Boston Phoenix
The Deep End
Sinking into Gov’t Mule live and on DVD
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Warren Haynes looks like a hippie Muppet as he stands on stage at the
Palladium in Worcester, flanked by the rest of Gov’t Mule and framed by
a giant psychedelic-lit mandala on the curtains behind the band. Not
that he’s wired. Far from it. Haynes barely moves as he wrenches notes
as beefy as his own frame from an assortment of heavy Gibson guitars or
inches closer to the microphone to sing in a bold gravel-dusted voice
that he rarely uses to speak. What with the crown of hair flows into
curls as it tumbles past his shoulders, it’s as if a toddler version of
Cousin It had perched on his head to get the best vantage point of his
sweet ’n’ dirty picking, and Haynes feared the slightest sudden movement
would topple the little bastard.

The stage-stoic Haynes, who favors a musical approach and songs that
were minted three or more decades ago, is an unlikely messiah in today’s
Jam Nation. Nonetheless, in a scene that’s evolved from the dawn of the
Dead to embrace everything from DJ swing to steel-guitar gospel to
lap-top boogie, he’s a delightful throwback — a linchpin connecting
Jamland’s past to a hardier sonic strain that draws on blues, metal,
funk, and even Afro-Cuban roots without getting fancy or wussy about it.
His importance to the culture that made Bonnaroo last year’s most
influential music festival is reflected by his summer schedule. After he
finishes the current Gov’t Mule tour and an album with the band’s new
line-up, which includes co-founding drummer Matt Abts, keyboardist Danny
Louis, and new bassist Andy Hess, he’ll tour with both the Allman
Brothers, which he first joined in 1995, and with the reincarnated Dead.

But at the Palladium back on February 21, the business was all Mule,
more or less. The trouble was in the cover-heavy mix of music. When
Gov’t Mule arrived as a trio 10 years ago, they played a blend of daring
originals like the jazz-fueled "Trane" and heavyweights like "Rockin’
Horse" along with epic covers like bluesman Son House’s "Grinnin’ in
Your Face." It was all dipped in psychedelia. Each number opened wide
for instrumental jams led by Haynes’s sophisticated guitar thunder — a
strain of from-the-hip blues painted in shades of oscillating tones and
jerked in odd directions by a playful instinct for unpredictable chord
resolutions and leaps between major and minor keys and turn-arounds that
cancelled subscription to any rule but impulse. It put Haynes somewhere
in the middle ground between Living Coloür ax man Vernon Reid’s
explosiveness and the quiet genius of Ornette Coleman sideman Bern Nix.

That changed after the drug-related death of charter bassist Allen Woody
in 2000. Musicians’ admiration for Haynes was confirmed by The Deep End
Volume 1 (ATO) and its sequel, two single discs that teamed the
surviving Mules with some of the best low-end string thumpers around
including Jack Bruce, Bootsy Collins, John Entwistle, Phil Lesh, Les
Claypool, and, well, just about everyone but current bassist Hess.
Haynes wrote a wealth of new material for those discs, but plenty of
jamming that didn’t go down on CD took place. And since covers are the
bridge through which musicians can most easily access their universal
language, they were the coal that fired these sessions.

That experience seems to have transformed the Gov’t Mule who played the
Palladium and who appear on the recent two-CD-plus-DVD set The Deepest
End (ATO) — which features those bassists and a host of other guests
including saxman Karl Denson and New Orleans’s Dirty Dozen Brass Band —
into something of a bar band who play nearly as many covers as homemade
numbers. Sure, Haynes and company can deliver the goods every time,
whether stretching their chops over their own "Blind Man in the Dark" or
Hendrix’s "Voodoo Chile," but after a while their classic-rock-radio
repertoire of tunes by the Beatles, Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin, and even
Rufus with Chaka Khan becomes wearying. There can be such a thing as too
much melody, especially when the turns of each tune are textbook. Give
me Haynes’s nasty "Bad Little Doggie" over the Beatles’ "She Said, She
Said" any day — at least on Gov’t Mule’s stage.

Even the exploratory playing in Worcester rarely tore away from rote
melodic forms. Maybe Haynes’s time with the Allmans, who still build
charming cloud castles of melody from twined guitar, has also smoothed
his edgy instincts. Still, Haynes and Gov’t Mule have learned something
that keeps even their predictable efforts appealing. It’s a sonic secret
they share, improbably, with the late Mark Sandman, founder of Morphine,
that Sandman dubbed "low rock." Haynes rarely takes his guitar out of
the deep end, and the band stay right there with him, creating a sound
that somehow crawls right into the human pleasure zone. It’s tough, yet
warm and soothing enough to land on receptive listeners like summer
rain. That sound’s Pied Piper effect makes it easy to forgive the band’s
new-found lack of excess and get behind the Mule.

Issue Date: March 12 - 18, 2004