The southern United States plays home to a deep bullpen of harpy-shadowed voices telling ancient, gravel-road stories. For whatever reason, southern rock as a musical genre unto itself attracts a great many synthespians – people who accidentally or on purpose feign an understanding of the primordial skirmish within the strings because The Allman Brothers made them want to feel something equally as rustic and spectral. Well-intentioned practitioners of melisma pick up a slide with all the earnestness in the world, but without having slid all the places a soul must in order to really play the blues. It can become a bit of a sartorial performance wherein what was meant to forever feel like spiritual pistols drawn turns into hubris-handbags at dawn. However, Darwinian selection never sleeps and to the top of the passel inevitably rises a potently authentic band such as Gov’t Mule, led by the indescribably brilliant Warren Haynes, a man who was not just there and strumming when southern rock was invented but helped to carve it himself, out of energies still unknown to science.
As longtime guitarist for The Allman Brothers Band in the era after Duane Allman’s untimely and tragic demise, Warren Haynes can decide to play the blues and it automatically means something different. New shades of indigo, cobalt, and azure get born, accompanied by the guarantee that they will all be royal. For legions of unwavering fans across litanies of years now, Gov’t Mule has been making crawfish etouffee out of every expectation. None the corporate embrace for these jongleurs of the southern jungles – and thank the meridional gods for that.
To even marginally attempt to tabulate the entirety of Warren Haynes’ musical contributions over the course of the past four decades would produce a breathing sea scroll longer than the high street in heaven. The man is simply a living master text on American roots, rock, funk, and soul music. With Grammy and genuine legend status long ago in tow, Warren Haynes has consistently turned in incredibly versatile and incomparable guitar work, both acoustic and electric, on his own, with Gov’t Mule, and in innumerable collaborations with the likes of David Allan Coe, The Dickey Betts Band, Phil Lesh, Dave Matthews, Coheed and Cambria, and John Medeski, to list but a tiny few.
His lifelong association with Gibson guitars led to the creation of a limited edition Warren Haynes Les Paul, designed to his specifications and modeled on his signature 1958 instrument of choice. Seminal gigs at Woodstock ‘94, Bonnaroo ‘03, and a slot on Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival Tour bedeck Haynes’ skydog-soaring highlights reel, as does founding and managing Evil Teen Records and having a street named after him in Buncombe County, North Carolina due to his overwhelming support for Habitat for Humanity efforts in the Asheville area where he was raised.
Be certain to understand that the infinitude carried by Haynes’ work with Gov’t Mule is the furthest thing from dynastic musical nepotism, however, but rather the best display we’ve all got of that other mode of knowing that only comes from having survived beyond the lifetimes of so many of your original stringbrothers within an artistic moment. One would also be on a stale trail to imagine that the sheer amount of history Haynes has made and partaken of from center stage would turn him distant or cold by way of its highway rigors. On the contrary, his personality is bright as a button, ever eager to look forward – an envoy of the sun even when culling soul-lessons underneath some considerable blackness.
Heavy Load Blues, out now via Fantasy, marks Gov’t Mule’s 24th album but first blues offering. It is both a paying of respects and a bespoke kind of blues that is truer than the law. Backed by Matt Abts on drums, Jorgen Carlsson on bass, and Danny Louis handling keyboards, additional guitar, and background vocals, Haynes can induce a fresh brand of fortuitous file-swaps in the blues format with these old friends, and also with the ones that live in the songs themselves. True to form, Gov’t Mule goes werewolf on the walls of the traditional blues polis, all while acknowledging in every aural moment what blues has always been solely responsible for teaching the world: the deeper the patina on anything, the greater the cachet.
Recorded to analog tape at Power Station New England, this album sees Haynes producing solos beset by squalls. They come out as long, liquid curses covered in peeling Biohazard stickers and serving as the only fit translator for the shifting messages in the moats Gov’t Mule has so cast and captured here. Always recognized for their trademark ability to throw a spanner into the works of any song, even the making of this album was an exercise in exploring new nowhere intersections and delta heritages for the band.
