Slant - A recent review of the new CD "Dose" described it as "Sludge Rock". How would you respond to that kind of label?

Haynes - I don't know...we laugh about it, but we've even thought of having T-shirts that said "Sludge...beyond grunge". I said this goes beyond grunge to something that might be called sludge.

Slant - I like that!

Haynes - I think it's kind of funny. The guy that reviewed us for Rolling Stone this time was not a fan of the type of music we play. It doesn't really make much sense to me that that person would review the record. Our first record was reviewed by Rolling Stone and given a stellar rating and I think everybody agrees that the new record is a much better record that the first record, Although we're very proud of the first record, we've become a lot better band since then. So it's kinda odd that the same publication would rave about our first record and then kind of...they didn't really slam the new record. He acted liked he liked it in some ways but I don't think he likes the overall premise of it.

Slant - It's kinda weird sometimes, we have the same problem here with the paper in Orlando. It seems like they always send someone who doesn't like the music to review it.

Haynes - You see, that's odd to me. If you don't like the type of music, don't review it. Let somebody else do it!

Slant - Dose was released quite a bit later than it was finished. I guess it was finished last year and not released until just a couple of months ago.

Haynes - Yeah, we finished it in June and then our original goal was to put it out in September. But we didn't meet all the deadlines with all the other kind of non musical things that have to be done. Mixing and mastering and artwork in order to have it out in September. You have to have three months from the time you're done with everything till you can put it out and if you miss September, its kind of best to wait until February cause October, November, December, January are not the best months to put out a band like us. Cause especially the end of the year is when all the superstars are putting out their records and you don't want to get washed away in that whole thing.

Slant - They try to get in for the Grammys right at the end of the year.

Haynes - And for Christmas, they want all those Christmas sales. And then January, nobody has any money (laughing) so nobody wants to put a record out cause nobody is buying. So February seemed like the best slot to us. You know, even if it meant us kinda sitting on it a while, which is a little frustrating cause you go, " Well God, we changed this now, maybe we could go back an redo it." you know.

Slant - You had some unusual artwork throughout the booklet in the new CD.

Haynes - Yeah...that's due to us having so much time on our hands, you know, because we did have so much time from the time it was out from when it had to be in the stores, we had a little more time to mess with the art. That's a first for us. Usually the record's done and you're rushing to get the artwork done. This time we actually had some breathing room and had time to play and have fun with it.

Slant - You have a lot of runes in there. Is there any significance to them?

Haynes - They're from alchemy, and our art director Christopher Manning, who did an amazing job on the package, he chose the runes. He chose some of them for their meaning and some of them just for their visual impact, just for the way they look. Like the one that represents Thelonius Beck looks like music. We kind of chose that one for that reason. But some of them have actual meanings behind them and you can go back and study them and go "this relates to that" and that kind of stuff. Each symbol applies to a song. There's eleven symbols and there's eleven songs and each symbol is somehow part of the artwork and it's applied to each song.

Slant - Most of your shows are taped by the fans. I've heard some of them and they are great. This is direct opposite to a lot of the bands who do everything they can to prevent taping. How do you perceive the taping. Is it just a way to kill bootlegs?

Haynes - Well, not really, although it does do that to an extent. I think it's a way of spreading the word to a different type of audience. You know, in the same way that the Grateful Dead did and all the bands that we mentioned earlier, coincidentally all allow taping and in fact encourage taping. We set up little taper sections, so you get there early, you set up your microphones, your DAT or your cassette. I don't think it hurts record sales at all. I think in the way that if someone's a fan of your band, they're gonna buy your records, but they also want stuff that's not available commercially. Then I think one of the spokesman for Phish recently said that as large as that whole scene has gotten now, that they credit it for reaching more people with their type of music than radio and MTV combined.

Slant - I haven't heard a single one of your songs on the radio down here.

Haynes - Well we're starting to get air play and actually more so than ever but it's not because we're compromising our music. I guess because in some ways people are catching up to what we are doing and starting to warm up to us. You know we're not a band that writes songs for the radio. Actually very few of the songs are less than six minutes. We have to go in, if they request a song for the radio, and then we have to figure out a way of editing it...where it...kinda doesn't chop the tune up to bad, you know. It's nice to see radio, you know, finally going, "hey we're gonna play you guys," which is a nice thing, but again that's not our design. I've always felt it's kinda backwards to try and second guess what people want to hear. It makes much more sense to us to just make the kinda music and build an audience around it and hopefully...eventually the word will spread and enough people will be into it and people take notice in the industry, and radio and places like that. But all the bands like Blues Traveler, when they finally got radio acceptance and MTV acceptance, it was because they had been around and growing and getting bigger, and their fan base had been getting bigger and bigger, till a time that they eventually couldn't be ignored any longer.

Slant - Does it affect your performance when you know every show is being taped by the fans?

