Horace Moore first connected with Dave Schools, shortly after they both arrived for their freshman year of college. The two bonded over Grateful Dead tapes and maintained a relationship that eventually saw them bonding over Widespread Panic tapes, with Schools quite literally supplying the music. Recently Moore has dropped the word “unofficial” from his prior title as the group’s “unofficial official archivist,” and is currently overseeing the band’s live release series. Here he talks about how that all came about and what he has planned for the future [Since then, Moore has announced the fourth installment of the series, a show from. With all the details at the archivist blog on Widespreadpanic.com
DB- I’ve heard that your current role began through your relationship with fellow Deadhead Dave Schools, shortly after you both arrived at college. Can you talk about how you first met him and the other guys in the band?
HM- I met Dave on my first day here on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. Someone who ended up becoming a mutual friend of ours, introduced us. The way I heard about Dave was, “You’ve got to meet this guy across the hall because he’s got a ton of Grateful Dead tapes that I’m sure you’d like to check out.” So within the hour I was over there and met Dave and the rest is history. A great friendship over the years and music has been at the core of that friendship.
In terms of the band, after meeting Dave we spent about a year being great friends, struggling with school and what we want to do when we really grow up, traveling around a lot and enjoying a lot of music. Then within about a year we met JB and Mikey and all the friends and family members you never really hear about, the glue.
I never really thought even for a minute that everyone would get together and there would be this huge band thing going on but that’s the way it evolved. It was a very organic process. A bass player meets a couple of guitar players and eventually they get a drummer involved…
The guys always had music on their mind and wanted to do their own thing and it’s been a great ride in the sense of being on the sideline checking it out. And it’s fun being a little more officially involved at this point too.
DB- When was the first time you saw the band perform in some fashion?
HM- The first time would be sitting around their house over at King Avenue in Athens. They were without a drummer at the time, so whoever was there kind of became the drummer. Passing the bongos around just trying to give a little beat to the background for these guys to play on top of. Just friends hanging out.
As far as the first semi-official show, it was not a buy a ticket, go to a show thing. It was really just playing at a party the way parties happen at any college town with a couple of kegs at somebody’s house. The friend that introduced Dave and myself to JB and those guys, had an A-frame house with a few other dudes here in Athens. So in February of 1985, I think, they threw a nice party, had some beverages and had what was Widespread playing.
It was Dave and Mikey and JB and I could put myself right there right now by closing my eyes. They were sitting on the deck and they had the thing going on. That was the first time I remember it being semi-official. Then they did a few more things that year and it got serious for them at that point. I can remember getting ready to go out on Dead tour in the summer. Dave and I were roommates at the time and I just figured he was going like he always had with me and our buddies. But he said, “No, I think I’m going to stick around. I’ve got a couple of things I need to do with JB and Mikey.” And I thought, ‘Whoa, okay, good enough.”
Then by the time the spring of 86 rolled around, you’ve got Todd joining the band in February and their first true ticketed paid admission at a music club type thing. It was The Mad Hatter, which is no longer here in Athens. The Classic Center sits on top of the spot where it used to be. But I was at that show as well and I can remember standing outside with my friend waiting for a couple other people to get there and go inside and how excited we were: “Can you believe they’re playing a real gig? They’ve even got a drummer, it should be fun…” And from there it kind of went on its own.
DB- How many tapes do you have in the archives of that early period?
HM- I’ve got tapes of some of the practice sessions where in the background you can hear a bunch of friends talking and telling the dog to sit down or get off the sofa or whatever. That evolved into the February show at the A Frame House and tapes of that exist.
In ‘85 there wasn’t a whole lot going on, just a handful of things that happened with the three piece. Once ‘86 got rolling around, I taped a lot of the shows at the Uptown Theater and a lot of people who were able to head to the out of town gigs were doing the same thing. Back in the early 90s all those cassette tapes from that time found their way into my house.
