Photo by Dean Budnick
On April 18, 1998, an estimated 100,000 people lined the streets of Athens, Ga. to hear the southern-rock stylings of Widespread Panic. Fresh off a set of shows overseas, the band simply wanted to get back to their roots and play a concert in their hometown. According to bassist Dave Schools, the thousands upon thousands of Spreadheads were nothing short of a surprise.
Today, Panic in the Streets is treasured by audiophiles as one of the best Widespread Panic shows ever, and earmarked by rock historians as one of the most monumental public concerts on record. What started as a record release party for Light Fuse Get Away, became its own historic occasion.
Below, Schools chats about Athens past and present, the insanity surrounding the concert and, in his own words, how Widespread Panic is “the happiest we’ve been in decades.”
Where I wanted to start was talking about Athens. Can you tell me a little bit about what Athens was like around that time of Panic in the Streets, in the late ‘90s?
It’s always been very gated. It’s a tight knit little circle. It’s a small southern college town with a really, really, big eclectic music scene. Not many venues to play, especially at that time. Not many liquor licenses downtown at that time. So, it was a small circle.
You had the 40 Watt Club, you had the Caledonia Lounge. There was a bar called the Hi-Hat that had great live music. The Georgia Theater, a couple of others. You could basically trade an entry into a club for a burrito. It was that kind of scene. Everybody knew everybody and there was a lot of cross-pollination…Which is a great thing; when you’re a town full of artists that are just, simply being.
Downtown was about five blocks by three blocks, including City Hall, a large Baptist church and the police station and a bunch of cool college business; record stores etc. No national chains, I don’t even think the Starbucks had moved in downtown yet. Everything was pretty locally owned and that’s was made it so cool.
I know you’re a West Coast guy now, but have you spent any time in Athens recently? Is it kind of similar now or have things changed?
Well, things always change. I remember reading a lot of things about Athens in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when I lived there, that it hadn’t fallen prey to the same sort of homogenization that a lot of southern college towns had fallen prey to. My experience, visiting there now, is that the people haven’t changed, but the town has sort of fallen prey to development. There’s a lot of student condos. A lot more national chains. A lot more hotels. I’m sure it’s good in some respects, and it’s not good in other respects.
I always like what I considered an apt description of Athens, Georgia from the ‘80s, which was, “It’s Mayberry on acid.”
I like that.
Now, I’m not sure if it’s so much “Mayberry on acid.” I know there are over fifty liquor licenses in that downtown area now. And there’s always a lot of testosterone and posturing in college towns, especially on weekends. The last time I was there, I noticed a lot of it and it was sort of a bummer. All the cool stuff that I seem to enjoy has migrated to the edge of town where the Caledonia and the 40 Watt Club are. There’s a great record store down there, a couple of great restaurants – it’s just natural. Stuff happens, evolution continues, city councils change and that’s a great segue because if you wanna talk a bit about the concert in the street, that never would have happened without Mayor Gwen O’Looney and some of the people on the city council that really believed that it would be an important step for Athens – to mount a large-scale, free music concert in the street.
Did you realize the album release show was gonna be as big as it was? When you were throwing around crowd estimates, did you ever think it was gonna be 100,000 people?
Oh lord no! No one did. There’s a book that’s about to be published by the University of Georgia Press [Widespread Panic in the Streets of Athens, Georgia], written by a guy named Gordon Lamb, who is a music writer in Athens, that is a total oral history. A “Just the facts ma’am,” kind of book. I read the book, the final draft of the book and it shocked, even me, how many hoops so many people had to jump through, politically and city council-wise and legally and culturally – socially – just to make this show happen.
It wasn’t like we just thought to ourselves “Hey let’s put on a free show!” I mean in our world, as Widespread Panic the band, that was the idea: “Hey let’s just throw a free show in our town!” But our management and the people that were in our corner and the people that seemingly were not in our corner, there was a whole lot of meeting and last second changes and all kinds of crazy stuff, including the mayor of Macon, Georgia, saying that he would be glad to put on the concert in his city, if Athens’ city council couldn’t get their act together.
I don’t think there was a huge stand against us. Although, there were some pretty ridiculous things. We had to replace all the horse feed for the mounted police force because they felt that our fans were gonna somehow get into where they stash the horse feed and dose it. [Laughter.]
But in the end, no one got hurt and it was a great time and we performed really well – It was thrilling. It was scary. It was cool. The whole town sold out of beer – beer and hot dogs. I think even the Waffle House ran out of waffle batter or something crazy like that.
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.
