Photo by Jake Krolick
In late August we ran part one of our reader interview with Widespread Panic bassist Dave Schools. Now that the group has returned to the road for more shows with the Allman Brothers Band, we thought it was a fitting time to present Part Two. Here he talks about the band’s next album, his move to California, his admiration of Hot Wheels and much, much more.
A number of folks had questions for you about Panic’s possible return to Europe, wondering if anything was imminent.
Oh talk is cheap, Dean (laughs). Europe’s hard. It’s really expensive to go over there on tour and it’s prohibitively expensive for a band on our level, especially because we haven’t been back in 10 years. It’s a luxury to have your own gear and every time we’ve rented gear it’s been a nightmare. So believe me it’s on our mind and we want to go back, we just want to make it work exactly right. Also, most of the time they want you to have product, even though I don’t know how important it is in today’s music atmosphere that you have a new record to push. So I would suspect that once we get out of the studio in January or February and have something under our belts, we might just sneak over there.
That relates to another question a number of people asked. So the band’s intention is to begin work on another studio album in the near future.
Absolutely. There have been improv jams, things that have been happening naturally and tossed around in the rehearsal room. I have a couple songs that Jerry [Joseph] and I wrote. JoJo has some songs, JB has songs, Jimmy’s got songs, Todd’s got songs. So it’s a matter of working those out.
I think we’re just about at the point of going back to the old school way of doing things and breaking a few of them out on stage and giving them a road worthiness test before we take them into the studio. I could be speaking out of my butt but I think everyone pretty much feels that way. There have certainly been some instrumental ideas that have been cropping up on purpose, in the middle of improvs or between songs on stage and those have the tendency to turn into songs.
Here was another popular one. A number of people wanted you to name some of your favorite venues to play.
Those change obviously because a lot of them come and go. We used to love playing the Cat’s Cradle in North Carolina. I recently wrote something about the Georgia Theater for Relix and I started ruminating about the early jamband east coast circuit. You’re in Providence, what’s that place called?
Either Lupo’s or the Living Room.
The Living Room, we played there with Phish.
That was the first time I saw you guys play.
Really, when they did “Big Black Furry Creature from Mars” as an encore? [5/11/90]. Hey all you haters, bands love each other so piss off [Laughs]
So you had the Living Room and of course you had the Wetlands and you had the Bayou in DC and Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Then you had the Georgia Theater in Athens and that sort of made the scene and that’s where a lot of these of friendships were forged. So even though some of those places were dives and probably major fire hazards and I’m not saying that about the Georgia Theatre, I have nothing but great memories of those places because they were part of this road we traveled and saw each other and fomented the scene.
Then you have your places that are famous, like who doesn’t want to play Radio City Music Hall? Who doesn’t want to play at the Warfield or the Fillmore? I’ve always enjoyed playing the Greek Theater in Berkley and of course you have places like Red Rocks and the Gorge that there’s nothing like anywhere. Another one of my all time favorite plays to play is the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium. There’s something dark and old and cool about the place.
And then you have your personal favorites where maybe you saw a show when you were a kid. Or playing Madison Square Garden and going, “Wow, this is sort of the same view Jimmy Page had when they were shooting the Song Remains The Same. Those are big deals. Playing the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, which is where one of my favorite Grateful Dead tapes was recorded. Those are big deals to someone like me.
You mention the Gorge. It’s an amazing experience from the audience perspective looking at the stage with the Columbia River Gorge behind the band. But in your case you’re on stage with the river is to your back. I take it that doesn’t detract from your experience?
I’m only working for 3 hours a night, Dean. For the rest I’m sitting around backstage going, “What a beautiful view…” [Laughs].
“How do you like living in CA as opposed to GA? What do you miss most about the south?” Jen K.
I love living in California not as opposed to Georgia. I just love California. Up here I love the temperate nature of the weather. Especially where we live, we have this micro climate that makes it like 95 degrees and zero humidity with coastal breezes during the day and then it gets down to 50 degrees at night and we get the coastal effect with fog. So everything stays green and happy and we don’t worry too much about fires, knock wood.
I definitely don’t miss the heat and humidity of Georgia but what I do miss is how it looks in the fall and the spring in Georgia. And I miss my friends and there’s a lot of aspects about Athens that can be got nowhere else in the world. There’s an intangible spirit there that people pick up on even if they just pass through town to play a gig or see a football game, heaven forbid.