I kind of look down the road and see that maybe that material is worth a bonus disc. I don’t know if it’s something that necessarily stands on its own as an archive release. The problem with the 86/87 stuff is it’s a two track format and there’s really not a whole lot you can do to clean it up. You can give it a little bit more bass or a little bit more high end, clean some hiss out of it but there’s not a lot you can do to isolate one instrument over another or push one up and pull one down. And that presents some issues because a lot of the rooms the guys played in during that time did not make for even a good soundboard tape. You get so much bleed coming off the monitors on the stage that gets into the microphones. They’re fun to listen to for people who are totally into it and want to hear everything but I’m not sure we’ll be gravitating towards those to put them out. The meat of the archive series will come from the years when they had multi-track ability and were recording the shows up to 64 tracks, which gives you the ability to go back in and mix the show for a CD and just make it sound awesome.
DB- What year did that begin?
HM- That happened at the very end of ‘94 and really started full charge in ‘95.
DB- Can you talk a bit about the selection of the Huntsville show [Von Braun Civic Center, Huntsville, AL, 4/3/96] which has become the third installment in the series.
HM- The thing about picking the first two, is they’re the toughest ones because you can’t please everybody at once. If you look backwards after your tenth release it’s a little easier to pick number eleven because you have that history and you’ve been able to choose different years and certain shows you know people would be interested in and found that little gem nobody knew about. So trying to get things off on the right track is a little harder, which I guess is true about anything in life.
With Huntsville, one of the things I specifically wanted to do was pick a show that had a lot of support through the ranks of Widespread Panic fans, be it the casual fan or the hardcore. And I knew the performance was there and the desire to have it put on an official archive release was there in terms of the fan side of things. I probably started with about ten shows and for one reason or another I culled some out and finally settled on about two or three. Then I made CDs for the band members and people around the office and we put our thumbs up or down across the board. Then it was left up to me as to what I wanted the call to be for number three. So I just made the call.
I thought it was great show from a lot of different perspectives. I thought it captured the band when they really hit their full speed. You’ve also got the first “Sandbox,” an iconic Mikey tune that I thought was special. A lot of great jams in the second set that tie together real well with great segues and a lot of high energy, along with band and crowd interaction.
I knew that a lot of people had the tapes of this show in their collections and some had soundboard recordings, especially of the second set. However, I also knew that the multi-track process was going to produce something that was better than what people had. That way I thought we really could show what we could do.
Chris Rabold [The band’s current soundman] did a fantastic job on sound engineering and he’s written some blog comments on our archive web page. He basically tried to mix this thing as if we were mixing it at a show.
I thought maybe Huntsville could pull a lot of people on board who maybe hadn’t heard about the archive project to date. I also knew that it would go a long way towards showing the true opportunity of these multi-tracks to take shows from that period of time where people do have tapes but demonstrate that we really can improve on the sound quality that they have in their collections right now.
DB- Relative to fans purchasing shows that they already having in their collections, that reminds me of the Grateful Dead world where I still believe that people would buy 5/8/77 if they put it out. I know I would…
HM- Sometimes I’ll look out into a room with 10,000 people and wonder to myself, “How many of these people are really tapped in to the taping thing?” I’ll look at the mic stands and assume that each of those guys is reaching so many people but there have to be plenty of people in there who don’t understand where to get it or how to get it.
Then you have to think to yourself, what is the true function of the archive process? Is it to fill in gaps in people’s collections or is it to capture the band at different points in time that collectively show what this band is all about. I’m trying to balance those two things. And I think if you’re trying to capture the history of the band over time, there are by definition going to be those shows that people have in their collections, like a Cornell 77.
What I found with Huntsville is that a number of people were extremely excited to see that show because it gave them a validation. The best way I can put it is in Grateful Dead terms from my own personal experience in that when those guys would put out an archival release from a show I had in my tape collection that I thought was top notch and did it for me, I thought it was awesome. To your point, I was out there buying it no matter what because I knew the sound quality would be better and it allowed me to fit my experiences into ones that they thought were important relative to their overall career.
