SOUL SURVIVOR
Journeyman blues rocker Warren Haynes returns to his soulful roots with a solid collection of original material inspired by his lifelong love affair with classic soul music. TIM SLATER checks in for Soul Time…
W
arren Haynes’ new LP Man in Motion couldn’t be more appropriately titled. The veteran singer/guitarist is constantly
working, dividing his time between three of the finest rock bands ever to tread the boards: The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead offshoot The Dead and his own project Gov’t Mule. Haynes’ latest album marks a departure from the dependable rootsy blues-rock that is his stock and trade, choosing instead to reflect the heavy influence that soul music played in his music upbringing. “Before I ever heard rock and roll music I listened to soul music” Haynes explains, “I had two older brothers and there was always soul music played at home, from the age of seven I decided that I wanted to try and sing like James Brown! It was several years before I heard people like Jimi Hendrix and Cream, which made me want to play guitar. Once I discovered rock music and discovered the guitar, that soul influence was still there to stay and wasn’t going to go away. That’s the way I learned to sing but you’ve got to remember that in America during the mid 60s soul music was enormously popular, it wasn’t like I was breaking any barriers. Soul music was on the radio, it was on television…it was everywhere.” Rather than deliberately trying to break by
recording a soul album, Haynes says that the tunes themselves began to shape the project. “I had several songs that I’d written that felt like they worked together and they all shared a soul influence,” Haynes explains, “I didn’t deliberately decide to make a record that way but I knew that I didn’t want to make a rock record like Gov’t Mule. I used cleaner guitar sounds and took a different approach and when we got into the studio it really started to take shape.”
Boasting one lone cover version in the shape
of William Bell’s Stax-label classic ‘Every Day is a Holiday’ Man in Motion certainly sounds like a labour of love, skillfully crafted and recorded live at Willie Nelson’s Pedemales Studio with a crack band featuring The faces Ian McLagan on keys. “All of the solos are recorded live on the basic
56 3pickup
tracks” Haynes offers proudly, “I don’t go back and overdub them. I think that when you are dealing with improvisational music it’d the only way to capture the spirit of the interplay, otherwise you are second-guessing each other. We are all set up live in the studio facing each other, it’s a very old school approach but I think that it’s by far the only way to do it when you are making this sort of music.” The air of painstaking craftsmanship is also
reflected in the LP’s guitar sounds, portraying a slightly cleaner but no less sweet and fluent approach that is the hallmark of Haynes six-string work. “I only played my Les Paul on two songs. On four of the songs I played my 1959 Gibson ES335, which is a semi-hollow body guitar like BB King would play. I preferred the lighter tone because I felt that it fit the music a little more, all of the guitars on the album are my Gibson guitars and my D’Angelico. For the most part I used a combination of three amps that we recorded at the same time so we could go back and choose between either one or any combination. We used a Trainwreck , one amp was a 1960 Fender Deluxe that belongs to Willie Nelson and the final amp was a fairly new Fender Pro Junior, which is a tiny little amp.” Seeing as Man in Motion casts a reflective tone, does he still remember his first ever live gig? “My first gig was playing for free at the end of
a Walkathon where people who had just walked 20 miles drank Kool-Aid, ate cookies and were forced to listen to a band of 12 year olds! I seem to remember that we played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and we played ‘Can’t you See’ by the Marshall Tucker band, it was all songs of the period that we enjoyed listening to. We were all very nervous and we knew that we had a long way to go!” As a professional musician who has maintained a solid career through many ups and downs, it only seems appropriate to ask Warren Haynes if he can pass on any sage advice to PM readers? “I am happy to offer my advice. Normally, if I
were asked about music my advice would be to open your mind to as many influences as possible. If someone asks me about the music business, my response is always don’t get involved unless you know that this is the thing that you want to do for the rest of you life; if you are on the fence then I would advise against it because it is a brutal business and is even worse now than when I was a kid. In the pop world you only get one shot but in the non- commercial world you are kind of left to your own devices to promote yourself. If you want to have to have a day job you can still put your music up on the Internet and see how it goes but to pursue music as a serious path like we did during the 70s, that seems to be a thing of the past!” PM
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