Georgia's Widespread Panic brakes for a while

After 25 years of almost nonstop touring and recording, Georgia's Widespread Panic is putting on the brakes for a while. The hard-working jam band is playing a final series of dates this fall before going on hiatus next year, which means the band's show at the Fillmore Detroit on Friday will be its last in the area for quite a while.

Widespread Panic's marathon, improvisation-filled concerts garnered the sextet well-deserved comparisons to the Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers and Phish, with audience members free to tape the performances. That cool, liberal attitude toward concert taping might have cost the group a lot of revenue, but it sure helped build a bond with the audience. The Southern rockers actually have significant Midwestern roots -- lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist John Bell was born and raised in Cleveland and put together Widespread Panic after he left Ohio to attend the University of Georgia.

Bell heard a lot of Motown while growing up in Cleveland because the strong signal of CKLW-AM (800) carried especially well across Lake Erie at night. "That's what I fell asleep to for years," Bell says. "I was subliminally absorbing those rhythms and harmonies, and thank God that's what I was listening to."

Answer: You know, we've been together 25 years and we're just taking a little time off to refresh our batteries. We're a little older now and have families, and they've been pretty good about watching us grow up from afar.

This is a natural, healthy thing to do, like a vacation but on a larger scale. We're doing 33 shows on this fall leg (of the tour), and officially we are finished after a run in Mexico at the end of January.

That's the beauty of it; you don't think that far ahead (about the hiatus). I'll just wake up one morning and know I don't have to think about Widespread Panic duties for a year.

Q: Are you having any feelings of nostalgia as you travel from city to city on this tour, knowing you won't be visiting these places again for quite some time?

A: No! You check back with us when we're 70 and we'll answer that question. We're grateful and we don't take it for granted. Being together this long and having a viable career isn't an easy thing, but we're just focusing on playing the shows well.

Q: Your band is well-known for not playing the same show twice, shaking up and changing your set lists from night to night. How did that first come about?

A: We started out with a handful of tunes and while we were playing, somebody would hint at the next song to play. We'd roll right into it without stopping, and later on as we got more tunes and started making set lists, it seemed just natural to keep them varied or else we'd go bananas. You'd become more like an advertisement trying to craft and play the same exact set list in 30 cities. That never even crossed our minds.

It's a bigger risk to jump into the bucket every night and see what you pull out. It's a way to keep the sense of adventure about your stage experience and hopefully that translates into being excited about the music.

A: It's even harder now to make a living now that the whole framework of the music industry continues to crumble and be rebuilt, but the taping (policy) is grandfathered in with us. When we started in the mid to late '80s we played shows for two years before we got our first record contract. We were touring all that time and were honored and humbled that anyone would want to do that, make a cassette tape of you playing songs for two or three hours. The positive thing that came back to us was that they would share tapes of us with their friends, and that theoretically would help us on return trips, make us a little more successful every time.

But record company guys got freaked out about the idea, 'cause that activity was eating into record sales. We just didn't give in on the idea of audience taping, because they'd been doing it so long and it wasn't their fault we went corporate. So you fast-forward to today and it's instant file-sharing, although there are fewer tapers now than there used to be. The quality is still questionable, but we let it happen.

It's kind of a drag 'cause it bites into what we're doing, but to view it as a positive, it motivates us to offer recordings through our system. We make recordings available a day after a show for a nominal fee. So all of a sudden we're in the game too, just trying to ride the wave of technology. It hurts ya, it helps ya, you kind of roll with it. There's no crying in rock 'n' roll.

A: This weekend in Athens, Ga., we're going to do our yearly Tunes for Tots benefit, where we play a smaller venue, about 1,000 people, and it's a grossly overpriced ticket for a good cause. When all is said and done, it raises about ($150,000), and that gets disbursed to between three and five different music programs around the state of Georgia. The money goes to purchase band equipment and uniforms.

That's what's going on in the public school system: The arts are the first programs to be cut. Often schools still have a music program intact, and with a little bit of a boost financially they can keep that running.

That's what we're trying to facilitate, because education should be one of our main focuses overall. Without brain power and creatively thinking human beings being cultivated in this world, we're creating some troubles for ourselves. If schools are a little more fun, you're going to produce some happier, well-rounded folks who are going to take over the world.