Huntsville is an iconic show and a lot of people use it to introduce the band to people who haven’t heard them before. Even today I listen to certain sections and I get chill bumps and I’ve been listening to it for almost 15 years or so. It just had a lot in it.
When you’re dealing with a band that allows taping and you get to the level of audience recordings that have been made over the past decade plus, that’s something you have to think about. But you have to get back to, “Is this a great show? Is it worthy of an archival release in terms of how it’s going to fit into the whole collection?” You can’t find yourself worrying about the specifics too much in that regard, which is easy for me to do because my background is as a CPA in accounting and I’m all anal retentive about that stuff. I do tend to overthink.
A great example of that is one of my stumbling blocks for Huntsville was the encore, “Can’t Find My Way Home,” which just happened to be the same encore from the Valdosta show in ‘89 which we put out as number two. And I just looked at the whole thing and I said, “Am I really going to stumble over the encore being the same at a show that was seven years earlier? No, I can’t do it.” But I’m sure somebody in Panicland will go, “Why did they do that? It’s the same encore, that doesn’t make sense.”
DB- Speaking of which, you’ve been soliciting people’s opinions via email on the Panic site. Can you talk a bit about the feedback you’ve received?
HM- By and large, every email I’ve gotten has been very supportive of what the band has been doing to get things out there and start the process. A lot of people are really stoked and I get tons of emails from well wishers that are two, three or four lines. But the ones that just absolutely blow me away are the people who will write paragraphs describing what this band has meant to them over the years, certain sections of shows they feel ought to be represented in the archive series and really expanding on it. My reaction to reading all that is I don’t deserve to be the one reading it. I didn’t do anything to produce the music on stage that gave people these feelings. So it’s been a good source of positive feelings for me, that I’m the one that gets to read these and create these dialogues with the fans and see what it is they’re looking for.
Obviously we can’t take every suggestion and make it happen in stores within a couple of weeks but a lot of the suggestions they’ve given me have opened up my eyes to several shows that have since very much gotten on my radar. So it’s been a nice little handshake if you will that I’ve gotten from everyone. But one thing about this project that we don’t want to forget is it’s for the fans. So over time let’s figure out what they want and make sure we’re able to give it to them.
DB- Have you expanded the dialogue to include some of the other archivists out there, such as David Lemieux or Kevin Shapiro or have you kept it within the band circle?
HM- For the most part it’s stayed within the band circle for right now. But Dave Schools used to be my neighbor and he moved out to California a little over a year ago. One thing I talked with him about over the last year or so was my desire to take a trip out to meet some of the David Lemieuxs of the world and gain some understanding of how they decided on shows and some of the roadblocks that came up in their process. I have not done that yet but it’s certainly on my radar to improve our product and gain some friends and insight along the way.
DB- Jumping back to your early friendship with Dave, during what timeframe did you see Dead shows together?
HM- We went to our first shows together in ‘83 and the spring of ‘84 and then we did the whole summer tour in the summer of 84. It was about four weeks and 8,000 miles in my little Datsun 200 SX with four people in it. We met a ton of people we’re still in touch with today.
We had a great time and it really opened our eyes because Dave and I had both been into music for a long time but neither of us had taken that kind of adventure yet. I can remember at the Saratoga show in New York, Dave saying, “That’s what I want to do.” I mean how many 18, 19 year olds say that? Tons of them but how many of them are actually able to come through with it? So it’s been an interesting friendship to watch Dave graduate if you will from concertgoer to one of the reasons people are coming to the concert.
DB- Did you ever have the experience of returning to see Widespread at some of those same venues where you had seen the Dead with Dave?
