Rahsaan Roland Kirk often referenced an Invisible Whip to describe the motivational force that kept him moving forward, creating new music. The quote commonly associated with him is: “We are all driven by an invisible whip. Some run, some have fun, some are hip, some tip, some dip, but we all must answer to the invisible whip.” Guitarist Jimmy Herring has drawn on this concept, albeit in a more concise manner, for the name of his new ensemble.
The group, which also features longtime collaborator and fellow Aquarium Rescue Unit alum Jeff Sipe on drums, along with Jason Crosby on Wurlitzer and Rhodes, Matt Slocum on B3 and Clavinet and Kevin Scott on bass, will open a summer tour on Wednesday, July 19 at Memphis, TN’s Minglewood Hall. The band will gig into early September, then reconvene in November for The Meeting of the Spirits tour, which will feature individual sets by Herring & The Invisible Whip as well as John McLaughlin’s 4th Dimension, after which the musicians will join forces to explore some of McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra material.
The following conversation touches on the new quintet and their upcoming dates as well as the future gigs with McLaughlin. Herring also reflects on the legacy of Bruce Hampton and speaks to the future of Widespread Panic. Pick up the August issue of Relix, to hear some of the guitarists’ reflections on Gregg Allman.
Let’s jump right into the personnel of your current group. For starters, you have two keyboard players.
I’ve always wanted to have two keyboard players because I love the sounds of having, let’s say, piano and organ at the same time. You hear that on records all the time. When you go see Clapton, he’s got two keyboard players. I just saw David Gilmour last night on AXS TV. It was an old concert where he had all these guests coming out and he had two or three keyboard players because that music demands that kind of orchestrational power, where you can hear beautiful string sounds and you can hear a B3 organ and then you can hear a Rhodes. I wanted to have that.
Matt Slocum has been around for years. I first met him when he was playing with Oteil and the Peacemakers. He lives in Birmingham and Oteil, at the time, was living in Birmingham. He invited me to come out and play with his band. I heard Matt and I was like, “Man where did you dig this guy up? This guy is amazing.” Ever since then I’ve been blown away by him and always wanted to work with him at any time possible.
This then led me to the other keyboard player that I love working with, Jason Crosby. I first worked with him years ago when ARU used to play with Bruce [Hampton] back in the day. We would play sometimes around the D.C. area and there was some kind of a harvest moon or full moon festival we would do. There was this band that had this young keyboard player and this guy was amazing. I was always stuck by how musical he was. Then I found out a little more about him, he’s interesting. He’s got perfect pitch, he was a violin prodigy when he was a child and he traveled the world. He’s an intense musician. Then I got to play with him. Project Z did a tour he came out on, then we recorded an album with him. He is just the kind of musician that I was looking for, he can just do anything.
With Jason and Matt Slocum together, the idea is that Matt will play the clavinet and B3, Jason will play the Rhodes and anytime we need piano. I wish we had a real piano, obviously. That matters to me a lot, I want this to be an organic sounding thing. I’m not really looking to have too many futuristic sounds, I like organic sounds. He’ll mostly play Rhodes and Matt will mostly play B3 and clavinet.
Do you think it’s possible when you go out in the fall with John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension, where you’ll appear mostly at theaters and symphony halls, that you might be able to have a piano?
Unfortunately, it’s not likely. Even if there is a piano at the venue, unless you’re touring with it and you have a piano tuner with you on the road and you’ve got the perfect way to mic it… I get irritated all the time because no one wants to bring a real piano. I’m like, what does Bruce Hornsby do? What does Elton John do? What does Billy Joel do? What did Freddie Mercury do? I know Brian May played loud, he had a wall of AC30s over there. I know they put him on the other side of the stage but back in the day, in the 70’s and 80’s, these guys were still playing real pianos. When you hear these concerts today, when you see Queen in 1980, you’re like, “Man that piano sounds beautiful. It sounds like a real piano, not like a digital recreation.” It’s such a can of worms, it is so expensive and so heavy. It’s difficult to move around and you have to have a tuner on the road at all times. Unfortunately, it does not look like we’ll be able to have a genuine grand piano bu maybe someday, I hope so.
To be honest with you we’ve had a few rehearsals and Jason has had his digital piano and Rhodes over there and he’s barely touched the digital piano. It’s mostly Rhodes because when you go from Rhodes to a digital piano it exposes the digital nature of the instrument. I didn’t tell Jason not to play the piano it’s just showed itself in rehearsal to be something might not get played much. It might just be mostly Rhodes and B3 organ, at least that’s real honest sounding.
Jumping back to your band, people are probably least familiar with Kevin Scott.
