The Ringers will play a series of five dates commencing on February 19 in Athens, Georgia, before heading to Charlotte, Raleigh, New York, and ending in Washington, D.C. on February 23. The supergroup quintet features three world-class guitarists, including Widespread Panic’s Jimmy Herring, Wayne Krantz, Michael Landau—a James Taylor axeman, drummer Keith Carlock, who has played with Sting, and Etienne Mbappe, bassist, who has played with diverse and classic artists, including Ray Charles and John McLaughlin. Together, The Ringers combine five different exploratory genres—rock, funk, jazz, blues, and African/Caribbean—into one singular musical vision with a powerful improvisational spirit.
Jambands.com caught up with Herring after his recent run of shows in the Dominican Republic with Panic to discuss his return to the road with the jamband giants after their 2012 mini-hiatus, the new Ringers project, his reunion with the Phil Lesh Quintet, his excellent 2012 solo album, Subject to Change Without Notice, and the reason why the master stringsmith has not released as much solo material as one might expect, but works within a method that suits his incredible talents quite well, as Herring continues on in his journey as a Ringer, or ringer, in just about any configuration he finds himself these days.
RR: How did the idea for The Ringers come about? I’m absolutely blown away by every one of the band members that will be appearing on that stage. Each one is a major focal point of a band, and to have all of them in one group lends one to the feeling that this is a band that will live up to its name.
JH: WOW. [Laughs.] O.K. Everything you just said, I feel the same way. I’m stunned and excited and I don’t really know what to expect. I do know that I’ve been enamored with every one of these guys for years. I’ve known about Wayne and Mike, obviously, for years, and Keith and Etienne and all of them are so great. The way it came about is that there is a guy called Souvik Dutta, and he is the head of Abstract Logix. He runs it. He’s got a record label and he’s put out every record that I’ve done. He is also putting out Wayne’s records, too. He came up with the idea.
I was on tour, and he starts talking to me. He’s my manager, too, so he was on tour with me, and he started talking with me about this idea—three guitar players and a great rhythm section that he had in mind. When he mentioned it to me, I was like, “Really? Three guitar players?” When he told me who he was thinking of, I thought, “Oh my God, those guys will never go for this.” [Krantz and Landau] are guitarists in trios, and, of course they are versatile and can do anything, but they don’t want to share the stage with two other loud ass guitar players. That’s what I was thinking.
I said, “But, hey, if Mike Landau and Wayne Krantz want to play—are you kidding? Just tell me when and where.” And, so, [Dutta] put feelers out, and he came back almost immediately with “Yeah, they want to do it.” I said, “Are you kidding me?!” [Laughter.]
It was Souvik’s idea from the very beginning; it was his baby.
RR: Obviously, you are very busy with everything you have going on right now. How difficult was it to find just these few dates for all the players involved?
JH: Well, it wasn’t that difficult. It was only that I was really looking forward to some time off. Something’s been goin’ on ever since last April. Every single month there has been something going on, so I was really looking forward to not having much going on in February and March—work on some writing and work and mess with some of this equipment that I’ve got layering around; it’s killer, but I haven’t gotten a chance to mess with it too much because we’re always working. Man, when am I going to get time to learn how to use this thing? But when [Dutta] mentioned February being the window to do it, I said, “Well, man, that’s it, then. If that’s the only time we can all do it, then let’s do it.” Like you said, it’s only like five shows.
Stuff that people never seem to get—not you; I’m just talking in general—like my friends, they don’t play music, and they want me to go and “Hey, man, take a trip with us. Let’s go on motorcycles and go up to the mountains. Let’s go on a fishing trip.” I need to go see my mom. All this kind of stuff—and when you only have like ten days off, it’s not really off time because you’ve got to prepare for that trip that’s comin’ up, and this is not the same thing for something I already know all the music for. This is all new stuff and a new concept and a new thing, so, you know, this period of time between now and when we play, I’m down in the basement every day just thinking about it, listening to the tunes, thinking about it, trying to write something about it that might be a good vehicle for us to improvise on, and things like that.
RR: Funny you should mention that. Last year, I unintentionally took about seven months off from music for the first time in eight years. I have to tell you, it was one of the worst periods ever for me. I felt like something was missing, and the whole time, it was right in front of my face—talking with musicians like you is what I enjoy the most about what I do. As you well know, Jimmy, I think there is a delicate balance between taking time off and taking too much time to do that.
JH: Absolutely. I completely agree and I did that around ’04 or ’05. I wasn’t working that much. I was working with Phil Lesh and he had kind of curbed his schedule a little bit, and wasn’t working as much, so I basically didn’t do anything for a little while. Well, actually, for almost a year, I didn’t play that much as far as gigs go. I would play at home, but mostly, I would ride motorcycles up in the mountains. I just kind of cleared my head, but it was exactly what you just said; it was at that cusp of being too much time and I started to long to play gigs again. And, boy, I got my wish. [Laughter.]