HM- A few times. For example I saw the Dead at the Starlight Amphitheater in ‘84 and ‘85 and then in 2002 there I was at the Starlight Amphitheatre, there’s Dave on stage and it was like, “Whoa, this weird…” I can remember the chill bumps and I’ve got them right now, just standing there thinking, “We used to travel around and see that band and we saw them in this venue right here and there’s Dave on stage.” It blew me away because also at the 2002 show, I had my wife, my two kids and my mother with me. We’d all taken a Winnebago and driven out there. It was just a special time to look around and go, “Man, in less than 20 years I’m married, I’ve got kids, here’s my mom with us and here’s my buddy on stage doing his thing.”
The Fox Theater is another great example. I can remember seeing the Dead at the Fox for two dates back in the fall of ‘85 and we all had to camp out for our tickets. Dave was with us and all. And then, boom! I think it was the early 90s, maybe ‘91 or ‘92, Panic opened for Blues Traveler there one night. I can recall standing there in the Fox Theater looking up at those guys saying, “Wow, this is strange.”
DB- Like many bands, Widespread Panic’s early shows often focused on covers. Looking back though, can you recall the first original tune that led you to think, “Wow this could be something…”
HM- I would say “Space Wrangler” is one they started playing real early as well as “Sleepy Monkey,” “Driving Song,” “Pigeons.” I can remember specifically “Space Wrangler” back in the Uptown days in Athens where they played like every Monday night for what seemed like forever. There was a pinball machine in the back of the room and I would always stand back from the stage and check it all out. I can remember the whole up and down, revving up and breaking down during “Space Wrangler.” Just being back by the bar near that pinball machine, going with the groove and checking it out. And I can specifically remember “Pigeons” hitting a chord with me, how they entered the song, all the things that happened during it and how they ended it. It was all just very powerful in that small room. And later when they’d play “Barstool” and talk about that iron going in the pinball machine, well there I was, standing back there by the pinball machine.
One of my most visual memories of the Uptown, was watching the guys who would come to the front of the stage and it wasn’t a stage that was even five feet off the ground, it was a foot and half or so. Mikey would be sitting down in his chair playing guitar right there at the corner of the stage and these guys would literally put their faces about 10, 12 inches from his guitar and just turn their heads like, “How are you doing that?” It just always amazed me that it didn’t bother Mikey and then I realized he had his eyes closed.
DB- You mentioned earlier that you worked as a CPA for many years. Can you talk about the move from accountant to archivist?
HM- I still am an accountant, I do accounting consulting work and this stuff I’m doing with Panic on the archive side is a labor of love. The way it came to be is that there has just been this general feeling over the past couple of years that it’s time to start delving back into the past and the multi-track tapes. During those years I would have conversations with different band members and share emails about different projects. They’d ask me to look at some shows from a certain period and give my ideas as to what would be appropriate to put out there.
Those things kind of stopped and started. But then a little over a year ago, I was at a show in Savannah and Dave and JB came up to me with the Carbondale CD, which was the first release in the archive series. It hadn’t been completely done yet but they had the artwork of the CD case dummied up with pieces of paper taped to a case to show how it would look. I wasn’t aware they were that serious about it and I was kind of blown away.
I had been loosely involved with being an unofficial archivist over the years. I had all the old DAT tapes and cassette tapes as part of my collection, along with specific instructions as to what I could let out and what I couldn’t. I’ve always had that trust of the band and the ability to understand what they were interested in.
So when I realized that no one was necessarily in charge, it just seemed to me that to keep a full blown archive release series going, they needed a person who understood both the band perspective and the fan perspective. So last summer over a series of conversations, I just approached them and said that I’d be willing to be that liaison. Give me an email address, I’ll correspond with the fans and find out what it is they want, we’ll give it a name, give it a face. I’ll be happy to get involved and let’s see where it takes us. And it’s kind of evolved from there.
DB- You mention that you were the unofficial archivist for many years. The story I’d heard is that one day you walked out of Dave Schools’ house with a big garbage bag full of tapes over your shoulder. Is that true?
