Guest Book

HEADLINE: MORE POWER, SAME IMPROVISATIONAL SPIRIT By Sean Piccoli Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel The phrase "power trio" fit Gov't Mule perfectly: Here was a three-piece band that made weighty but agile music in the manner of Cream and Mountain. But singer-guitarist Warren Haynes and his mates were more than a '90s homage to the '60s. Gov't Mule extended the trio dynamic into the heaviest realms of blues, rock, funk and soul, and improvised like a jazz band. A decade later, that well-grounded versatility carries through to the latest Mule variations. But "trio" no longer applies. Gov't Mule has just released High & Mighty (ATO Records), its second album of new songs as a four-piece ensemble. Granted, "power quartet" doesn't have the same ring, but the addition of a keyboard player hasn't deprived the band of its muscle. It's just allowed Gov't Mule room to grow. "I don't want to ever deliver a record that's exactly what people expect from us," Haynes said in a recent interview. Haynes said his favorite tracks on any Gov't Mule album are what he calls "indications," meaning songs that signal new interests and future changes in direction. On High & Mighty, the examples he cited were Unring the Bell ("very much reggae-influenced, more than anything we've done"), Nothing Again ("an alternative country song with a rock band performing") and So Weak, So Strong ( "very different from anything we've done in the past"). "I think each record you can see the band painting in colors that they didn't paint in on the record before," he said, adding that these new colors are often old influences that just take time to surface. "You can't portray your entire musical history in one album or five albums," Haynes said. "It's a gradual process for all of those [influences] to come to the forefront." Circumstances also forced change on the band. Bass player Allen Woody, who co-founded Gov't Mule in 1994 with Haynes and drummer Matt Abts, died of a heart attack in 2000. Haynes and Abts considered shelving the project, which had begun as a side project to the work Haynes and Woody were doing in the resurrected Allman Brothers Band. Instead, they recorded with several bass players and released the results on a pair of CDs, Deep End, volumes one and two. They found they had especially good chemistry with a session bassist named Andy Hess, who signed on as Woody's successor. It wasn't a given that Gov't Mule would remain a trio. "Before Allen Woody passed away we were already writing material that needed a larger ensemble," Haynes said. So the addition of keyboard player Danny Louis made sense given the band's direction, even if it somehow altered the primal beauty of the power trio -- a format that Haynes did not consider sacrosanct. "It was never in our minds that that's where we wanted to stay forever," he said. "There are certain hardcore fans that, in their hearts, probably would have preferred that we stayed where we were, but that was never an issue for us." There is still a core vocabulary running through the newest music: the convergence of guitar, bass and drums; the improvisational spirit; and Haynes' husky voice. "All of my favorite rock singers were rock singers emulating soul singers," he said, citing Lowell George (Little Feat), Steve Winwood (Spencer Davis Group, Traffic) and Haynes' former band mate Gregg Allman. Haynes just doesn't want to be caught impersonating himself. "The new lineup has grown so much over the last two years," he said, "and I do look at it in some ways as a whole different band." Sean Piccoli can be reached at spiccoli@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4832.