RR: Let’s talk about some of those recent activities. How was Panic en la Playa Dos, the recent Widespread festival in the Dominican Republic?
JH: First of all, I just want to say, I mean, it’s a pleasure to talk to you guys. I really appreciate that you guys even want to talk to me. I feel lucky just to get the opportunity to talk to someone who gives a shit because there’s a lot of people that don’t. [Laughs.] I’m very lucky that you guys even want to call me. I appreciate that.
Getting back to the other thing you asked—how was the festival? The festival was good; it’s just that we were on the beach in the Dominican Republic and the wind was blowing real hard and that’s not the optimum place for music as far as sound goes. And, you know, man, I’m such a baby when it comes to all that stuff; although, I’ve got to say, I had a really good time. But, my good time can actually go away really quickly when all my shit gets rained on. [Laughs.] I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that on one of those nights, the rain was horizontal and the wind was blowing 25 miles per hour, and it just blew the rain all over my equipment. I was fit to be tied. I lost a couple items that are going to have to be completely disassembled and re-built. [Laughs.]
But, that’s what you get. Most people would say, “Are you crazy? You took your own equipment to that thing? Nobody does that.” Well, that’s true. What I did do—I rented the speaker cabinets and stuff like that, but I did take two of my favorite amp heads, which were made by Andy Fuchs, and I did bring my own reverb unit, which was an Overdrive unit, and I did bring a power amp, which I used to power the reverb side of my guitar rig, so, you know, that stuff got rained on really bad. I’m embarrassed. Now, I’ve got to call up Andy Fuchs and say, “Andy, by the way, I need to send this head back to you; it got rained on.” And that’s embarrassing because, really, that shouldn’t happen.
Other than that, I had a really good time playing with Panic again. I love playing with Panic. I’ve known those guys since ’88, ’89, and we’re just good friends, and it is so much fun to play with them. They’ve got this amazing catalogue of music, and I was a little bit not too sure how much time it was going to take to get our legs back, but, man, it happened really quick. I felt like we were back in form very fast. It didn’t take long to where it just felt like we hadn’t even taken a break. Everybody’s really into it, everybody loves each other, everybody loves playing, and it was great. I really enjoyed it. I’m really looking forward to getting back to the normal way that we tour.
Photo by Joshua N. Timmermans
RR: What are your thoughts about the lingering effects of the hiatus? Do you feel the decision to take a break was a good call at that point in time?
JH: Yeah, I think it’s really healthy that when a band has been together for 25 years, and they decide, “Hey, let’s take a year off.” That’s a luxury that a lot of people are not able to have, and this group can do that. They can take a year off, and come back and be just as strong as ever. I think everybody needed…everybody had a family and there is just all kinds of stuff that you don’t necessarily get to do whenever you are touring quite a bit, so, yeah, I thought it came at a real good time. I thought it was going to be a year off, but it turned out to not be. [Laughter.] Dave, too, because Dave [Schools] was working a lot with Mickey Hart, and I told those guys, I told Souvik, “Man, look, all I want to do is make a record,” and they’ve been on me to do some type of instructional DVD type of thing and I have not done it for years because I’d say, “It’s the same information that everybody else uses. What’s the point? You can get this information from anywhere?” But Souvik and all the guys said, “No, no, no, they want to get your take on it.” I said, “That’s flattering,” but I’ve shied away from doing one; I haven’t done one. In 2012, I told Souvik, “This year, all I want to do is make a record and, finally, I’ll do one of those instructional DVD things, but you’ve got to let me think about it and let me do it my way,” and he said he would.
But, of course, when you do a record, it’s very consuming. We started writing in April [2012], and started recording in May. In June and part of July, we were getting the mix done, and before that, I had special guests, and I needed to mail the file to them to play on it because they couldn’t be there with us, like Bill Evans, Béla Fleck, and Mickey Sanders. They couldn’t be at the original sessions, so I had to mail the file. It’s all real time-consuming stuff.
Finally, when that got done, man, within two weeks, it was like, “Oh, we’re going on tour.” [Laughter.] Then, it was like August, September, October, November, there was touring goin’ on, and then, December, it was Christmas: “Holy crap, it’s Christmas! ” And, then, Panic played New Year’s: “Oh my God, it’s New Year’s.”
So, the year was real busy, but it was a good busy. It was a real good busy, and I had a great time playing music, and I think it was healthy for Panic because everybody had a chance to do the normal things that people do in life. Also, there’s some new music floating around. We haven’t started playing it yet, but people have been writing in the off time.