Lead track “Blues Before Sunrise” dissolves deliciously into the ears like the caramel dousing that makes monkey bread what it is to the tongue. The titular “Heavy Load” sounds like taking a saw-toothed saber to a bottle of rum, shooting the vessel’s entire contents in a single swig, then licking the blade. “Hole In My Soul” has horns doing for the mood what a moiré sky does to mournful Sundays and slinks like a Pink Panther kind of blues, as jazzy and debonair as it is dirty-cool. “Wake Up Dead” inhabits the occult real estate of the prototypal blues murder-threat ballad, Haynes’ charcoal-infused vocal delivery something to inhale deeply and learn from the burn of in your chest. By contrast, “Love Is a Mean Old World” is a tune with a different thread count, Haynes’ voice stippled with a metalized tint here, and slide breaks tying themselves in French knots.
The daystar ditty on Heavy Load Blues is almost certainly “Snatch It Back And Hold It”, a Junior Wells classic. Under the hoof of any government’s best ever mules, it transmogrifies into a swampy swath of undercurrents, full of the kind of licks that allow for no liggers, wild canids in a fretboard forest. Eventually blending with the Hammond B3 organ into some form of stereolithography, this song features an extemporized middle eight that goes on for much more than twelve and that you’ll wish went on for 10 or so more when it does end.
With “Ain’t No Love In the Heart of the City”, ye ole Mule goes a little bit of 1980s Glenn Frey in feel as Haynes sings about the rose rot that suddenly appears on every beautiful thing you once observed when the fuchsia glow of love was still actively changing your perception of the air and architecture. Some mud-mouthed writer who shan’t be named always loves it best when the “f edition” of the word “motherscratcher” appears in the first stanza of any song, and “(Brother Bill) Last Clean Shirt” does not disappoint there or in its demonstrations of the lethal antipathies and dark beatitudes Haynes and Company conjure out of the sonic soup.
“Make It Rain”, borrowed from the impish wonder that is Tom Waits, comes in like a thunderclap, colors crawling on petrol puddles – all gunshine and painbows. Other creative covers include “I Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” by Ann Peebles and a searing salute to Howlin’ Wolf in “I Asked Her For Water (She Gave Me Gasoline,” which speaks in a new way of that song’s inherent love-riven-by-cracks-as-fathomless-as-The-Milwaukee-Depth. The deluxe version of Heavy Load Blues comes with eight additional tracks, including live Haynes originals and retakes of standards by Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, Savoy Brown, and others.
QRO felt Wayne’s World levels of unworthiness when the opportunity arose to spend a few minutes chatting to Warren recently about Heavy Load Blues, the nighttime nature of Howlin’ Wolf, the unique verve of vintage gear, and why the blues – such a venerable art form – makes so much modern sense right now. What follows is a transcription of our best attempts to keep our cool whilst in the digital presence of a slide-wielding southern string-savior like no other.
QRO: Hey there, Warren! Thanks so much for putting the most incredible coda on my week by bringing all of your goodness into my Friday.
Warren Haynes: Oh, it’s my pleasure! Thanks so much for having me.
QRO: I got to see you guys recently at the second night of your annual Mule-a-Ween magic, and it was just extraterrestrial. As a multigenerational, native Atlantan who travels back and forth to Asheville all the time, I’m a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t made it out to one of those earlier as I know you’ve been putting those special shows on for a long time and Gov’t Mule represents such an irreplaceable credit to the American south.
WH: That is extremely kind of you to say, thank you. Yeah, we always do Mule-a-Ween in different places. That was our second time at The Tabernacle for Mule-a-Ween but it’s always fun to do something crazy and thematic.
QRO: Absolutely! I take that approach with all of my birthdays! [laughs]
WH: Good, you should! [laughs]
QRO: I thought it was really symbolic as well that you guys were doing that on the 50-year anniversary of the unforgettable At Fillmore East by The Allman Brothers and we are meeting to talk about all of this the day before Duane’s birthday.
WH: Yes, and the 29th of October is his death date, the night we did Heavy Load Blues. So, there’s a lot of kismet going on there.
