WHEN GOV'T MULE arrives in Las Vegas on Friday, the improvisational rock quartet will be in the midst of a two-month swing through the West and select Southern cities. The jaunt also serves as a sort of victory tour for the band. On March 16, Gov't Mule captured two Jammies, one for best live album and another for top show of the year, at the fourth annual Jamm awards, honoring the best improv bands. "I had a great time," says Warren Haynes, Mule's lead singer and guitarist. "I thought it turned out really nice."
For the ubiquitous Haynes, the night was simply a good start for what promises to be a full schedule through the summer. On June 12 in Bonnaroo, Tennessee, Gov't Mule plays its last show of the tour. Later that day, Haynes will play his own solo set at the festival, and then join the reconstituted Grateful Dead, now known as just The Dead, on stage, continuing with them for the rest of their tour.
Haynes is in such demand for his muscular but refined mode of guitar playing (pronounced "gee-tar" in the South), that he has developed as a member of the Allman Bros., starting in 1989. "I was a huge Allman Bros. fan growing up," Haynes says. "I grew up in North Carolina and the Allman Bros. were one of my favorite bands growing up. To 20 years later find myself in the band was pretty amazing."
Bassist Allen Woody joined the Bros. that same year, and he and Haynes remained steadfast friends until Woody's death in 2000. But before that, in the mid '90s, the two younger Bros. seized on their musical chemistry and formed Gov't Mule to explore music in ways which the tight strictures of the Allman Bros. would not allow.
The new band chiefly served as another creative outlet for the tireless performer. "I've always needed that," says Haynes, who did a solo album in 1993, Tales of Ordinary Madness, prior to Gov't Mule. "I write a lot of music and some of it fits into the Allman Bros. style and some doesn't. Some of it doesn't even fit into Gov't Mule style. But I definitely need that outlet to take things into a different direction."
With all the avenues, Haynes still manages to stay firmly footed in the Allman Bros. style of soulful rock. "Although we have a lot of similar influences, there are a lot of different ones, too," he explains. These differences seem informed by his early taste in music, developed as he began his performing career.
"I started out as a singer, very influenced by soul singers like Otis Redding, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, the Temptations and the Four Tops," he says. "When I heard Sly and the Family Stone, it helped build a bridge to rock 'n' roll music. And then when I heard Cream and Hendrix, that's what made me want to play guitar."
In Gov't Mule, all of Haynes' preferences are assimilated under the umbrella of improvisation. "When I was growing up, all bands improvised so it's nothing new to me," he says. "There's just a category, jam bands, to identify all who do that. For us, it's nothing different than we've always done. My favorite form of musical expression is improvisation, so I would never be happy without that in my life."
Like the Allman Bros.' extended live renditions of songs, much of Gov't Mule's music is fleshed out and reformed on the road. "There are some things you're capable of in front of an audience that you're not capable of elsewhere," Haynes says.
While Haynes is a co-conspirator in The Dead, he resists any comparison of Gov't Mule to the mother of all jam bands. "We don't really sound much like the Grateful Dead, we're more of a rock band," he says. "Maybe too many bands in the jam band world follow that one blueprint. Maybe more of them need to be influenced by other directions."