Believe me, I’ve played every cool college town in the country and they don’t have it. They might have something different that’s just as positive but there really is something special about Athens, especially the way that the arts flourish there. The music is just incredible and you cannot count the number of bands who made a worldwide impact or even a dent that came from Athens. You can’t count them on two hands.
I also miss my friends a lot. I have great friends there. But when you live somewhere for 25 years that insular and small, those are friends that you keep with you forever. I try to get back there as often as I can. I’m really glad we rehearse there and we’ll probably be recording our next record there, which will give me a chance to spend more time in Athens.
In terms of Athens, was it around your freshman year that [R.E.M.’s] Murmur or Reckoning came out?
Reckoning came out when I was a sophomore. Murmur was already out when I was a freshman, I believe. I remember the night of my high school graduation party. I went and got into a little trouble with a friend of mine who was dating a guy at the University of Georgia. And while we were getting into a little bit of trouble, we were listening to the Chronic Town EP and he was saying, “This is a band that’s going to be big and they’re from the town where you’re about to go to school.” And it was pretty cool to come down and see all that happen because I did see it happen. I didn’t see the playing in bars but I saw their entire rise to superstardom.
Did that resonate throughout the Athens music scene in any way or were there so many bands that it was just part of a larger whole?
Here’s how uber hip Athens is. They weren’t national stars yet. They were maybe one or two records away from being national stars although they were certainly critical darlings. But Athens was so uber hip that there was a backlash against them. When I first arrived there bands that were really hip were really arty or really punky. Bands like the BBQ Killers, which I actually played bass for before they settled on their real bass player, were about as arty uber punk as you could get. And other bands that were popular like Love Tractor and Time Toy didn’t sound anything like R.E.M. There was always a lot of eclecticism, just as there is today. Everybody knows everybody, no one hates anyone. There’s not that big city L.A. or Boston or New York sort of thing like, “We’re going to slash the headliner band’s tires and hope that they don’t get to the gig so the opening band can headline now.” That doesn’t happen there. It’s more like, “Oh, hey look, the headliner band’s broken down on the side of the road, can we give you a lift?” It’s always been that way there.
But in terms of what the bands were playing, R.E.M. had already left and the bands were on to something else in the clubs. What was simmering was going to become something else.
“If Hollywood made a Widespread Panic movie who would play all the band members?” Matthew
Wow, that’s a good one. Gee, I haven’t given that one much thought. Let’s start with Steve Lopez, our tour manager, very important. Horatio Sanz plays Steve Lopez. Now let’s see…Maybe you could put a beard and some long hair on Philip Seymour Hoffman and he could play me…John Bell could be played by Timothy Olyphant, the guy from Deadwood...Gosh that’s tough. Maybe we should solicit some ideas.
“Do you have any hobbies outside the music world?” Jon J.
I do. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and say it…I collect old Hot Wheels. This is something that began in like 1968 when I was 4 and Mattel first started putting the little toy cars out. I really enjoy that. It’s fun and I’ve met a lot of people from all walks of life who don’t give a damn about what anyone does for a living, we’re all here to talk about little toy cars.
After I moved, I also broke out my vinyl from storage and got a pretty nice tube amp, a new turntable, a good stylus and resurrected my old Cliff speakers. And I’ve really enjoyed going through that, cleaning up the records and buying what’s out there in the used record stores. I love that. It’s really, really enjoyable.
I’ve been doing a lot more writing lately, too. That’s what they told me I was going to do when I was growing up. Of course being a rebellious person and a rock and roll kid, there was no way in hell I was going to do what they told me I ought to do. But here on this side of this life I’m really enjoying that.
In terms of your vinyl collection, when you’re out the road, do you see a renaissance of record stores? So many were going belly up for a while. Do you think that’s stabilized?
I think that most of them are doing okay. There are two kinds I’ve seen that remain successful. One is the little almost bodega style, that’s musty and dusty and has been around for 30 years. Either the owner owns the building or the overhead is so low that they’ve never run into trouble. What they offer is a great selection of used records and those places seem to be relatively successful. The one here near where I live in Santa Rosa is called the Last Record Store. They’ve been around since the 70s and they sell new CDs and used CDs too but they also have a great selection of vinyl. I talked to the guys who run the place after Record Store Day happened a few months ago and they told me, “We can’t keep stuff in stock.” So that’s one kind of place that’s still successful.
The great example of the other kind is a place called Twist And Shout in Denver. They have everything you could ever want new on CD and they have an immense collection of used vinyl with great prices. And the ratings there are some of the truest ratings I’ve seen. If they say something’s near mint, it’s neat mint. And they also sell tchotchkes and posters and prints and everything music. They’re not trying to be the goth store or the emo store or the alternative store, they’re just trying to be your one stop place for all things music. And those kinds of stores if they play their cards right, still seem to be having some success. But the market’s in the toilet.
