As Widespread Panic prepares to kicks off its 25th Anniversary next month, today we revisit a challenging moment in the band’s history, as this article from September 2006 looks at the period following the loss of co-founder Mike Houser_

Widespread Panic isn’t the first band to have lost a founding member in its prime – Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool in 1969, bassist Cliff Burton perished in a bus accident while Metallica were on tour in Sweden in 1987, Who drummer Keith Moon choked on his own vomit and three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd died in the second most famous plane crash in rock history. Rock ‘n’ roll is a hazardous business, and while some outfits are able to reconfigure their aesthetic, their outlook and their very sound, others aren’t.

While a whole new future beckons, to a man, Widespread Panic is still haunted by their friend. So haunted that his presence loomed large no matter what we talked about: whether it was the band’s tour, new album, or guitarist George McConnell, everything seemed measured against the spirit of Michael Houser. It’s very likely the reason McConnell’s four-year tenure with the band came to a close was because his straight ahead, R&B-infused rock was so radically different from Houser’s Byzantine noodling. Perhaps their rather obsessive need to talk about their fallen brother was a mass purging, in order to fully move forward, or a recognition that it isn’t easy to leave behind a piece of yourself, especially when it’s been a part of you for over 20 years, in the case of founding members John Bell and Dave Schools. Then again, some people never get over the loss. More than 30 years after the death of his brother, Gregg Allman is still lamenting Duane: “That’s something you just never get used to.” Lynyrd Skynrd still take Ronnie Van Zant’s flat black hat with them from show to show, and before Van Zant’s brother, Johnny, began singing the words to “Freebird,” they would only do it as an instrumental with Ronnie’s hat perched atop the mic stand. But to its great credit, the band has been able to prove that even without the help of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, they were able to put Widespread Panic back together again, but with one caveat. While it sounds much the same as the old Panic, it’s an entirely different beast. Less unruly, a little more assured and without the raging unpredictability that was at its core. When Houser was alive, you could expect anything at all – it was like hearing whales sing on a good night. Disconcerting, but always utterly surprising.

But nothing so surprising as a mere four days after turning in this story and finding out that George McConnell had suddenly left the band following Panic’s July 30 show at The Fox Theatre in St. Louis. It gives some of McConnell’s statements a rather prescient spin, especially what he says about Jimmy Herring, since Herring has been tapped as the new guitarist beginning this fall. With the old saw about the clarity of hindsight it is now easy to see some of the things I thought of as just inner-band tensions as indicators of something deeper – that McConnell’s crack-playing would always be dwarfed by the specter of a ghost – he just didn’t play like Mikey. “You know, it’s a continuing process, and really I think he got the gig more just because he’s someone that we felt good about,” explained Dave Schools when we spoke several weeks ago for this piece prior to McConnell’s departure. “I gave him some advice that I picked up when I took over for Allen Woody, after he died, with Gov’t Mule. I just said there’s three ways to look at the material you’re trying to learn. And one is, there are certain things that are signature licks that need to be basically copied exactly. And then there’s a larger slice of the material where you pay respect to the idea and the intent of what he played, but there’s a little wiggle room for you to inject yourself. And then the other part is, and hopefully it grows, is where you step in and apply your own values to something. And it’s small at first – but you try to. Hopefully you fit in and you write new material, and that becomes the thing. But that first part is the hard one to get, sort of drawing that line of distinction. Because that’s really, it’s for the fans. And if you knew the person well – like Alan and I were dangerous running partners and I got out before he did, and the rest is history – it’s easier. For me, finding those signature parts was really easy because I knew him, and there’s no wiggle room there.” But apparently after four years with Panic, there was less wiggle room than even George McConnell thought. Even his wife seemed to sense that. “It’ll last as long as it lasts,” she explained sanguinely at the Berkeley show. What is key is that it couldn’t have been as amicable an ending as the band press release would lead us to believe given that the guitarist left nine days from the end of the summer swing, returning to his Oxford, Mississippi home. “My old man always warns me all the time, he’s says: ‘Don’t let the McConnell in you come out,’” said the guitarist at the close of our interview at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, explaining how he is inclined to react when backed into a corner. In this case he was talking about some “semifamous guitar players telling me they deserve the job [in Panic] instead of me.”

“You mean your temper flares?” I asked.
“Yeah, just telling someone, ‘Fuck you, I’ll show you.’ It’s part of the McConnell in me, as my old man says.”