Haynes - Well it affects it in a way that we want every show to be entirely different than it was the night before. And that's not just for the audience but for ourselves too, I mean, if there was no one in the audience, we still wouldn't want to get up and play the same songs every night you know. (laughing)

Slant - I heard that you are going to be doing a song on the Creedence Clearwater Tribute CD.

Haynes - We're talking about it yeah. We're hoping that it works out. They asked us about doing a song, but we but we haven't agreed on a song yet. There are a few that we're looking at but we haven't made a decision, but we're excited about the possibility. We all love those guys and figure it would be a great tribute.

Slant - Do you see any possibility with being confined, stylistically at all? It seems like you guys are pretty diverse.

Haynes - Well I think we try everything possible to avoid being confined stylistically. We have so many different influences and they all emerge somehow in our music. And the more albums we do, the more our influences will come to the forefront. The new record is the most diverse thing we've done, and we're already starting to think about the next record and which directions to explore with it. You know, it's nice to be able to convey all these different directions as part of your music. Again, we're just influenced by so many types of music, but they're all, for the most part, American art forms. We're just trying to create something that's hopefully unique from a lot of ingredients which have been around for a long time.

Slant - What are your thoughts on the uniqueness of the strong bond between the band members and their fans?

Haynes - Well I think the type of music we play and the type of people we are and the type of people we attract. All those things are inter-related. And it's not pretentious music. It's very organic music and the people that come to our shows have that organic quality in common with the band. You know we're...we're just all about hanging out and having a good time and playing music and listening to music and into being a good vibe, you know. It's hard, the larger scale you do that on, the harder it becomes, but it's really important to us that...that we maintain that kind of vibe cause of all the experiences we've had through the years. It's really weird when the band is entirely severed from the crowd...and it's a hard thing to...to gauge how much energy is coming from the crowd. The crowd is responsible for a large part of the energy on stage. You know we play entirely differently in front of an audience that we would play if we were just in an empty room.

Slant - I think you can tell that from the difference between the studio CD's and your live CD's.

Haynes - Yeah...without a doubt. You know we're definitely more at home on a live stage, but we try to make the studio environment as much like the live environment as possible...in the way that we set up like we're doing a performance. The new record we did with no headphones, all of us set up in a room, playing together in close proximity, just as it we were doing a show. And that kind of setup doesn't allow for some of the conveniences of modern recording, punching in and out and replacing mistakes.

Slant - It's a hell of a lot more real!

Haynes - A lot more real, and more like people did it in the old days like when Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding were making records. That's the way those records were made. If you got a performance and there was some magic on the performance, you didn't question any of the faults that might co-exist...you just kinda let it be what it is. I think that's what real music is about.

Slant - I appreciate music that's live. A lot of times, I really rather listen to something where a guy isn't perfect, but he is really out there doing his thing!

Haynes - Definitely, I think...whoever used the word perfection in the same sentence as music, you know...music has never been to be about perfection, it's about emotion, and there's nothing perfect about emotion. Really, all three of us agree that the best the music can be...is very emotional and as little...cerebral analysis as possible. You can go nit pick all this stuff and go, "Well, I didn't really play this part the way I wanted to...and this note's a little flat and...", but none of that stuff really matters in the long run if you got a magic performance. There's never gonna be a completely perfect take of anything and you just have to accept that and go with the overall vibe. So for us our way of doing that is just like jumping in with both feet and saying "OK...here it is, it's completely live, mistakes and all and yeah, we could have fixed it but it would have been for the worse I think."

Slant - It's the old deal..."if you make a mistake, do it three times and call it a riff" type of thing.

Haynes - Yeah, that's the whole Miles Davis philosophy...make that mistake three times in a row and it's part of the song.

Slant - Yeah, I like listening to you guys...You will start a song, wander off into a bunch of teases from a bunch of different songs, and wander back. I really enjoy that...I think it's really cool. I like when you throw in some Mountain riffs. That's one of my favorite bands.

Haynes - Us too...and a lot of the kids in the audience may or may not know of Mountain, or a lot of the bands that we quote. In the course of an evening, we may do fifteen or twenty bands' different little quotes and some of them go unnoticed and some of them don't. But people talk and go, "What was that" or " I think I've heard that before" and they go, "Oh yeah...that's from such and such" and they go check out the record and see how it's similar to or different to the way we were doing it. You know, it's turning people onto music that influenced us.

Slant - Assume an offer came to play anywhere you wanted with all expenses paid. Where would you choose to play.

Haynes - Hawaii would be nice. It always seems to be a difficult place to get to. It's so far away and so hard to get to...that not many bands play there. I guess there's places all over the world that we would love to play. We're trying to work out a Japanese tour now and there's some parts of Europe that we're looking forward to touring. But it's not always feasible in the scheme of reality.

