Live with Gov't Mule
GibsonBass I really like the live albums that you've done and again there's a difference, you've got the Live At The Roseland Ballroom and the Live With A Little Help From Our Friends (Vols. 1 and 2), they represent different sides of the band with the latter using guest musicians in the set. Would you say though that The Roseland Ballroom captures the band as it started out, a power trio?
Warren Haynes Yeah Roseland is a pretty good snapshot of where we were at the time. We were still a new band at that point and we didn't have a very big repertoire, we weren't able to play as different a set list as we would eventually be able to do because we didn't know very many songs but that's a good moment in time for us. We didn't go into it thinking we were recording it, it was kind of a last minute decision and it was a one hour set so it turned out pretty cool. The reason that we opened with Trane at Roseland Ballroom was because we were the opening act and Blues Traveller was the headliner and when we went on there were very few people in the building and so as we were playing people were pouring in to Roseland and so we just wanted to start out with something that we could warm up on and that we would kind of be jamming as people came in to the room. It was just kind of a theory that we decided to try because we weren't the opening act very often, we didn't do that very many times. We just decided to try that and in hindsight in turned out to be some sort of dramatic statement or something because we opened with an eighteen minute instrumental
GibsonBass That's a great record though
Warren Haynes It's a very cool record, the reason we decided to put it out was because it was a very concise picture of what Gov't Mule was doing at the time, it was only sixty minutes long but it was well performed. We felt like we walked off stage feeling like we had played a good show and it happened to be on tape and we were at a point in our career were we felt like it was important to put something live out so we decided to that. There's an interesting story behind the bass sound on that record though. When Michael Barbiero and myself went in to mix that record, when we pulled up the fader for the DI on the bass it was too distorted, there was digital distortion and we couldn't use the direct sound so we were using what we thought was just the close mic on the bass speaker and we eventually discovered that it wasn't the close mic on the bass speaker it was Allen Woody's vocal mic, that the close mic on the bass speaker didn't make it to tape at all so the only bass sound that we were able to salvage for that record was Woody's vocal mic and we happened to be set up very tightly because we were the opening act and so his vocal mic was very close to his amp and picking up a lot of the sound and of course his amp was so loud there was tons of it in the vocal. That's the only way we could make that record work because there was no bass channels so to speak and we didn't discover that until we were actually listening to Don't Step On the Grass Sam where Woody was singing background and all of a sudden this voice comes in very loud and we're like oh my god this is the vocal mic, this is Woody's vocal mic so Michael just EQ'd it in a way and compressed it very heavily so when the vocal came in it wasn't disturbingly loud and that's the bass sound for that record and people to this day go how did you guys get such a great bass sound on that record. There's no DI and no close mic it's mic'd from about six feet way
GibsonBass That's really quite impressive. Maybe i'll try micing from a bit further away.
Warren Haynes Well it's a little more old school but when you think back to a lot of the early rock bass sounds that we were talking about that's the way they mic'd the bass from a little further away than people would mic it these days so it had more air around it, more ambience around it and in a trio once again you can hear that ambience because there's so much space there
GibsonBass It was certainly was a great band and he's sadly missed. I just wish there was more live footage of the band from that era. Bootlegs obviously circulate but do you think anythng may be officially released?
Warren Haynes Well the only stuff that exists is not greatly filmed. There's one particular show that's filmed fairly well but by today's standards not really that well and we're trying to acquire the rights to it and at some point maybe we could put it out but there's very little good video footage from that era unfortunately. I as well would like to see something surface and there's also some stuff from the tour we did in Brazil that's ok but getting the rights to that stuff can be really tough
GibsonBass I guess that's another hurdle to overcome
Warren Haynes Yeah but ideally I love to see some of that stuff surface and it's unfortunate that his instructional video has probably the best footage of us jamming, as limited as it is
Go to part 4 - Allen Woody bass style | Check out the Gov't Mule website | Other GibsonBass interviews
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