QRO: I’m a big fan of kismet! Let’s talk about how it played into the blues infusion you’ve got going on with this latest record. You guys have contributed so very much to the American musical landscape and are frequently (and rightly) referred to as a breathing “encyclopedia” of sound, but Heavy Load Blues is a bit of a departure for Gov’t Mule in the sense of it leaning into that original blues genre more – what precipitated that change for you?
WH: Yeah, for the past five or six years, when someone would ask me in an interview or something, “Is there anything you’ve always wanted to do that you haven’t done yet?”, one of the things would be that I’ve never really done a traditional blues record. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but it always stayed on the backburner until COVID and lockdown and all that. Then, it kind of seemed like the right time, partially because, well, we all had the blues during that time period and are still coming out of the blues now, I think. But also, partially because I had written a handful of blues songs – and I don’t generally write what I consider to be ‘traditional’ blues songs. I had written five or six over that time period and thought, “Well, this is a good time to think about doing that record.”
QRO: The Howlin’ Wolf tune “I Asked Her For Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)” stands out to me because you guys took that in such a different direction than the original that I’m familiar with. Obviously, Gov’t Mule is all about experimentation, improv, and taking things in neat directions, but I thought you guys really blew the barn doors off that one.
WH: That’s the most different from the original of all the covers that we did. The original Howlin’ Wolf version, which came out in 1956, was so eerie-sounding, so dark and heavy. I can imagine somebody hearing that on the radio in 1956; it must have been like hearing Black Sabbath or something like that.
QRO: Well, I was around back then, Warren, and I can tell you it was scary! [laughs]
WH: I bet! [laughs] Wolf, I think, is the heaviest of the blues guys anyway, and I’m a huge fan, so if we were going to do that song we needed to capture the weight and the eeriness of it, but in a completely different way. So, we had this funkier almost Hendrix vibe going on that was the heaviest that we got on this particular album, and, coincidentally, was the first song we recorded for the album. We only did one take. We did that take, we kind of looked at each other after, and we said “Yeah, that’s it. We don’t even have to do that again.” It kind of set the bar to feel like “Okay, we’re off to a good start here.” But we didn’t anticipate anything else on the record being quite so visceral.
There were a lot of guitars I had never recorded, a lot of amps I had never plugged into in the studio, and it was just a really inspiring sort of thing.
QRO: I love knowing that this was the first thing that came out as you guys stepped into this sonic territory. Now, I understand you took a pretty analog approach to this record and did everything on vintage instruments, can you tell us a bit about that?
WH: Yes, I felt like it was a great opportunity for us to go further down that vintage gear path than we ever had. The studio that we recorded in is about an hour and fifteen minutes from my house so we brought a truck to my house and took as much of my old vintage gear, amps, microphones, and guitars as we possibly could into the studio and recorded with a lot of that stuff for the first time ever. There were a lot of guitars I had never recorded, a lot of amps I had never plugged into in the studio, and it was just a really inspiring sort of thing. “Oh, what’s this guitar sound like plugged into this amp, oh, that’s a cool sound, maybe we could use that on this song.” You know, a good way to come out of the pandemic!
QRO: I would say so! I just think you get such a different sense of authenticity from those instruments. I’m a big ‘perform your performance’ versus ‘create your performance’ person, so whenever I go see bands that cannot recreate a studio record on the stage, that’s a different animal to me. As opposed to what you guys do, which is take what is always a fundamentally live experience and make it happen in a studio setting.
WH: Yeah, we are definitely the opposite of what you were just describing in that, when we go into the studio, we are trying to capture what we know we are capable of live. That’s the bar for us. For this record, it was really important for it to sound really different from a typical Gov’t Mule record. Part of that was the way we set up, and all the vintage gear, and being in a tight little room with everybody right on top of each other and recording live with no headphones, that was a big part of it. But also, just the mindset of knowing this is not a typical Gov’t Mule record; we want it to sonically sound different than anything we’ve done, and that made us play differently.
As a guitar player, you respond to your surroundings. You respond to the sound of your guitar, the sound of your amp, what everybody else is playing – you know, that’s what blues and jazz is all about, responding to your environment. So, if your environment is different, you’re going to respond differently, so that was part of it as well.
QRO: It sounds like you’ve created almost the blues dive experience because most of your best blues guys are less about gigs at Carnegie Hall and more about playing some cool, little side-of-the-road place, and that’s why it’s got grit!