I suspect that was what allowed him to leave the tour in a huff. And also the part that caused him not to return our calls, despite our myriad attempts to allow for his side of the story given that we’ve included an addendum with John Bell’s comments on the situation. We literally stopped the presses to accommodate the rapidly changing universe of Widespread Panic. But adding insult to injury is being replaced by the man who seemed to be dogging his heels, and someone that he names out in his interview, as you’ll read in the later parts of this piece. But what could be more rock ‘n’ roll than a conflagration like this?

What you’ll read next is the story that came out of interviews with the band three weeks prior to McConnell’s departure and two days before we were to go to press…
You can never underestimate the power of a name. Did Michael Houser know when he dubbed this second-wave, thinking man’s jamband after his own nickname for anxiety attacks that he would put his compatriots into their own panic 16 years later? Doctors will tell you that most sufferers report a fear of dying, going crazy or losing control of emotions and behavior, but while one in 60 people suffer such attacks, not all of them expire at an early age. Some do. But compounded with his reluctance to see a doctor, well, it just seems that it had to indicate something. “I never go to doctors,” Houser told a reporter in 2000. “I just don’t want to hear what they’re going to tell me.”

“That’s just a guy thing,” says percussionist Sunny Ortiz a little too quickly and just this side of dismissively, following the band’s rather truncated soundcheck at Berkeley’s Greek Theater, a perfect half-circle carved into the side of the East Bay Hills overlooking the hazy azure of San Francisco Bay. While an idyllic spot, this jewel-like venue is only a mile from the San Andreas Fault, a scar in the earth’s crust that threatens to erupt with a daunting regularity. One night before a full moon on this too warm July evening, the night seems filled with portent and rough magic. But that’s just the way Widespread Panic likes it. The band’s only guiding rule is “expect the unexpected.”

Ortiz pauses a moment as if deciding whether to go on about his fallen bandmate or not, adjusting his expression, so not to give anything away – subtly shape-shifting from the genial Sunny – who earned his nickname back in high school for the perpetual smile on his face, the result of copious LSD use – to a more complicated man, whose eyes become hard black stones if he’s being asked to subvert the band’s carefully tended group-think, which currently is that they’re back on course and the past is, well, the past.

Their decision to reintroduce some of Houser’s songs into the set, while painful at first, was a mutual decision. “It’s our past, too, we couldn’t ignore the songs forever,” says Bell. “Some of the songs were very personal to Mikey so it’s hard for me to jump in and ride that. It was easy to sonically provide a harmony and sing along because I could participate without having to apply myself to the imagery as much, in some songs. But the ones that we’re playing again, those are ones that I feel comfortable being able to explore. Songs like ‘Ain’t Life Grand’ and ‘Porch Song.’ ‘Vacation’ is kind of personal on Mikey’s part, but it’s a lot of fun and it was there since the very beginning and it feels kinda universal, so we decided to do that one, too.” By rights, most of the band’s mourning is behind them. They have a new album, Earth to America, which is filled with hope, redemption and the certainty of a creative and even spiritual rebirth indicated from the very first song, “Second Skin.” But despite the two tours since the guitarist’s death, four live albums and two studio albums, and a stage show that lifts off from the third song, you just don’t get the sense that Michael Houser is ever very far from this band’s thoughts, or very far at all. Dematerialized perhaps, but Houser has not left the building.

Ortiz looks down at the wood-wormed wood slats on the backstage deck for perhaps a minute too long, before continuing. This time, so quietly that one has to bend forward to pick up the soft words that threaten to float away on the stiff breeze that just picked up, hurling dust motes, dried flower petals, old setlists and good intentions over the backstage deck, like an impish ghost. “Well, I do think he had the sense that something was wrong for awhile,” says the musician, who looks at least a decade younger than his 53 years. Concern still knits his smooth brow, like it was yesterday, instead of almost four years since Houser died, and he rather unnervingly speaks – like all of his compatriots – of Houser in the present tense. “When I worked on Door Harp, his solo album, there seemed to be something wrong. We’d meet at his house around midnight, and he’d complain about how much his back was always hurting. Finally, I said, ‘Man, go have a check. Just go have a check, you know?’ He said he thought he had overexerted himself by playing basketball with his son,Waker. And so he said, ‘Oh, you know, it’ll work itself out,’ but he always complained so I didn’t push him. Finally he had it checked and then it was just like – that was it.”