Slant - I have a friend up in Canada that's disappointed that you only play Montreal and Toronto.

Haynes - We did Montreal for the first time on this tour, we'd never been there before and we're trying to work out Vancouver, which hopefully will work out for the next one. We have plans to do Canadian stuff as well. We're friends with this band called Big Sugar who opens for us in the states and we're trying to do a thing where we open for them in Canada cause they're like a platinum band in Canada. We're trying to help each other in that way so we're trying to work out a tour where we can go up there and open for Big Sugar in Canada and just have loads of fun.

Slant - Your album is only out in the states right now?

Haynes - It comes out April 1st in Canada and June 1st in Japan. Other than that, it's only out in the states except as an import in other parts of the world. We're working on it a piece at a time.

Slant - Are you guys going to allow taping at the House of Blues?

Haynes - The House Of Blues is a little weird in the way they don't allow video taping or cameras, but we pretty much allow audio taping anywhere we go.

Slant - One of the fans said that when you were out in California, you played this funky bluesy version of "Come Together".

Haynes - Actually with Tim Reynolds, who is a guy that was an opening act. Tim is an amazing guitar player who was opening our tour. I would come out and play the last couple of songs with him and we did "Come Together" four or five times...in a way as a tribute to Michael Hedges who had just passed away and had a great acoustic version of that song. It just kinda happened in an unspoken way. Tim started playing it one night. We didn't even talk about it...we just started playing it...we were both big Michael Hedges fans.

Slant - Do you guys get on the internet at all?

Haynes - We have like stacks of it sent to us and stuff. We don't go on-line, cause we're too computer illiterate. We're scared to get into the real world. (laughing) But they print out big stacks of it and we check it out on the bus and stuff.

Slant - At least the EMULERS (Internet fan club) can know that you read the stuff on the internet that they write.

Haynes - Yeah...and we are sometimes influenced by some of the opinions.

Slant - There's been a lot of word on the net about putting "Suffer" on the next CD. When is the next CD coming out?

Haynes - We're gonna start working on the new CD as soon as possible. Probably when we finish touring this year and..."Suffer" is definitely a priority. That song, I would say will definitely be on the next record. We were hoping to put it on the new record but there was some complications that kinda kept us from doing that and we had so much material to choose from that we made the decision accordingly. We're very excited, especially now, it's kinda grown...kinda grown into itself. We've been playing that song for some time, but only in the past six months or so has it really taken the shape it's in now and we're very excited about it.

Slant - Are you planning on releasing any live CD's or is this a back burner type of thing?

Haynes - There's talk about it. Maybe some live CD's with some special guests. We're still in the talking stages right now but it is something that we're interested in doing.

Slant - Any solo work coming up?

Haynes - I may do a few solo acoustic shows in the down time and eventually I would like to put out a solo record although I'm not in a big hurry. We're all very consumed with Gov't Mule right now. Maybe even an acoustic oriented record. I did a lot of acoustic shows, just me and a guitar, and some of them were recorded to multitrack tape. In theory, I could release that kind of a record, which has been in the back of my mind for quite some time cause it's so totally different. It's a different side of me than whets on record.

Slant - I have one of your solo records...."Tales of Ordinary Madness".

Haynes - Well that's only the real solo record that I made...which was made in 92 and out in 93. You know I do want to do another solo record, but it would be entirely different than that record. There's a lot of stuff that we're talking about. I think the big priority is the next Gov't Mule record right now.

Slant - I really like that format. I've always enjoyed power trios and I really like that type of sound.

Haynes - Thank you....Us too....I mean...and not many people were doing it. That's one of the things that led to us gravitating towards it...is that nobody does that kind of thing anymore.....you know a trio that's improvisational in rock music. It's something we're very excited about too. If you have the right chemistry you can explore so many directions. That's what we're into at the moment.

Slant - Well it seems a lot more interesting than the depressed women that hate men on the radio right now.

Haynes - (laughing) Yeah..you know someone was asking me earlier about that....I think we're just so inundated with that type of music right now, the same as we did with grunge and with alternative music. Usually when you get such a flood of any type of music, people get sick of it and want something else and I think that's what's starting to happen now. Unfortunately it's always a good forerunner that's on the cutting edge that creates this type of vibe and all these copy cat bands come in behind them and ruin it. That's what's happening and in a way....it's what happened with quote unquote "southern rock". There was a lot of great music coming out of the south in the seventies and then there got to be so many like imitators that it eventually destroyed itself.

Murf Murphy Murf is a registered professional engineer....(i.e. haircut and a real job) who loves to play guitar. Vist Murf's home page. He lives with (1) wife who wishes he would grow up, (1) teenager who wonders how his parents got to this point in their lives without his help, (2) dogs who sleep a lot, (1) ferret who attacks when not looking and (1) cat who is basically useless. Other Articles I've Written