The Core: Gov’t Mule
Warren Haynes captures the spirit of his band’s 25th anniversary with the new live album and Danny Clinch-directed concert film, Bring On The Music.
Life Before Insanity
Danny Clinch and I have known each other for close to 30 years. Before Gov’t Mule even formed, he photographed Dickey Betts and me for the cover of Guitar World and, not too long after that, he did all the photography for the first Mule record, including the front cover with a mule draped in an American flag. He actually rented a mule and dragged it into Central Park to get that shot.
He did all the photos for most of our early records, and we’ve been talking about doing a film together for the past several years. I’ve watched his career expand with all the different projects that he’s been involved in and, whenever we’d be hanging out, we’d always discuss making that film.
Danny and I have played together three or four times as well—his love of blues is one of the things that we’ve bonded over. We’re always listening to some cool, obscure stuff. That’s just icing on the cake— he’s obviously a wonderful photographer and a wonderful film director, and the fact that he plays music is a nice bonus.
In the last few years, with the thought that Gov’t Mule’s 25th anniversary was coming up, we just said, “We really need to make this happen.” He was the right choice to direct it, and [Port Chester, N.Y.’s] The Capitol Theatre was the right choice for where we should shoot it.
Uncharted Paths
We shot Bring On The Music: Live at The Capitol Theatre over two nights in April 2018. [Relix publisher and Capitol Theatre proprietor] Pete Shapiro and I met when he took over Wetlands in ‘96. When I first came to New York City in ‘89, Wetlands was a staple that a lot of people in our scene would hang out at and, eventually, perform at. And we’ve done many projects in the interim. My first Cap experience was seeing The Rolling Stones there before it closed down for what they would call a “club gig” in ‘97. [Laughs.] The history of that place is so great, and when you’re backstage—just wandering around—there are all these wonderful photos and posters that give you a sense of the history of the Capitol. [The decision to tell some of the Mule backstory during the concert film] developed pretty organically. Danny may be a little more methodical than I am, but my recollection of it was that, each time we talked, more things would come up, and we just kind of whittled it down to what seemed to make the most sense.
I wanted to make sure that we included something from each era of Gov’t Mule and each studio record. But I also wanted to include some obscure stuff that isn’t on a previous live release and pull out some songs that we hadn’t played much during the last few years, like “Life Before Insanity,” “Far Away” and “Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother.” And I only wanted to include improv-oriented staples—like “Blind Man in the Dark,” “Mule” and “Rockin’ Horse”—if they were different versions than on a previous live release. Hopefully, we went down a path that we had never gone down before—“Blind Man in the Dark” is completely different than any other version we’ve ever done, but we wound up not including “Rockin’ Horse” because I didn’t feel like we accomplished that.
There are only six songs that we didn’t include from the six hours of music we recorded. And the songs that wound up not being included were usually for technical reasons. On one song, my guitar was really out of tune—to the point that it would’ve annoyed me. On another song, we rehearsed a new arrangement that we totally screwed up. [Laughs.] At first, we weren’t going to use as much music as we ended up using, but the more we dived into everything, the more we felt like including. So the hardcore fans who get the deluxe version will get five-anda-half hours of music over two CDs and two DVDs.
Come Back
I was also cognizant of the fact that none of our live releases have anything from [our recent albums] Shout!, By a Thread or Revolution Come…Revolution Go so, obviously, we wanted to do a little bit more from those three records. I wanted to do as few covers as possible, but I did want to do one new cover, so we rehearsed Pearl Jam’s “Come Back” that afternoon and played it that night under the notion that, if it didn’t turn out well, then we didn’t have to use it. And I ended up being very happy with it. I heard that song on Pearl Jam’s SiriusXM channel while skimming through satellite radio and wasn’t familiar with it. The first thing that occurred to me was, “This sounds like Eddie Vedder writing an Otis Redding song.” It’s very much a soul song or an R&B song. Timeline-wise, I am not sure if it came on my radar before Danny and I started talking, but I wanted to do something we had never done. It also may have crossed my mind that Danny has worked so closely with Pearl Jam.
Bound to Cover a Little More Ground
As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, we’re keeping some of the songs that we pulled out intentionally for those two nights at the Capitol in our setlist, and we’re digging up some other old stuff that we haven’t played in a while. I’ve got a running list of some songs that I want to revisit and a few covers we’ve never done that I want to do at some point. Recently, I’ve been enjoying doing fewer covers, just peppering them in here and there, though I have a few unexpected ones that I’d like to do in the future. At this point, we have so much to choose from in terms of studio albums and we’ve covered a lot of ground stylistically.
I’m always trying to find a balance over the course of a long show—not only between the different musical directions, but also between these different tempos. We also want to achieve a balance between song-oriented songs and improv-oriented songs, major and minor keys, and different melodic concepts and influences.
When I am writing a setlist, I look at what we played the last time—sometimes the last two times—we were in a certain area. I want to make sure it’s as different from that as possible and that it’s also different from last night’s show and the show the night before that. A lot of it is based on what the venue feels like and what songs will sound good there and make a connection with the audience. Sometimes, I’ll make some changes after the soundcheck just based on getting a different read on the venue itself. If it’s a city we’ve never played, then we have a completely clean slate, and if it’s a city we haven’t played in a long time, then I want to make sure to do a little bit of everything. And, in Europe, people tend to be a little less precious about how often we are changing the setlist. We’re also pulling out some Allman Brothers songs a little more often than in the past, based on the obvious fact that the Allman Brothers Band is no longer touring. It seems to be a little more appropriate these days. I enjoy doing them and I know the audience really likes it.
Future Mule Tracks
I am not sure which is going to happen next, but I’ve been writing a lot of songs that could be Mule songs and I’ve also been writing a bunch of songs that could be solo-project songs. They’re two different batches of tunes—the solo stuff I’ve been writing mostly seems to be somewhere in between [the soul-oriented] Man in Motion and [the acoustic-driven Appalachian sound of] Ashes and Dust. I don’t know what the first Mule record post-25 years is going to be, but I know it’ll revisit the past a little bit and also go somewhere that we’ve never gone before. Our mission is finding a balance between those two things.
I’ve been writing some instrumentals that I’m excited about at the moment. It’s been a while since Gov’t Mule has had some new instrumental music, but it’s been there from the first record, with “Trane” and “Dolphineus.” We did “Thelonious Beck” and “Birth of the Mule” on the second record, and then the third record went away from that, maybe to avoid a pattern. We’ve accumulated so many instrumental pieces over the years that we have a lot to choose from, but I like the fact that the ones that I’m working on now are completely different.
This article originally appeared in the October/November 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more subscribe below.