But even so, drummer Todd Nance indicates that the seeds of Houser’s fragility existed long before his tenure in Panic. “Mike was never the healthiest of people,” reveals Nance, Houser’s high school pal and co-conspirator in any number of escapades that led to the guitarist ending up in local Chattanooga hospitals. “We used to have to go to the emergency room a lot. We’d go for the panic attacks mostly, but every now and then the occasional physical thing, jumping out of the car going too fast or something like that. The two of us used to get in so much trouble together when we were young, I was always surprised that my mom actually gave Mike my phone number when he called looking for a drummer back in 1986. I hadn’t seen him since ‘81. So I was surprised she even gave him my phone number because we were, well, let’s just say we didn’t play good together.”

Play together? That seems an odd term to describe two almost grown men. “Well, we got in trouble together. First time either of us was ever arrested was together for loitering and drinking under age. But, yeah, I guess it was kind of strange that that phone call from Mike came out of the blue. I hadn’t played in two years, I was living in a condominium and I couldn’t make noise.”

Perhaps of all of the band members, Nance has had the hardest time reconciling the loss of his friend. After all, they were in a band together, and while they didn’t go to the same East Tennessee high school, they certainly spent a lot of time with one another. He twitches in his chair, tugging at the bill of his baseball cap, before answering. It’s doubly hard to lose a band member, but more so one that pulled him out of his civilian life in Atlanta, where he was working for an agency called Husbands for Hire, doing repair and handyman work, that is, when he wasn’t taking photographs for Owen Mills, the company that takes almost every single graduation and baby photo in America. "Michael and I, we learned music together so we were kind of just dialed in with one another.We wrote a lot of the songs together when we were in high school; we’d rather do that than just cover songs. There were a lot of changes in them, so I was used to that. That made it pretty easy for me to play with this band. He actually kept a couple songs that we attempted to write back then, which were pretty embarrassing. I hope [Houser’s wife] Barbette’s got those put far away.

“But it’s more than just the songs. It still feels like he’s around. When we rehearse songs and stuff that we haven’t played in a long time and we’ll go back and listen to them, I hear him play, and so, yeah, he’s backstage with us every day now,” he says, almost defiantly.
“He sort of visits me, you know?” says Schools, a little sheepishly, not a state of being that you associate with a guy who looks like he was pealed right off a Black Sabbath tour, with his long perfect heavy metal hair, black, seditious clothing and lumbering, authoritative bass style. Certainly someone who is much too pragmatic to believe in… gulp… ghosts. “There wasn’t a day that, there’s still not a day that goes by where I don’t at least think about him. You know, certain times he’s visited me in dreams. When we were recording Ball, there were some phantom sounds that didn’t go to tape, but while we’re doing a take, we’re all kind of going, ‘What the hell?’ And sometimes onstage even, it’s like there’s a tonality that, like, cannot be made by any one of us onstage that comes through, and maybe we’re the only ones who hear it. Or maybe I’m the only one who can hear it,” he trails off.
“Or maybe it’s like Derek Trucks,” he adds. “You know, people who knew Duane Allman swear that Derek is really Duane. Maybe Mikey is being born somewhere right now.”

But whether he is or not, the band certainly is. Since his death, they’ve done whatever they could to stay intact. First by honoring the guitarist’s wish that they allow him to finish out as much of the 2002 tour, and then to keep touring after his death, if only to prove Isaac Newton’s first theory of motion: “A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force.” The only thing that would have derailed them was their grief. “It’s like there’s a little bit of trying to outrun the pain. I’ve seen certain pieces of something like survivor’s guilt when we kept touring after he died. It’s very difficult. I mean everybody kind of did their own thing to mourn him. I’m not sure whether we should have taken the time off then orkept going. Never having the chance to properly really mourn Mikey, it could be damaging. So I guess that’s why we continue to do it.”

And so do fans. They lament his passing with a rigidity and fierceness that they have taken out on his replacement, George McConnell. According to the guitarist, for the past four years he’s been getting hate mail, death threats or more directly, fans show up at the shows holding up hand-scrawled signs and planting themselves right in front of the guitarist.

