Warren: Well, to the best of my knowledge Phil had been asking Steve about other people to bring into the fold and Steve brought up my name, and I guess Phil knew of me from the Allman Brothers or Gov’t Mule or whatever but I think he probably heard of me from Dick Latvala. Dick and I were friends; Dick was a big supporter of our music. I think between Dick and Kimock they probably turned Phil on to me.
Steve and I have been friends several years and a few years back when the Allman Brothers played the Fillmore for a Bill Graham tribute concert Dicky Betts was MIA and I called Steve to come and fill in and play some guitar with us that night. We had a great time and we’ve spoken on the phone since and we’ve hung out a few times since but he’s on one coast and I’m on the other so its hard to hook up as much as we’d like. But then when I got the call about doing the Phil Lesh thing I kind of gathered and was told not in so many words that Steve was one of the people that had put my name "in the hat" so to speak.

Philzone.com: What was your reaction?

Warren: I was very, very excited that they had thought of me and you know, one of the things I really enjoy doing in life is playing with as many different good musicians as possible, and in as many different situations as possible, I really enjoy the challenge of playing all types of music in all types of settings, in bands big and small and everywhere in between. So when I heard about the possibility of doing some stuff with Phil I thought that sounds like a nice thing.

My schedule is pretty crazy it doesn’t have a lot of room in it so its like, yeah, hopefully if they’re into it to whatever extent I can be involved and that’s exactly where they were coming from. They were so considerate they were like, ‘ well, you tell us what you can do and that’s what we want you to do’, and you know, that’s a perfect situation for me because they’ re very respectful of the fact that I have a full time band in Gov’t Mule and so we just kind of work around that schedule."

Philzone.com: Did you know at the time that you would become a recurring friend of Phil’s or did that sort of happen because Mountain Aire came out so great?

Warren: I think it was initially just to see what happened, you know, there was no real talk about doing more stuff but I think in the back of my mind I thought, well maybe it will turn into doing some more stuff. I don’t want to say 'trial basis' but it was just intended as a one off to see how it went. And Phil seems to be using a lot of different musicians and enjoying the fact that all these different musicians can interpret those songs and other songs completely different from one another. I think one of the things that occurs to me that he seems to be really enjoying taking a lot of those Grateful Dead songs and exploring them from a different way, from a different approach, you know, which is totally cool because, you know those guys, they had this great chemistry as the Grateful Dead but those songs have a life of their own and they can be interpreted in a lot of different ways and he’s excited about seeing that; seeing what other ways they can be interpreted, which is really cool.

Philzone.com: It is really cool, we really love that.

Warren: Yeah, yeah, I think so, you know.

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Philzone.com: The electricity in the crowd is so much better right now than it was towards the end of the Grateful Dead, and I really personally believe it is because, you can just see it, something will happen and someone will go into something and *boom* a smile on Phil's face this big, those knees start wobbling and everybody knowsthat it's just… how can you not love something when everyone is having such a great time? It’s just great!

So Mtn. Aire, your first gig, its huge, outside, big festival, how did that feel?

Warren: It felt really good, you know, we had four or five days of rehearsal which was nice and I thought the show went good you know; it had a few grim ones here and there but I thought for a first time experience it was really good and positive. We all left the stage smiling and thinking, hey, this was nice we should do it some more. You know, that’s really the key, I think we’ll look back at that gig as a milestone gig, but, it will only get better from Mtn. Aire I think the more we play together the more it will continue to grow into new directions and stuff.

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Philzone.com: Right, Mtn. Aire was really special, Patchwork Quilt. Let’s talk about Patchwork Quilt.

Philzone.com: Was it around the ninth?

Warren: It was that day, yeah, we got the word that day. We were playing Jones Beach and we got the word that Jerry was dead and we had already made arrangements for the Black Crows to come and see us and sit-in and I remember walking across that big huge back stage and seeing Chris Robinson across the way, and Chris is always in a positive mood, you know but he really was just kind of sad and somber and everybody was hugging each other but there wasn’t a lot of conversation, it was just like what do you say in a time like that, you know, so we all went on stage and played together.

I never intended Patchwork Quilt, which was written a year after that, or maybe more, I never intended for it to be anything other than a personal song. It wasn’t like here’s this song I wrote about Jerry; I’m not into that, I’m not really into that whole kind of thing.

Philzone.com: I don’t necessarily think that the fans picked up on that, it was just like you were talking about the night, did you catch the moon in the sky at Mtn. Aire? That was a beautiful night.

Warren: It was gorgeous! It was totally gorgeous and it fit the atmosphere of the evening and you know when Phil called me the first time and said ‘hey, I want you to sing some songs’, and ‘what about this song and what about that song?’. He brought a few tunes he was familiar with me singing; Soulshine and She Said and few of those tunes and obviously from my soul music background it made sense for me to sing like Smokestack Lightening and Midnight Hour and that kind of stuff. But he said ‘if you got any other songs, even if they’re new songs and nobody’s ever heard of them or whatever, if they make sense then maybe we should work them up?’. Then I thought, wow, we should work up Patchwork Quilt because nobody had ever heard the song.

Philzone.com: Did you just have the lyrics at that point?

Warren: I had written the whole thing, I had even done a demo of it but it was just me by myself and I had never played it for anybody, I mean, maybe my wife but beyond that I’d never really played it for anyone and then he brought up ‘what about some outside songs that nobody’s ever heard’ I thought, yeah, maybe we should do that song and when I showed it to him he was very into it.

