The Allen Woody bass style
FlyGuitars Is it right that Allen was actually a guitar player before taking up bass?
Warren Haynes Yeah, he did start out playing guitar and then switched to bass from there. I think his approach to bass playing was very guitar orientated and especially in the concept of a trio he was able to utilise more of his own style in an aggressive way because of that much space a trio format allows
FlyGuitars How would you describe Allen Woody as a bass player?
Warren Haynes Woody was fearless as a bass player, you know he played with reckless abandon the same way Matt plays the drums and the chemistry between those two guys just happened to work because you could take two aggressive musicians like that and throw them together and it may or may not work. In their case it just happened to work great but Woody had a sensitive side that a lot of people did not see as much because of the nature of the beast, you know Gov't Mule is a very aggressive band especially in the early days because we were trying to bring back something that we thought was missing in rock n roll
Once we had done that then we decided let's move on let's keep going, let's keep going in different directions. Our own ambition was not to be a power trio, we wanted to be a lot of things, that was just the first thing we wanted to be. So with each record we were trying to change and wanted to grow as a band. When we did Life Before Insanity with more instrumentation a lot of that was Woody's idea. He wanted to play guitar, he wanted to play mandolin, he wanted me to play more parts and these were just things we would talk about sitting around in the interim. He didn't want to be stuck in the power trio format either. I think there's some misconceptions about that, that some people think that Woody thought Gov't Mule should always be a power trio and I don't think that were the case especially with the songs that we were writing and the new directions we were approaching
FlyGuitars I think for me it certainly came across that Gov't Mule when Woody was in the band was the three of you and it wasn't anyone steering it in one direction.
Warren Haynes There's a conscious effort on the first album to do very little overdubbing, it was almost completely live in the studio, then the second record, let's do a little more overdubbing but not much then by the time we got to Life Before Insanity we all wanted it to be more of a studio record, more layers, more overdubbing, more instrumentation. I played guitar in seven different tunings on that record. So it made it some ways harder to achieve live because I would have to switch guitars all the time to allow for the tuning differences and if Woody played mandolin there was no bass and if he played guitar then there was no bass but we found ways of getting around that, rearranging the songs where they still felt good as a three piece but some of the stuff that had keyboards, about half of the record really sounded better when we brought a keyboard player in and so there was a point where we brought Johnny Neel on the road with us, there were times when we brought Bernie Worrell on to the stage and so you could see the band toying with the quartet idea a little bit. I don't know that we would have ever added a full time member, who knows. That decision wasn't made until after Woody passed and after he passed Matt and I knew that that was the right thing to do
FlyGuitars Is there one Gov't Mule track that you could choose as a demonstration of what his playing style was like?
Warren Haynes A song that would be definitive for him? possibly any live version of Blindman In The Dark - He never played it the same way twice. The signature parts he played on the studio record were really great and even the improv is really great but then live it went way beyond that. That song benefited from a lot of different basses, sometimes he would play with a very bright bass sound similar to the record which is a Rickenbacker. Sometimes he would play an EB and get this huge bass sound and it worked either way, it sounded great either way. Sometimes he would do it on Thunderbirds, which was in between. He very seldom brought the Rickenbacker out live and in Gov't Mule there's such a need for bottom end he would have to add tons of bottom to the Rickenbacker to make it work, he could do that in the studio much easier than you could do it in a live performance but that song really showcased his improv ability cause he was following me, he was following Matt, he was also leading the charge at the same time
The last Gov't Mule studio album to feature Allen Woody, Life Before Insanity
FlyGuitars The third record Life Before Insanity has an obvious keyboard presence, did that alter the way Allen played compared to previous records? Did he feel the need to create space for the keyboards?
Warren Haynes Yeah I think just intuitively, whenever we were playing live and a fourth member would sit in whether it was a keyboard player or another guitar he would automatically adjust his playing to accommodate the setting and in the studio it was the same sort of way. We were starting to write material that sounded better as a quartet and so he would automatically adjust his playing accordingly. Not something he really had to think about that much, it's just when you play the type of music we play it's so improvisation based that it really hinges on listening. So your listening to what people are doing and if there's more space being filled up then your first instinct is to fill up less space
Thanks to Graham Fieldhouse and Warren Haynes. Graham has also interviewed current Mule bassist Andy Hess - check it out!
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