RR: I saw Dave Schools play with Mickey Hart’s band, and I haven’t seen him in such a small venue in quite a while. He was pretty relaxed and happy—not that he isn’t in Panic, but you could tell that he was enjoying Hart’s gig. Like you well understand, some of the pressure is off, and you’re just having fun; you may not know where any of the music is going to take you, but it’s worth the effort.
JH: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, man. He loves Mickey, and Mickey’s a supercool guy. He’s done so much cool stuff throughout his career. It’s really cool to play with people that you’ve looked up to, and to get a chance to just see how other people do things. There is so much to learn, and I’m sure Dave was just having the time of his life doin’ that.
RR: Speaking of the holidays and the Dead and a blast from your past, you reunited with Phil Lesh in December, and played with his quintet at Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael with Warren Haynes, John Molo, Rob Barraco, and Phil. What was it like to play with that group again, and how does it feel to play at Terrapin?
JH: Man, it was so fun. I mean…it was wonderful. It was like going back and puttin’ on an old pair of shoes that fit perfectly. You know, man, we all love each other, and we’ve known each other for a long time, and all of us look up to Phil, obviously, because Phil is just a musical juggernaut. That guy, that guy, is tireless. It’s so inspiration to know someone that is in their 70s, and still so driven to play music that they do it…I mean…we’ll go…here’s a typical week when you go to Phil’s place to play four shows—O.K., you fly in, and then the next day are rehearsals. It starts about 2pm, and you get out there about 10 or 11 o’clock at night. And it’s not like he rehearses everybody to make everything perfect. We just go over a bunch of music.
That’s the thing. [Phil] doesn’t drag you down by making you play everything a certain way. What he does do is that you go over a bunch of tunes. You may not get a lot of perfection, but you’ve gone over a whole lot of music. He’ll work tirelessly from 2 o’clock to…usually, there might be lunch when we get there, so we’ll eat, and we usually don’t get started until around 2:30 or 3, but then it goes to 6:30 or 7, and he doesn’t even sit down in that amount of time. He doesn’t even sit down, man. We’ll eat dinner, and then we come back and he doesn’t sit down, again, for another three hours. It’s just like, “Geez, this guy is tireless.” And, then, he does it again the next day—the same thing. Then, we have four shows in the days after that.
Man, it is very inspiring, not to mention getting to play with Warren and Rob and John Molo, and just, you know, all the wonderful people that work for Phil and Jill that we come to view as family. I love them so much, and I can never express how much I’ve learned in the process of working with Phil over the years. Anytime he calls, if I can do it, I will do it if the schedule allows it.
RR: You mentioned rehearsals and a bunch of tunes, so let’s segue and circle back to our discussion about the upcoming gigs with The Ringers. When will this group rehearse, and how will that material come together before you play?
JH: You know, that’s a real good question. Well, the idea basically, loosely, is that each person will try to bring in three to four songs, and we’re trying to get that music to each other through sending CDs, or sending files on the Internet, or whatever, so that people have an idea of what we will be playing. Then, we are going to try to choose some covers. So, if each guy has three tunes, and there are five people in the band, that’s fifteen tunes, roughly—we’re talking loosely, now—and if we each bring in a cover or two, that’s like twenty tunes, and that’ll be enough to get us through. We’re not a full-time band that’s going to have enough material to play to not repeat a song in five shows. We’re probably going to get a set that we think works and keep doing it and, maybe, the encores will be different every night. I really don’t know. We’re not trying to take over the world or anything; we just want to have some fun, and we want to try to keep it loose, and not have it be super-rigid and rehearsed and have everything sound perfect.
The idea is to find common ground between the five members of the band and give everybody the chance to just have fun and be able to do what they do. That’s going to be
the fun part of it. As far as getting together to rehearse, I think we’re going to try to rehearse two days in a row right before the first show. Hopefully, by that time, people will already know what we’re going to be playing, roughly, and there is always going to be that chance that someone might say, “Hey, man, check out this little riff right here; maybe, we can do this,” and then we just do it on the fly at a soundcheck or something. That might happen, too. I’m just trying to keep an open mind. And that’s not hard to do with these people because all these people are so open to everything. Nobody’s like “I play jazz,” or “I play rock,” or “I play funk.” Everybody plays music and we all love music and we don’t really look at music in categories, so it should be a lot of fun.
RR: About your comment regarding variety and openness and that line of thinking, as I told you in our 2009 site interview regarding your debut solo album, Lifeboat, I loved the work due to numerous musical reasons. But your second solo album, Subject to Change Without Notice, is a double whammy of kick ass. The variety of music on that album is played with such quality and intensity and passion that you make it sound so easy, and, yet, there is nobody that plays quite like you, Jimmy. I was very impressed with your latest album and I was wondering how long it took you to gather those particular sections together for the complete work.