“I am the most hated man in the jam world,” says McConnell with a short bite of a laugh. “They hold signs that say: ‘Dude, you aren’t Mikey and you’ll never be Mikey’ – just into real asinine, very childish things – to flat out ‘You suck.’ ‘What are you doing in this band? You shouldn’t be in this band.’” But who should? Were there any other contenders for the spot? “I heard they asked both Jimmy Herring and Derek Trucks,” says the tall, austere Mississippi native a little too quickly. But it was clear that McConnell was the right man for the job.

Or was he? “We don’t know if he’s the right guy for the job,” explains Ortiz. That’s a sad thing. You know, it’s tough because our critics are the folks that are out there. I mean it’s easy for us, because we’re going, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, feel that togetherness. Everyone was on the same page. Everyone was out there to have a good time, including us. That’s our biggest thing. Even from the beginning when we first started playing, our main focus was to have a good time, drink beers and everything else. The only thing that is different is now we drink wine."

And they drink a lot of wine, expensive, deep, soulful red wines, that they buy in copious amounts from a local San Francisco store in the tiny Fillmore district. “If I could categorize what they buy, it’s full-bodied reds,” says Denise Johnson from the Napa Valley Wine Exchange. She’s a guest of the band at the show for her six or so years of excellent service, helping the band’s manager and percussionist pick out the hidden gems from the Sonoma and Napa regions. When Ortiz spots Johnson backstage he gives her a hug. “We set up a wine-tasting downstairs,” he tells her, gesturing his right hand toward the netherworlds in the warren of anterooms beneath the stage. The two continue discussing a wine that she brought him that security wouldn’t let her bring in. Immediately Ortiz dispatches one of the road crew to go fetch it. Meanwhile I slip downstairs to witness their ad hoc tasting. Sure enough, on a Butler’s table is an array of fruit, cheese and glasses set out with military precision. Behind are a dozen or so bottles of Napa’s finest. “Would you like a glass of wine,” offers John Bell, pouring himself a glass of merlot from a side table before folding his now-lean frame into a rather patrician-looking sofa with a low center of gravity. “If our new album was a wine it would be a Cabernet, dark and smooth,” he laughs, taking another healthy sip.

Talking about full-bodied, Bell gained over 30 pounds in the 15 months that the band took off in 2005. That was his time to come to terms with what had happened in his band.

“Personally, I numbed out a little bit afterwards. We still had a business to run, to put it bluntly, with a lot of people behind the scenes that make their living being a part of what we’re doing. It didn’t feel right to just stop right after Mikey died. It was almost like we should keep going because it just felt like that was the right thing to do for so many reasons. And not to get out of touch with what you were doing, because we didn’t know what it would be like coming back if we’d taken our year off right then.We had planned to take that year off even before Mikey announced that he was ill. And so that was a long time coming. But then we were like, ‘Nah, this isn’t the right time either, to take the time off.’ But then it was. What did I do? I ate a lot. I mean, I’d just sit there and cook and eat and I wouldn’t say I was in a state of denial but I was letting the process move through me slowly. And I gained about 30 pounds while I was doing it.”

Bell is an affable man, or so he’d like you to believe.Wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball jersey and baggy jeans, he’s a cross between a Confederate general and Kris Kristofferson. The singer/guitarist and co-founder of Widespread Panic attempts to lull the listener into placidness – if not with libation – than with his combination of earnest New Age platitudes, chaos theory and sports analogies, but beneath that seems a cold banked anger, and some very stringent boundaries about what he will and will not tolerate.

While he says that the band is a total democracy, other band members insist the buck stops with Bell. It was his idea to split the publishing at the very onset of their career, despite protests from Houser. “Yeah, I knew that would be good for all of us. And we had R.E.M.‘s example. Mikey didn’t see it that way at first, but eventually he did. And it’s worked out for the best,” explains Bell.

Sitting in this backroom, designated by a small hand-lettered sign that says “Wives,” he exudes a Zen-like calm in the half-light, the only source of illumination a small table lamp across the room and a flickering orange candle. The illumination certainly isn’t coming from Bell. Like Mandrake, the fabled comic book magician, John Bell has the ability to cloud men’s minds. Slippery as a fast-moving fish, the singer darts and dodges from fixing himself to a single point, unwilling to even say what ties all the band’s song together.

