Warren Haynes Story/Interview from Rolling Stone

[Jaimoe]

Warren Haynes Gets Around

The most-wanted man in jam-band rock

This is a rare day for guitarist Warren Haynes: a day off at home. He won't get many this year. "Easily less than a hundred," he says in a husky drawl on a recent afternoon in his Lower Manhattan apartment. "And when you add travel days and rehearsals . . ." He sinks into his chair with comic exhaustion, as if he's too tired to do the math.

A few days earlier, the Asheville, North Carolina, native --the hardest-working man in the jam-band business -- finished the second of two tours he's done since January with his power-blues band Gov't Mule. In a week, he will be in California practicing with the Dead for a summer's worth of shows, his first as an official member. On a lot of those dates, Haynes is the opening act, too, as a solo singer-songwriter. Then there are Mule gigs in the fall to support the group's new studio album, plus forty or so shows that Haynes will play as one of the twin-guitar pillars of the Allman Brothers Band.

Even when he's home, Haynes is working. In March, during the Allmans' two-week spring residency at New York's Beacon Theatre, he commuted to the venue each night from a local studio where he labored on the Gov't Mule record. "There are a lot worse things than music taking up most of your life," says Haynes, 44, who also plays in Phil Lesh and Friends, the psychedelic-repertory combo led by the Dead's bassist. "To be with one band forever is more taxing than jumping back and forth. Repetition dulls you out. This keeps me sane."

"He's strong at a lot of things," says Derek Trucks, Haynes' guitar partner in the Allmans. "That's why he's in these bands. The Dead need a vocalist, the Allmans need a songwriter and second vocalist as well as a guitarist. Yet Warren is playing himself. That's what you go for as a guitarist: Find your own voice and play in it with everybody."

A soft-spoken bear of a man with long, sandy-brown hair and big, meaty hands, Haynes is a devout guitar traditionalist. The dirty bellow of his Les Paul and his high-wire improvising are descended from the heavy-Seventies lightning of early heroes such as Duane Allman, Eric Clapton and Mountain's Leslie West. Haynes notes that he started Gov't Mule in 1994 with fellow Allmans member, bassist Allen Woody and drummer Matt Abts after a night with Woody on the Allmans tour bus listening to Cream and Jimi Hendrix records: "Woody said, 'Why doesn't anybody do that anymore? Why is there no improvisational trio?' That was the impetus -- to jam a lot."

But Haynes is also a determined modernist. His new acoustic album, Live at Bonnaroo (taped at the festival last year), includes covers of Radiohead's "Lucky" and U2's "One." Haynes' own songs, such as "Soulshine" and "Patchwork Quilt," a requiem for Jerry Garcia, are adroit blends of blues heat, Sixties R&B anguish and country grace, the last refined during a spell in Nashville in the 1980s as a writer-for-hire and session singer. He still gets "nice checks," he says, for co-writing Garth Brooks' 1991 hit "Two of a Kind, Workin' on a Full House." "One thing I can't get behind," Haynes says flatly, "is endless jamming with no song."

Even when he steps up to solo in established terrain, such as the Allmans' catalog, Haynes is his own man. He says that after he first joined the group, in 1989, taking the late Duane Allman's spot next to original guitarist Dickey Betts, "I would sprinkle in thoughts I know came from the Fillmore East album. In 'Statesboro Blues,' you play the Duane licks. It's heresy not to. But I took the long solos in a different direction, shaking them up in note selection, phrasing and tone." Ironically, after leaving the Allmans in 1997 to focus on Gov't Mule, Haynes replaced the dismissed Betts in 2002. "I feel I have to inject some of Dickey back into the music, which is a strange dichotomy."

Haynes got his professional start at twenty as a sideman for country singer David Allan Coe but traces his voracious musical appetite back to his two older brothers, record collectors who tutored him in the best jazz, blues and late-Sixties rock. His work ethic, he suggests, probably comes from his father, Edward. "After my parents divorced, he'd call and wake me up for school -- he was already at work," he says. "Then I wouldn't see him until ten at night. He worked all day to provide a better life for us."

Abts has seen that same sense of mission since he and Haynes first played together in the Dickey Betts Band in the late Eighties. "Warren gets tired and hungry, like we all do," Abts says. "But when everybody else is burnt and a problem arises, he stands up and gets right back in it."

The greatest test of Haynes' fortitude came with Woody's sudden death in August 2000, shortly after the release of Gov't Mule's third album, Life Before Insanity. "It took me a while to consider starting over," Haynes confesses. "But then it dawned on me: The only reason I knew Woody was because the Allmans continued after losing Duane and [bassist] Berry Oakley." For two years, Haynes and Abts toured and recorded with A-list bassmen such as Dave Schools of Widespread Panic and Primus' Les Claypool before settling on the current lineup with bassist Andy Hess and keyboardist Danny Louis.

Haynes admits that he sometimes feels overwhelmed by his good fortune and the stuffed calendar that comes with it. His wife and manager, Stefani Scamardo, "is the one fitting all this stuff together," he says with a big sigh of thanks. "I'll throw up my hands: 'There's no way I can do this.' She'll say, 'Let's work on it.' Next thing I know, things are working out that I would have given up on.

"But the more you play, the better you get," Haynes insists. "The point you're trying not to reach is the one where you don't enjoy it anymore. I've never come close."

David Fricke

[Booche]

He is a hall of fame quarterback.................

Its that simple.