WH: Yeah! And late at night. We recorded late at night and I remember Muddy Waters talking about, after he did Hard Again – the first record that Johnny Winter produced for him – he said it was his favorite studio experience because Johnny let him record at night. Prior to that, they always made him record in the daytime.
QRO: And that’s not his time – those guys aren’t supposed to be up before noon!
WH: No! You don’t sing the blues in the daytime! [laughs] And you’ve got to be good and warmed up. So, what we did – because I had been writing so much material – we decided to make two records at once. That meant finding a studio where we could get two different rooms set up – one for the blues and one for the regular Mule setup. We would go in the big room and record Gov’t Mule songs starting about 1 o’clock in the afternoon and going until about 9 o’clock at night. Then, we’d move over into the blues room and record the rest of the night – and we did that every day.
That became the norm and it was a great recipe. It allowed us to shut our brains off and just play blues after a long day of concentration and working on much more complicated material. At the end of the day, it was “let’s just play and capture it on tape.”
QRO: That’s fascinating too, Warren, because don’t you think the blues is all about release anyway? It’s about releasing whatever stresses, emotions, or hardships people have – and you were essentially living its ethos as you were creating its atmosphere.
WH: Absolutely. You are 100% right about that. That’s what the blues is designed for. People say blues is sad music – no, blues is music that makes you feel better when you’re sad.
QRO: Yes! I think it’s human connection music. The guys that scratched that genre out of the dirt came from a hard background. They’d had a load of oppressive factors on their shoulders. Yet, everybody – whether it is Mick Jagger in Britain or Mike Bloomfield doing the Chicago-to-California thing – responds to it. It affects everybody, regardless of their life experience, so I call it “truth music.”
WH: No question!
QRO: I heard a story that I would love for you to corroborate or elaborate on – something about your Fender spring reverb unit having a little moment in “Make It Rain”?
WH: Yeah, I have two of these Fender spring reverb units – actually, one of them is old and one is new. I brought both of them into the studio. One of them is from the 1960s, and it’s a little more finicky and problematic. But I also brought in the new one, which is a reissue, that Billy Gibbons gave me. I probably should have used that one in hindsight, but if I did we wouldn’t have this story!
So, we hooked up my old one from the ‘60s, and they have to be in a really solid environment because if you bump them they make this unbelievable noise. We had it in a very secure environment, but we didn’t predict that there would be radio frequencies setting it off. We started recording “Make It Rain”, and in the middle of the keeper take, it would just start going off and it sounded like thunder – like a rainstorm. We were laughing and when we finished the take I asked our engineer and co-producer, John Paterno, “Can we keep that take?” And he was like, “Oh, we have to keep that take!” Even on the video of us listening back, it sounds like we’re playing in a rainstorm.
QRO: It does! And, on first listen having not heard that story, I thought, “What a cool effect!” Only to find out you hadn’t used any effects; it was just a moment of serendipity!
WH: And we actually toned it down a little bit because when we heard it back in the control room, it was super over-the-top. Maybe, at some point, we could release the original monitor mix of how crazy it really was. We had to work to get it a little toned down!
QRO: That touches on something I definitely wanted to ask you about: these moments in performance that might at first glance be called “error” but later reveal themselves to have been genius masquerading. Have you experienced that a lot in your storied career?
WH: Yes, I’ve learned to be open to that stuff because that’s usually the best stuff. My friend Phil Lesh, from The Grateful Dead, has a saying about that. He talks about how “there are no mistakes, only missed opportunities.”
We want Heavy Load Blues to sonically sound different than anything we’ve done, and that made us play differently.
QRO: I cannot tell you how much I love that saying! It reminds me of my favorite one from Miles Davis: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterward that makes it right or wrong.”
WH: And that’s true! I’m not a big play person, but I did see Jelly’s Last Jam – the Jelly Roll Morton play – and I saw it on Broadway with Gregory Hines playing Jelly Roll Morton. There was this great scene in there where he was a child prodigy, a classical pianist, and he goes into this brothel where there’s a guy playing barrelhouse piano that he’s just making up on the spot. Somebody says, “The kid plays, let him play.” So, he gets up and starts playing a classical piece and somebody yells out, “That ain’t music! It ain’t music if you know what happens next!” That was my favorite moment in the play.