He’s a young bass player from Dothan, Alabama, who moved to Atlanta some years ago. He sort of took the Atlanta music scene by storm. What I love about him is number one, his personality. That’s just so key, it’s got to be about more than a person’s bitching playing. You’ve got to be able to be people, you’ve got to be able to work with people and be friendly. This guy is just a joy to work with and he’s a great bass player. Another one of the main reasons I called him is he plays a four string bass. He plays a four string Fender bass. He has the sound of the music I love. I don’t know if you ever noticed this but sometimes—and there are always exceptions to this—with the five and six string basses they have such powerful EQ possibilities on the instrument that sometimes people will EQ out the features about a bass that I really like. I’m like, “There are too many options on these basses and I can’t hear what the bass player is playing.”
Obviously with Oteil [Burbridge], it doesn’t matter what he plays, he always has the sound. Same with Dave [Schools]. I can hear every note those guys play. Their low notes sound like a piano. That’s what I want, I want the bass because the bass defines the harmony. A guy plays a D chord and the bass player plays a G, that changes the whole chord. Now the chord is a different chord. It’s really critical for me to be able to hear what the bass note is and I don’t want to be struggling to be able to tell what it is. With Kevin, that’s not an issue. He’s playing a Fender style bass, it’s like a Precision or a jazz bass. It’s just a sound that I feel like mixes really well with other instruments. That’s another crucial element for what I’m looking for. To have people’s sounds that go together well.
In terms of Sipe, the two of you have been playing together off and on for 30 years now. I assume the goal is you want to be comfortable but you still hope that he can surprise you night after night.
I can only say that if you’re not being surprised by him every night, you’re not listening. That cat is on another level altogether, he’s just on another level. He’s constantly growing and evolving. The other thing is, we’ve played together for so long. We’ve kind of grown up together musically. We weren’t children when we got together and started playing with Bruce—we were in our mid to late 20’s—but in a way we had a rebirth because when you play with Bruce, if you’re with him long enough and you’re out there every night, there’s a school you go through that you can’t get anywhere else. He and I both went through that. We have that in common, in fact everyone in the band was tight with Bruce.
We lost Bruce about seven weeks ago today and it’s still really raw. I just miss him, although I feel that it was the time for him to go and we’re being selfish. I miss him. I want to call him and want to talk to him. He left us so much and all of us have played with Bruce in one capacity or another. Kevin was in one or two of his bands. Jeff and I toured with him for years. Jason and he were super tight, I don’t know if they ever toured together all the time but Jason and Bruce were tight. Matt Slocum obviously, he played with ARU when we went out and did things in recent years, which wasn’t very often. He played with Bruce all the time in other scenarios. For me, that’s really important. I want to be able to bring what we’ve all learn from him to this thing, I want it to be an element. I don’t want to try and be little robots or anything, I just want it to be a spice in what we’re doing.
I think that Bruce will go down as one of our most unheralded yet influential musicians, if you look at the whole school of Hampton.
That’s exactly what he wanted. He wanted a low profile, he wanted to be like a minor league coach. That’s the way he viewed himself. He doesn’t tell people what to play. The lessons you learn from him are not about how to play your instrument, in fact, that the last thing it’s about. When you’re playing with Bruce it’s not about any of the things that you think about that can make a better musician, that’s what’s so fresh about it. He teaches you about being a person first, about your craft and your dedication to your craft and your family. It’s really deep, it’s really deep. It’s definitely not about playing bitching solos or any of that bullshit, it’s so much deeper than that.
It’s easy to overlook people who aren’t out there in the public all the time. He didn’t think his thing was for everybody but he wanted it to be for anybody who wanted it. It’s not for the masses unless the masses love it. The point being, he liked to keep a low profile. He had many chances to become more popular. He had many chances to have a high profile and he always leaned the other way. He was the most comfortable in a 200-500 seat club, that’s where he worked his magic. That’s what he wanted to do. I have no idea where any of us would be without him. I mean, as far as the people I grew up with musically: Oteil, Jeff, Derek Trucks.
Later, there was always the next wave of people who came. We all share something special with each other. The Codetalkers were a great band, a great band. These guys could go into a studio and they could do three records in one day. I heard a CD of 25 songs that were all completed and they were ready for vocals, they didn’t have vocals on them. These were songs they were playing and when I was going to play with them they gave me that to learn the songs. The vocals weren’t on there but it was real obvious where the vocals would have gone and I was so impressed. I went to Bobby Lee [Rodgers] and I was like, “Dude, this CD is unbelievable. Where did you guys do this?” He goes, “Oh, we just did that one day over at Jeff Bakos’ studio.” They did those 25 tunes in one day. One day! Who can do that? It was all live and it sounded like a record. The only thing it needed was vocals. I was like, “Man this is absolutely album worthy stuff right here. They did it in one day and it’s mind blowing.”