HM- It’s absolutely true. I graduated in 1987 and then in the beginning of ‘88 I decided to back to school to get my management degree. I was in school and it was hard to manage all that with wanting to see the guys play. Then in ‘89 I finally moved over to Atlanta to do the real work thing. Dave and I talked all the time but I found that every time I needed to send him something in the mail he had a different address.
So with me always having tapes on my mind, I asked him, “What’s going on with all those cassette tapes that are basically the band’s collection that are at your house?” He goes, “Well I move them around with me.” And I said, “Man, that’s not good, you’re going to leave some of them behind, you’re never in town…I need to come get those, don’t I?” And he said, “Yeah, you probably do.” So we came up with a time and I drove over to Athens and walked out of his house with a black Hefty garbage bag slung over my shoulder like Santa Claus and drove back to Atlanta popping tape after tape into my tape player going, “I can’t believe this…” It was awesome.”
And that’s how it kind of got started. I found some really cool things that reminded me of the early days at King Avenue sitting around and I made a collection of a few tunes and gave it to the band. And in doing so, I think they understood that here was somebody that they could trust. After a couple of years I got a call from JB who said, “There’s a package for you at the office. Swing by and get it when you can.” And I went over there and I had a ton of tapes from him that I think he had found in a move.
After a few year period where I was getting all these tapes, I considered myself the unofficial official archivist because I had all these soundboards I kept getting and I was concerned, “Do I let these out?” I had a lot of things I could let out and I made a lot of those tapes part of other people’s collections. I also had quite a few that I really had to sit on because they had been mixed down from some of the multi-track stuff to put out things like Light Fuse Get Away, where they would mix the whole show down to a two track. That was a hard thing to do coming from my early days of trading tapes but I certainly realized the rope that had been given me and I didn’t want to hang myself with it. So I was able to maintain that confidence with the band in terms of being somebody they could trust with their music. So they gave it to me for safekeeping until the organization graduated to a different level and they got their own room to store a lot of stuff in.
DB- To what extent are there holes in that collection and have you discovered many missing nuggets?
HM- It’s very well documented from the end of ‘94 to the present. A lot of the efforts from the past have resulted in a very good documentation from the 85/86 timeframe all the way through ‘88. On the other hand, ‘89,’90,’91 seem to be really thin. The band was really finding themselves on the road a ton compared to what they had been used to. I don’t think a whole lot of tapes got made. That’s not to say there aren’t any but you get back to those two tracks representative of the rooms they were recorded in and there’s not a lot you can do to make them sound better.
Little nooks and crannies have surfaced though. I have found a couple of shows from the late 80s that aren’t even in the Everyday Companion. Ted Rockwell and Will Duckworth just did a fantastic job with that stuff, so that’s been a resource. Whenever I find something I’m not quite sure about, I’ll put it against that and I’ve found a few shows from the early days that don’t seem to be listed.
There’s also a few shows from the 90s that aren’t traded because there were no tapers and the soundboards never got out. And I’m happy to say we’re going to be doing a good intersection on some of those because we have them.
DB- One final question. Given your perspective, can you talk about the state of the band today.
HM- I love it. My favorite show is always the next one. With all the changes that have happened over the course of the past few years, I couldn’t be happier with Jimmy Herring on stage and seeing what he has to offer the musical experience and also in terms of fitting in as one of the guys. The camaraderie that has come with him has been exceptional. I’ve really enjoyed seeing them redefine their sound with him, watching him change their sound a little bit and them changing his sound a little bit, so it’s really become a fluid conversation. Going back to the Savannah show I saw last year I walked out saying, “That’s one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen, period. Panic, Dead or anyone in between.” This is a band where the sky’s the limit in terms of the magic and the potential for where they can go musically. I think they’re really enjoying each other, seeing what they can do on stage and moving into the future.