JH: Man, thank you so much. I appreciate that so much. You know, sometimes, you get tunnel vision and you don’t know if the things that are important to you come across on recordings. But, man, you just seem to notice the little stuff, and I really appreciate that. I guess I start writing music whenever it comes to me and I would say, “There’s an idea.”
I’m not very organized. It seems like I’m always working on someone else’s music [Laughter.], so my stuff is very disorganized, and that’s part of the reason that I’ve only done two records. I mean, now, there’s all kinds of cool ways to organize stuff with computers and stuff, but I just haven’t done that. I don’t write things out. Sometimes, I’ll write out a rough sketch of a tune, so I won’t forget it, like a rhythm or a chord chart, or whatever, but I found myself going, “O.K., I know I want to do another record, but I don’t have enough material,” which is very common in my world—I never have enough material for a record.
Souvik said, “Jimmy, we’ve got to get into the studio; we’ve got to do this,” and I said, “I know, but I’m not ready.” In any other world, you’ve gotta plan for things, you’ve gotta do things in advance. So, he booked the studio time, and he let me do it the way I wanted with John Keane [producing]. I love John Keane and I have an immense amount of respect for his prowess in the studio. The guy knows how to make a record sound like a record. I wanted to do that this time. I made a record with him with Panic, and, actually, I’ve worked with him a lot in the past, but I had never made my own record with him. I went to him and asked if he was O.K. with co-producing a record, instead of just producing it, and he said, “Yeah.”
Upon further thinking about it, I just told him, “Look, man, I don’t want co-production credit on this record. My only reason for even asking you that is that I want the final say about my own performances. When you work with producers, a lot of the time, they won’t let you make yourself happy. Sometimes, that’s a good thing because you can drive people crazy: “One more take! One more take! Oh, I’ll get it this time.” And I’m notorious for that and I can be a real pain in the ass in the studio. I said, “Look, John, I want you to produce this record. I don’t want any production credit for anything, but can you do it, and just let me have the final say about my own performances? If I’m doing a solo, and I can do it better, will you be able to let me do it?” He said, “Yeah, we can do that.” So, I said, “O.K., you produce the record, but I have to have the final say about my own performances.” Even after saying all of that, I still gave him the final say about a couple of things that I thought I could do better. There were a few things that happened that I thought I could have done better, but he just said, “Hey, Jimmy, it’s just a snapshot in time.” I said, “You’re right; I’m going to leave it in your hands.”
I had the studio booked, and people were being flown in from Czechoslovakia [Laughter.] and Poland or somewhere and I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to get my shit together.” I needed two more songs, and, strangely enough, two days before the session, those two tunes just came to me. I, literally, did not have melodies for them, yet. They were just chord progressions that kind of came to me in grooves. The last two tunes that came to me were “Bilgewater Blues” and “Aberdeen.” “Aberdeen” is the gospel-flavored song.
RR: Yes, sweet tune, and “Bilgewater Blues” has quite a riff on it.
JH: Yeah, it’s like a baritone, grungy tune. That baritone—any time you pick that thing up and you haven’t played it for a while, if you play it for 20 minutes, a new riff will come out because the instrument is so different. The strings are slinky and it’s tuned real low. It’s fun to play. Came down here and picked it up, and in five minutes, that riff came out and I was like, “Damn!”
RR: You also recorded a masterful studio reading of a George Harrison tune, too—“Within You Without You.” Very well done.
JH: Thank you. Thank you very much. We’ve been doing that for a while. I had that idea years ago. I’ve always loved that song. When I was growing up, Sgt. Pepper’s was a very…I mean, I didn’t hear it when it first came out. When did it come out? ’67?
RR: Yeah—June, 1967.
JH: I was five years old. It was 1975 by the time I was really able to fathom and get inside those tunes and that tune, for some reason, all my friends that used to listen to that album all the time that was their least favorite tune, but, to me, it really spoke to me. I don’t know, maybe the drone—they couldn’t get into that. It wasn’t that they didn’t like it; sometimes, they would just skip over that tune, and I’d say, “No, go back.” [Laughter.]
But that was ’75 and I was 13. It has been in my subconscious all of that time, but I never imagined trying to play it until around, I guess, five years ago. It hit me—that would be a good tune to try to do as an instrumental, and then we could have a section in the middle where it breaks down, so we could improvise, and then we could come back to the tune. It seemed to have the makings of a jazz type of version of it where improvisation was encouraged. We had a lot of fun with that one. That was always fun to play.
RR: I understand why you may not, but I hope you find the time and space to make another solo record—hopefully, it won’t take another four years or so. It is wonderful to be busy and it’s wonderful to see you out there, Jimmy, in whatever configuration you choose to explore.
JH: Oh, man, thank you. I appreciate that you are always so keyed into the small stuff. That is the stuff that no one ever seems to notice. [Laughs.]