What was interesting about The Codetalkers is that right when they were at the cusp of gaining some real national recognition, Bruce decided he wanted to move on to something else. Do it think it was that he wanted to go back and coach a new team of players?
That’s a very good guess. I guess your guess is as good as mine. When we got signed with ARU, a week later he was kind of taking steps to leave the band. And we were all like “What? What are you doing?” We luckily talked him out of it. And we stayed together, made two records and then he left. But it was just time.
Every five or six years he needs to do something new, and sometimes his bands don’t last that long. I feel lucky—we were the longest band he had ever had until the Codetalkers came along. And then they eclipsed us, they were together 7 years. I think we were only together 5 or 6 years, so they had a good run with Bruce.
While you’re about to embark on an extended summer tour and I’m sure that’s foremost on your mind, I’m particularly excited about your fall dates with John McLaughlin. What can you tell folks about him who might not familiar with his music?
John’s one of the children of Miles Davis—people like John, Chick Corea and of course there’s lots more. But John went and formed Mahavishnu, Tony Williams formed Tony Williams Lifetime, Joe Zawinul formed Weather Report [with fellow Davis alum Wayne Shorter] and Chick Corea formed Return to Forever. These are all pivotal and they were straight out of Miles’ band. You know, it was out of his urging and in fact we think of Bruce like our Southern version of Miles Davis.
I think with John what you’ve got is somebody who really learned from Miles and never stopped evolving. He’s constantly recreating himself and he’s been very successful. He’s someone who never sits still. He’s constantly changing and putting a new group around himself to do his thing in a different light, which is what Miles did. It’s very inspiring. Actually, it’s beyond inspiring, it’s both terrifying and inspiring.
To me, he’s always been the pinnacle since I became aware of musicians who took their craft to a very high level. As a kid you grow up and you’re listening to music. And then the older you get, you get exposed to different things. When I first heard Mahavishnu, it’s like my whole world changed instantly. It was like my focus changed. It went from first just wanting to play rock and roll—which there’s nothing wrong with and which I still love very much—to all of the sudden practicing eight hours a day to try and learn my craft a little better.
When you’re young you might focus purely on the technical side of things because you hear how fast John and Mahavishnu can play. So of course that’s gonna be one of the things you’re gonna have to work on the most to be able to play any of his music. But after you get past that part of it, you see the depth in the compositions. And the technique is only one element of what he does. His music is spiritual. It’s on another level.
John is citizen of the world, he’s not from one place and he loves music from different cultures. You know he came to New York and embraced the New York sound. Then of course he was into Indian classical music.
So to be asked to play with him, I’m still scratching my head. But he is so wonderful and generous and kind to us. I guess he must be sort of intrigued by the southern faction of whatever it is we’re trying to do. It’s got elements of jazz, it’s got elements of rock, it’s got elements of funk and blues and roots music in it. I guess he finds that intriguing in sort of a curious kind of way. Which is hilarious to us, we’re like, why does he want to play with us? You know, he’s John McLaughlin.
To me, he’s a titan and there aren’t a lot of titans still with us. I have no other word for him.
I completely agree with you. He is a titan, he’s one of the creators, he’s a musical innovator. And he was an innovator at a time innovation was embraced. Nowadays it’s harder to innovate and still be able to work. You know, because if it’s not automatically popular, it’s hard to get gigs and stuff. But yeah, he is a titan. You called it perfectly. It’s amazing, inspiring, you know?
Several years ago we did this gig at Paul Reed Smith’s 30th anniversary event. He asked ARU to play at his event and we were like “Really, you want ARU to play at your respected guitar company’s event, are you serious?” and he was like “Yes, I want you guys to do it.” Then he called John McLaughlin and had him come and play with us. And when we played with him it was pretty happening. He just jumped right in like he had always been there. And he enjoyed it, which really meant a lot to us, of course. It’s pretty intriguing to me that he finds anything worthy about what it is we’re doing (laughs).
Final one: folks would love a quick Widespread Panic update. I’m curious if you have any plans to enter the studio at the end of this year or early next year?
Nothing’s been discussed as far as that, but we’re definitely writing music, everybody’s writing music. People are sending home demos to each other. There are emails coming all the time with “Hey man, what do you guys think of this here?” JB will write a little tune in his studio, he’ll do a demo and send it around and everybody will be jazzed about it. So we would love to go back in the studio. Nobody’s said “Let’s go into the studio at this time or this date” but I’m sure we will. It’s one of the beautiful things about this band, it’s gonna keep going. So we’re gonna do it, I just don’t know when.
