Guitarist Plays Multiple Roles

As a member of the busy Allman Brothers Band, Phil Lesh and Friends and Gov’t Mule, guitarist-singer Warren Haynes easily qualifies as one of the hardest-working men in rock.

Given a personality to match his enormous talent, it’s easy to see why he’s in such demand.

But just last year, Haynes’ musical future was uncertain. In August 2000 he lost his bassist and musical soul mate, Allen Woody, with whom he formed Gov’t Mule (with drummer Matt Abts) in 1994. The pair also helped rejuvenate the Allman Brothers Band in 1989.

At the time, he hadn’t rejoined the Allmans yet, and Phil and Friends was more a revolving door than the cohesive band of (former Grateful Dead bassist) Lesh, guitarists Haynes and Jimmy Herring, keyboardist Rob Barraco and drummer John Molo.

“At first I think Matt and I felt that was the end of the band,” Haynes says. “Gov’t Mule was based on the chemistry the three of us had as a trio, and we didn’t feel we could move forward.”

Replacing Woody, who essentially served as the other half of Haynes’ heartbeat for more than a decade, wasn’t something he thought he could do.

“Woody and I had developed this rapport musically by playing together for 12 years. We could look at each other and know what the other was going to do,” he says. “The rapport we built together 1,000 shows later is something that you can’t even imagine unless you’ve played with someone for that length of time. He was an instinctual player and was very good at following the soloist. That’s not really something you can learn.”

But the phones started ringing. Members of Metallica, Blues Traveler, the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers were telling Haynes that they’d lost bandmates and that it was important to continue pushing the music forward.

“There were a lot of people that have gone through similar things,” he says. “You tend to think you’re by yourself in that situation, but you realize that you’re not.”

Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools offered his talents for touring. At the same time, another idea was brewing. Whenever someone in the Mule office would ask Haynes who he’d like to play bass for the next album, he’d jokingly respond, “Jack Bruce for this song, Chris Squire for that song.”

All of that came true, and then some. “The Deep End Vol. 1,” released a few weeks ago, features Haynes and Abts with an astonishing roster of bassists (Bruce, Bootsy Collins, John Entwistle, Mike Gordon of Phish, Roger Glover of Deep Purple and Flea, among others) and other guest musicians.

Vol. 2, to be delivered in the spring, will feature bass lines from Lesh, Les Claypool, Schools and George Porter Jr. of the Meters.

“We were extremely surprised on how many ‘yeses’ we got,” Haynes says of what is perhaps the greatest roster of bass players to appear on a single project. “We made this big long list, and we were apprehensive in the beginning because we didn’t want to be constantly turned down. We wound up getting two CDs’ worth of material.”

In addition to steady touring with Gov’t Mule (Schools and Allman’s bassist Oteil Burbridge have been sharing the load), Haynes has rejoined the Allmans to replace fired founder Dickey Betts, and has become a full-time member of Lesh’s post-Grateful Dead band.

The heavy workload means wearing different hats. In the Allmans, for instance, he is teamed with young phenom Derek Trucks, also a stunning slide guitarist. Along with his work mentality, Haynes is known for his adaptability and views the differences between his groups as a boon.

*

“In the Allman Brothers it’s more of a soloist in the traditional sense; all improvisation is musical conversation.... With the Allman Brothers it’s one person taking charge of the instrumental section,” Haynes says. “Phil likes it to be musical conversation all the time. It’s kind of like a Dixieland approach to psychedelic rock, blues, folk and jazz. There’s never a time when you know what the other person is going to do.”

The current lineup of Phil Lesh and Friends formed last fall and changed Lesh’s approach of mixing up his roster for every tour. The group pulls heavily from the Grateful Dead repertoire but reinterprets the material Lesh helped make famous--and around which a counterculture formed.

Haynes was a singer before he ever picked up a guitar and was initially enamored of soul and R&B.; He began playing guitar at age 12. “I started singing at a really early age,” he says. “At that time I was really in love with Motown and Memphis, and that led me to Sly and the Family Stone, which was a bridge that led me to Cream and Jimi Hendrix.”

His first big break came when he was hired by outlaw country singer David Allan Coe. He stayed with Coe from 1980 to 1984 and made important contacts with Betts and Gregg Allman. When Haynes moved to Nashville, both Betts and Allman tapped his services for solo projects. In 1989 he was asked to participate in the Allman Brothers Band reunion in the coveted slide guitar slot originated by Duane Allman, one of his primary influences. The spirit Haynes and Woody injected into the then-struggling Allmans wasn’t lost on anyone, and the group again became a leading concert draw.

*

Ray Hogan writes for the Stamford Advocate, a Tribune company.