QRO: That’s completely perfect, and I can relate as a writer. I always outline my pieces within an inch of their inky lives, no matter what format I’m writing, but nothing ever follows the outline exactly – and if it did, it wouldn’t be very interesting to read at all.
WH: I agree totally. As a writer, I try to allow more and more of my stream-of-consciousness stuff to make its way into the process, to filter things less and less, and to always be open to those serendipitous moments in every possible encounter. If you process them accordingly, they’re probably going to be more worthy than what you were thinking of in the beginning.
QRO: That makes me want to ask you how your music comes to you – is it typically lyrics or riffs first?
WH: More often than not, I write lyrics first and music later. I find that it’s easier and more effective for me to take the lyric and decide what mood it needs for music. Having said that, for the past ten years or so, I’ve been doing the reverse a lot – just to not get too much into a pattern. Also, as my friend Gregg Allman would say: “There are as many ways to write a song as there are songs.” You have to be open to whatever.
QRO: In every way, and I think you guys are to be commended for always trying to go in different directions. You don’t rest on your laurels.
WH: I’m a firm believer in pleasing yourself first as an artist. People pick up on that. They know if you’re being true to yourself or if you’re having fun on stage, and people tend to gravitate toward music that they feel is coming from the right place.
QRO: Would that perhaps bleed over into your reasons for covering Tom Waits, because you’ve essentially just described his entire artistic aesthetic and I loved your cover of his song.
WH: Oh, thank you! I’m a huge fan and have been since the ‘70s. I try to take a cue from people that are even more open-minded than I am. I’m pretty open-minded, but when I look at some people – and Tom being a great example – it’s easy to put too much pressure on your art and allow too much worry about what people might think into the process. That’s kind of backward.
People say blues is sad music – no, blues is music that makes you feel better when you’re sad.
There’s that age-old art versus commerce argument about how if you have no audience, you have no art, but at the same time, I think that Gov’t Mule has been so lucky from the very beginning because every decision we’ve made has been based on what we ourselves liked.
QRO: Well, it shows too. You’ve had such a rich, robust career. Are there young bands that have caught your attention as being perhaps the bearers of the kind of torch lit by you, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, and the other southern rock titans?
WH: I think there have been more in the last year or two than there have been in the last ten. I think we’re on the upward part of the sinewave now. There’s this guy, Kingfish, who is really great in the blues world. There’s a young woman named Cerise, a great singer and player, that I really admire. So, there have been some encouraging signs.
QRO: I’m so glad to hear you say it because of course you know that these sounds are my world, and they used to say that rock-n-roll was a young man’s game, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. All of my favorites are well over 50!
WH: Let’s hope that rock-n-roll gets back to being a young man’s game!
I’m a firm believer in pleasing yourself first as an artist. People pick up on that.
QRO: I’m always banging on about how even the young ones I could name are so few and far between that I bet they have never met each other – whereas that’s a big difference from your day, and also my day, when there was an actual scene. The internet has fractured that quite a bit and when we do find these little rock-n-roll nuggets, they tend to be out there on their own!
WH: Yes, you’re exactly right. In the old days, there was very much a community. We try to keep that going in things like Island Exodus that we do at Runaway Bay in Jamaica. It’s a destination event that really brings people together, and we’ve been doing that for 11 or 12 years now.
QRO: You’ve had such a lovely and long career. What is it that keeps you going and what do you love about music?
WH: I can’t imagine a world without music. It’s kind of always been that way for me. Music is one of the few things in life that never hurt anybody and that brings joy to everyone in varying degrees. I’m really, really thankful to the extent that I think I’ve got the best job in the world. I can’t imagine anything else that I’d rather do with my time.
QRO: It’s quite a rare and wonderful dream you are living! Thank you for taking the time to speak to us today. We are all huge, unabashed fans. I’ll definitely see you on the road out there somewhere in 2022!
WH: Sounds great, thank you so much. It’s been really nice talking to you.
