sixth record at the time. It was just what we did. We always felt really lucky and really blessed. We weren’t the most loved and revered – critically – band in Athens or anywhere, but that never deterred us. We just played music and picked up fans one-by-one and that’s what we were in the process of continuing to do.

Our thing was we hadn’t played in Athens since Halloween of 1995, so it had been almost three years since we played a hometown show. We had sort of outgrown our ability to do multiple nights at the Georgia Theatre. The Coliseum, where the UGA team plays basketball, is one of the most notoriously terrible sounding rooms on the East Coast, so we didn’t want to do that. They had a new Civic Theater that held not enough people and the large room, which was where we played Halloween three years earlier, also sounded terrible. So it just was like, “We need to play our hometown.” That was our motivation. There was no like, “Let’s celebrate the release of this record” or “Let’s celebrate the success of your career.” It was like, “We haven’t played our hometown in a long time. Let’s do it. Let’s figure out a way to do it.”

When you reflect back on that performance from Panic In The Streets, do you have any musical highlights? Do you ever listen to it?

No. You know, I’m not a fan of listening back. I mean, I feel like I remember it being good. The emotion that I remember, the overriding emotion, was stepping out on stage, looking at all those people, hearing Gwen O’Looney’s invocation of “Don’t hurt my town” to introduce the band and realizing that – kind of literally, praying to whatever force is out there to let us do our job and keep these people focused and happy ‘cause there’s a whole lot of ‘em out there.

That’s crazy.

Yeah, that was it. I remember just thinking, “We’re playin’ good.” I don’t know if it’s possible to have a complete cosmic mind-fuck of a show in that kind of situation, the very first time in your hometown. But, it was a good show and it was an energetic show and no one got in trouble, nothing stupid happened. There were very, very, few injuries. The cops arrested literally no one because they wouldn’t have known where to begin. [Laughter.]

We turned in a good show, the crowd dispersed and filled all of the nightclubs, bars and eateries around town. So economically, I think it was a real boom for the town and it certainly put us on the map, in a lot of ways. It made us legit in a lot of ways. I think the worst thing that could be said about the whole event was the incredible amount of trash. You know, there was a lot of trash and I think that we had to pay double overtime to the city sanitation workers just to get that stuff off the streets by the next morning.

Hey, if that’s the worst thing that happens, it’s not too bad. The hard working people of Athens make a little extra money…

That’s right. Considering what I’ve seen happen, on the weekends of big SEC football games like big rivalries, I’m gonna say we had a calmer type of crowd that day.

The Georgia Dogs make people a little crazier than Widespread Panic.

Uh, certainly angrier. [Laughter.] Or happier, this year. I don’t follow them anymore, but there was a time when I couldn’t not follow them because I lived in a dormitory right next door to a stadium. Unavoidable.

Just regarding the insanity around the event, do you have any non-musical memories from that show that stick out?

I can’t remember. I know I had bought a house; first house I had ever owned and I moved into it and slept on the sofa the night before the show. It was like an empty house, the power was turned on, but there was no food. I didn’t have any of my stuff really over there yet and I remember hearing drums – that they were allowing people to camp about five miles away in Sandy Creek Park and I remember hearing drum circles.

And the next morning you woke up on the couch and headed out to go play for a hundred thousand people.

Yup, just another day. [Laughter.]

I wanted to transition a little bit and talk about Widespread Panic now, because you guys are doing more multiple night runs and you’re not exhausting yourself on the road. Are you enjoying this new mode of touring?

Absolutely, it’s the best route for right now because it’s what we all want to do. The thing we discovered last year, doing lots of festivals, is we didn’t really get to go deep into our catalogue. And so when we did get to Red Rocks, we were like, “Yeah, we can go really deep and this our world.” So, this year is about finding ways to make our bubble ours; less festivals and more multiple night runs. Like the one we just did in Birmingham, where we can just play whatever the heck we want. There’s no expectations. I think the people that come to these multiple night runs, they know they are going to get a lot of everything, across the whole run. And that’s the point. Mainly, the point is for us to stay happy, and I think as far as work flow and as far as getting along, we’re the happiest we’ve been in decades.

And creatively, you guys are doing amazing too; you have new originals, the song “Sundown Betty” and you also shared a picture of Jimmy Herring and John Keane in the studio. Does that mean there’s a new album in the way?

Well, that’s a whole other discussion. [Laughter.]

The worth of an album, in the year 2018, and the investment of time and money to create a collection of songs and release it – I don’t know if that’s so smart. You know, I work with a lot of bands producing and I play with a lot of different people and it’s something we’re all sort of scratching our heads about. There’s a beautiful thing about the artform of an album – a collection of songs recorded at the same time – but it might not be fiscally sane thing for a young band to do – or an old band. Maybe the thing to do is to get into the studio for like three days and just blast a song out and keep your fans in the know that you’re always at work, that you’re into creating new music and still experimenting. I think it’s a good thing.

You know, when I was a kid, it was a singles world. I’d go into the store and there’d be a wall behind the cash register with the top 40 singles and I’d fork over a dollar of my dad’s money and buy one. And that’s kind of where it is now, except we’re forking over a monthly subscription to a streaming service–mainly.

So yeah, we will relish anytime we have in the studio together, especially the work with John Keane. I would suspect more things like that will be happening and I’m sure we’ll be talking about the fate of “Sundown Betty,” whether it gets released as a song or we try to add another one to it. It’s all up in the air and none of it’s really important.

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