“I think I’m reluctant to tell you, like, what always seems to pop up for me, because who knows, that could change, and I’m not really comfortable with folks thinking that, oh, that’s the way it is. Or that’s what’s going to be expected of me, or that’s how I identify myself. Because it is open to just fluctuation. But I do notice that in the music, what pops up are kind of like dreams. They’re like little dreams that you have when you fall asleep, and either it’s obvious to you that that’s something your subconscious has been working on, or there’s maybe a secret in there that’s yet to wholly reveal itself to you. And sometimes it’s just nonsense, and you’re like, ‘Wow, glad I woke up.’”

He just woke up, but I’m the one rubbing my eyes.Wait, what did he just say? Blame it on the poor light source, but the deep grooves and web of wrinkles in Bell’s face seem to converge in a single point that looks like a Third Eye, and it’s rather unnerving to say the least. But what is most unnerving is watching him veer from subject to subject, trying to throw observers and fans off the scent of where he is at any single moment. It’s all open to change. And then there’s a matter of the ever present red voodoo doll that always accompanies the band onstage. “I once picked up the doll, and the guys said, ‘Put that down George, that’s some heavy gris-gris,’” explains McConnell. “I put it down right away.”

‘It sounds great.’ It seems like it’s working. But, you know, people are finicky. Our fans are finicky. Believe it or not, as fucked up as some people can be, they really do pay attention, and you have to respect that. And we’re guilty of not taking care of our fans.

As for McConnell, he still feels a little embattled not only by the fans, but his peers. “I’ve had other guitar players come up and tell me that they should be in this band instead of me.”

“Really?”
“Oh, hell yeah. Some semi-famous guitar players that a lot of people know very well flat out have said that. “I never, ever thought that I was there to replace him,” drawls the lanky musician, who friends describe as being shaped like a question mark. And hunched over his guitar, with a cigarette stuck into its head like a modern day Slash, they’re right. But it’s not only his shape; his whole future was called into question the day he got a call from keyboardist Jo Jo Hermann asking if he would join the tour in spring 2002. Though many have said this, during those last shows, including a performance at Bonnaroo on June 22, 2002, McConnell says Houser played each note as if it was his last. "There was this finality too, and it is one of those things, every last note you played mattered.

Even the audience members were going, ‘Man, he looks great. He’s playing his ass off, he’s doing super.‘" But he wasn’t. In less than six weeks he was gone. While the common belief has been that Houser anointed his replacement, that’s just not so. "Nobody ever said this, and this is probably in my own mind, but I just felt like I was the specter of the grim reaper sitting in the corner with my guitar instead of a sickle, and Mikey’s looking over, like, going, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m about to die and this guy’s going to come take over.’ No one ever said that, but that’s how I felt. Mikey was nice to me, but we didn’t talk at all, unfortunately. And I think it’s a misconception that people think that we really hung out and he showed me a lot of songs. He was too ill.

“Mikey didn’t choose me. I really think it was the other band members. I really think in Mikey’s mind, he fully thought that he was going to finish out that tour. No ifs, ands or buts about it. And I think he was – I don’t know when, what they decided or if they ever decided it with Mikey. I’m not sure if Mikey even knew about me taking over.”

“I think none of us wanted to believe that he was actually going to go,” says Ortiz. “He knew he was going to, but we were going, like, ‘It won’t happen. Something will come up.’ And it was just like a roller coaster ride those last few months.”

Now it’s a whole other kind of ride. Smoother, more accepting, different. For one thing, McConnell plays nothing like his predecessor. His rock touchstones are players like Steve Cropper, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, with a liberal dose of first-wave punk: New York Dolls, The Clash and The Sex Pistols, and his guitar attack is more aggressive and measured, and less subtle than his predecessor’s playing. And then he doesn’t take as many risks. And that’s something necessary for Panic to sound like well, Panic.

“The one thing that people always get wrong about us is that they think that we’re the Grateful Dead, when we’re really the Led Zeppelin of the jamband world,” explains Nance.
“With Panic it’s all about the song itself, and the jam part just came as a consequence of just having fun playing a good song,” agrees McConnell. "It’s kinda like Led Zeppelin when they play something that they’ve written in the studio, then when it gets live it would become this big monster thing with a drum solo. But then you could just as easily say that they’re really Black Sabbath. As I understand, Mikey was a big Black Sabbath freak, and real into heavy music and stuff.
“Mostly they tell me not to try to be Mikey, but to just be myself. It’s never anything about notes, but more in terms of style. Get heavy, drive this part. Lay back on this part, or we want it to go to a crescendo and then drop off to – bam! – silence. What we’re shooting for in the song. Whether it happens or not, you know doesn’t really matter. “I guess the thing that bothers me, and the thing that I’m first of all most concerned about, is making the guys in the band happy playing music. Because the last thing they want to do is be an oldies review of themselves,” says McConnell.