CDs are going bye-bye but I don’t think vinyl’s ever going to go bye-bye. The music gets around you and you feel it, especially this generation of kids who think that the way an mp3 sounds is the way music is supposed to sound and feel. When they hear a record played through a tube amp and good speakers and they feel the air move and sense the three dimensionality, pops and clicks be damned, it’s a totally different experience.
“In your opinion, was it easier or more difficult for bands to successfully tour when WSP was just coming along?” Alden P.
Well it was hard for us for any number of reasons [laughs]. I think it might have been financially easier, though. I think there was more attention paid to club bands. I think all this consolidation in the bigger markets with Live Nation, AEG and all this stuff, with ticket prices going through the roof and people charging 250 bucks to see a dinosaur act, wasn’t such a big deal back then. Ticket prices were lower for the arena shows and consequently the club shows were full. The drinking age wasn’t necessarily 21 across the aboard either, so if it was a college town it was generally packed. I think that was easier.
One thing that I don’t think has changed, is why bands do it. Why they get into a van or a station wagon and jam all their crappy gear in there and hope to get enough money from a gig to put in the gas tank and get to the next one where they’ll be sleeping on people’s floors. Whatever motivates people to do that I don’t think has changed. I think their enthusiasm is not even tempered by how hard it is to pull that off now, when it’s even more of a challenge. And I’m certainly glad they’re doing it because if all that stopped and if their enthusiasm began to wane and youngsters who were playing rock and roll or playing music for the adventure and the fun of it, if they felt like they couldn’t pull it off, it would be a mighty sad place for us to be, for those of us who love new music.
Along these lines, how conscious are you of ticket price and how vigilantly does the band try to regulate it?
We’re always really conscious of it. We work really hard to keep overhead down so we can keep the ticket prices down but at the same time you don’t want to rob showgoers of their experience. So we’ve always put more into the sound than we have into the lights because we felt like that was more of an important part of what we do. We also know our fans like to see more than one show, so what’s the point of charging 60 dollars? Then they’re not going to come and see the 2nd or 3rd show. But if you keep the ticket prices affordable they come to all three and we’re going to do something different.
I understand a band like Pink Floyd with all their stuff doing the whole world for a year and half in support of a record that took them seven years to make. That’s your one shot. If you live in the Ukraine there’s your one show. You’re going to spend six months worth of your music budget to see a band that you’re not going to get another chance to see for ten years. But as far as bands that you can count on to tour every couple of years charging 250 or 300 bucks for a stadium show, no thank you. I don’t get it and I think it’s biting everyone on the ass right now. I think it’s really important and I think bands need to keep an eye on these things because if they don’t keep their manager and promoters and so forth in check, they’ll walk into a half empty house and be like, “What was the ticket price?” Well it was 110 dollars and it’s no wonder it’s only half sold.
I tell you what else drives me crazy is the scalping. When the show is sold out and we walk onstage and discover that people have decided to boycott the 350 dollar front row seats that the scalpers are offering. So we walk out into a sold out show and there’s no one in the front row because the security hasn’t been told to chill and even if you tell security to chill and let people into the empty seats, that pisses off the guy in the second row who paid face value. Why shouldn’t he have the front row? It irks me greatly as a fan of music and someone who used to love to be in the front row and would be there at a ticket outlet at 8 in the morning. That would piss me off.
These are these factors that are killing live music right and making it unaffordable for people it could mean the most to. I went to see The Who back in 2000 at Phillips Arena. It was billed a a greatest hits tour. It was before Entwistle died and the show was fucking great, Dean. Zak Starkey has everything Keith Moon had without the drugging and drinking. His energetic playing rejuvenated Pete Townshend to where he was leaping around on stage and the show was great. We had these side seats so we were at eye level on the side with the band but we could look down and see the floor and the expensive front row first section was 50 year old guys who could afford to pay $200 per ticket and they’re not going to stand the whole night. And even back up in the nosebleed seats where it was 50 or 60 bucks were the kids who want to be in the faces of those guys and pick up on that energy where it hits them from the amps coming off the stage, not from the video screen the line array speakers. To me it just seemed backwards and weird and I understand it’s a business and there’s a lot of big things involved that I might not want to admit exist but godmman it, rock and roll is for the people who want to jump and shout and get into it.