But to their credit, the Panic members are not living in the past. Nor do they want to. “The only thing that I’m afraid of is where we’ve been and how it mightaffect us in the future,” explains Dave Schools. "I think our fans know thatthere’s sort of a continuing evolutionary trend, and that it would be unhealthy for us to be stuck in some kind of rut, and I think we recognize that to a certain extent, too. But I think my biggest fear was – are they going to forget us while we’re gone? I wasn’t worried about the chemistry of the band because we’ve taken six months off, or whatever, and it’s like riding a bike.

Once we get together, it might be glorious slop, but the feeling is always there between the six of us." Ortiz agrees. "The whole persona of the stage I think exemplifies how we present ourselves on the stage. I think people can feel that energy. They can “J.B. is not like the rest of us you know,” explains one intimate. “He believes in past lives and magic. And books.”

Commendable in some quarters, but it seems the bigger piece of the puzzle is his commitment to constant transformation, whether it’s never playing the same set twice to ordering the same meal at a favorite restaurant. Hell, he doesn’t even like to stick to the written lyrics in one of the band’s songs.

“The lyrics are always open to amendment,” he admits. “I think it’s about letting the song play you, and I don’t think that should be restricted to just the way we go about it with our instruments. Why not just take off lyrically, too? If there are new images popping in your head or all of a sudden the characters are doing a different dance that day, then that’s kind of fun to just report on,” he explains, his half-moon eyes narrowing in the low light.
“I always think of Widespread Panic as a work in progress. It’s like, about back to any final destination, you’re always this morphing organism, you know? In a state of becoming, but there really never seems like an end destination. I mean, if there’s any intention or goal, that is our goal. It’s not to create this one piece of art and then, okay, there it is. It’s like you just keep creating on that same piece of art, because it never feels finished anyway.”

Part of that urge for restless reinvention meant not hiring longtime producer John Keane to produce their latest album, Earth to America. Instead, the band hired Terry Manning, a Stax production alumnus and engineer for bands such as Jason & The Scorchers, George Thorogood and The Destroyers, Joe Cocker, Joe Walsh, Johnny Winter, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Molly Hatchet.

But despite not having Keane onboard, the album is an honest look at what the band has gone through, as well as a bold declaration that they plan to prevail no matter what. “Goodpeople” is autobiographical, assertive and upbeat, giving fans an unstinting look at where the band is, from the first line: “We are the good people your friends told you about.” And they are. One thing that everyone comments about is this band’s likeability factor. “We all like each other for sure,” says Ortiz. “If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.” “I want to know where all the jerks are,” says Panic’s lighting avatar,

Candace Brightman, who previously worked as the Grateful Dead’s longtime lighting technician. “Everyone is so nice, it makes me sick – there’s no one topick on.” “I’m sure John Keane didn’t take it personally,” posits Bell. “It was just business. And he’s here now.” Indicating that their erstwhile producer is showing up at important shows like May’s concert at Atlanta’s Fox Theater and these two Berkeley gigs.
“I think we were really shits to John Keane,” says Ortiz. “Sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot,” “Not because we want to, but certain situations have arisen. The changing of record companies. I guess that’s how it all starts. And then with the passing of Mikey, it kind of set us back a few years. Because we’re just like small fish in a big ocean, you know? Not just the jamband world, but the whole music genre. The big fish are Radiohead and Pearl Jam. We feel like we’re not anywhere close to where we’re enriching to anyone, except for ourselves. And maybe that’s why people kind of get off to us – because they can feel like there’s no pretense.”

But the important thing is not the remembering, but what’s ahead. To continue to make their art. To never anticipate the end. “Even though times are changing for us, we feel like it’s never going to stop for us. There’s always going to be something on the other side of this. If that battle means that we’re going to be fighting upstream, then we’re going to fight upstream till the bitter end. And a lot of people talk that with Mikey’s passing away, that that was it for us. The battle was over. There’s no more, there’s nothing to live for. And we felt that way for a short while, but like, what are we going to do? This is what we do. And we plan to do it to the bitter end,” says Ortiz. “Or at least until the wine runs out.”