He was into it before he started putting together the lyrical connection. He was already into the tune but then the more he got inside it, I think, the more he felt connected to it. The whole time I was like going, hey, if its too close to home, I don’t want to do it, you know, I was giving him every option to say 'no, I don’t think we should do this song' or 'its a little sensitive', you know, because sometimes songs that are that personal, it’s hard to get through them in a live setting, you know.

So the first time we did it I thought it actually turned out really good, there were times at rehearsal it sounded even better and I think it gets better each time that we play it. I love that song and I had mentioned this to Phil, that there was a reason to perform that song when he called me, it kind of gave me a reason to perform it. Otherwise it was a bedroom song; something you just sing by yourself to nobody.

Philzone.com: Do you consider yourself a deadhead? Or have you ever in your life considered yourself a deadhead?

Warren: I would say that I’ve consider myself a deadhead more in the past ten years than ever. Even though I saw my first show in 1979, I didn’t see them again until ‘89. I only saw five or six shows ever. But in the past ten or twelve years I became more and more of a fan and started trying to see them as much as I could. In joining the Allman Brothers and just the connection between the two bands, and the two bands audiences, kind of made me realize not only the chemistry that the band had, but the songs, you know, the songs were so really just great songs. Their songs will live forever. Some people, I don’t think, think as much about the actual songs as about the chemistry that the guys had together but the tunes were, they were classically written, I mean, you know, the Robert Hunter lyrics and all the stuff from Jerry and Phil and Bobby. That’s one of the things that has really allowed me to maintain the respect for those guys, that they deserve. Its like sometimes you grow up listening to music and then years later you go back and listen to it and the songs don’t hold up as good as you hoped. With the Grateful Dead songs they hold up better every year, you know what I mean, year after year, you realize how timeless those songs can really be. Fifty years from now they’re still gonna be great songs regardless of what changes mainstream music goes through, those are still gonna be great songs.

Philzone.com: Do you realize how much you sound like Brent Mydland?

(Warren chuckles)

Warren: Well Phil, I guess, picked up on the fact that our voices were coming from the same school and thought it would be a good idea if I sing a couple of Brent’s tunes.

Philzone.com: Was it Phil that said that to you?

Warren: Yeah it was his idea. He first brought up Just a Little Light and then eventually Tons of Steel. I saw them a couple of times with Brent and really enjoyed Brent’s voice, you know, but I didn’t really study that stuff, I had never really heard it as much as I wish I had until after he was gone. Brent was a great singer and he was that soulful connection in the Dead, you know, it seemed like they always had one guy that brought the soul music thing into the fold. Because the Grateful Dead to me, from an outside prospective was like this mixture of all the different personalities and each person brought their own thing into the band, and that’s what made it a special chemistry, you know. They had the folk element they had the bluesy element, and they had the Jazz type element but starting with Pigpen they always had that soul music element with Turn on Your Love Light and all that kind of stuff. That’s where I was first raised, my first love was soul music. Before I ever picked up guitar I was singing soul songs. From the time I was seven years old I was trying to sound like Otis Redding or Wilson Picket or the guys from the Four Tops and the Temptations. I sang for years before I ever picked up a guitar. So when you really strip it down for me the thing that made me want to be a musician in the first place was hearing soul music. So, I guess, that’s my connection with that whole part of it, you know.

Philzone.com: Can you elaborate on working with Phil at the rehearsals? What’s that like?

Warren: Well the first thing is how open-minded he is about music and what music is intended to be. He doesn’t ever want there to be any preconceptions about how a song should be played. It should be played differently from moment to moment and from night after night. He never wants any of the musicians, himself included, to repeat what’s been done before. Its always ‘let’s look for a new approach on playing the songs’, you know.

I was a little confused when I first came into rehearsal because, as loose and open as the Allman Brothers could be, and as Gov’t Mule is, there’s still usually some semblance of who’s gonna take the first solo, who’s gonna take the second solo, if we’ re gonna trade off and all that kind of stuff. Worse case scenario somebody’s gonna nod their head and go "o.k. you take it".

With Phil, and apparently in the Grateful Dead it was just whatever happened. Somebody would start playing and somebody else would compliment that and there wasn’t a lot of ‘o.k, you take the first solo and Ill take the second solo’ and there wasn’t a lot of ‘let’s do this here or do that there’ it was just kind of ‘let’s see what happens when we get there’.

We compare that, and Phil had brought it up at some point comparing it to what they call ‘musical conversations’. Which was the way jazz was born, the way blues was born; ‘call and response’, somebody plays a lick or sings a lick and then somebody responds to it, and then somebody responds to that, and somebody responds to that and it turns into music. I started referring to it as ‘Dixieland on Acid’. Because Dixieland music consists of people, like it’s not one guy soloing or playing the melody, its two or three guys and they’re playing independently and there’s two or three different melodies all going on at once but you have to listen. Half of you has to listen to what the other cats are doing and the other half of you just has to play what your doing with confidence and between those two things you can open yourself up to all this counterpoint, and beautiful music that’s not born out of a linear approach to music, ‘you do this and I’ll do that,’ it’s all kind of subjective and even borderline subconscious. Your creating this atmosphere at the moment, you know, moment by moment, you’re creating the mood with which the music is being played.

Having been a huge fan of New Orleans music all my life, that means a lot to me, the whole music conversation thing.

Govt Mule takes that and expounds upon it, but in a totally different setting, in the setting of a three-piece band. We take a lot of influence from Miles Davis’ band, especially the band with Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams and Miles, that, for most of us that’s our favorite Jazz band, maybe our favorite band ever. Those guys were so good at musical conversation. It was never a case of one person soloing and everybody else backing him up. It was always this, in and out, call and response thing. When you can do that with other musicians and when you have that rapport that chemistry together it’s so much more deep and three dimensional than the normal approach to soloing and playing music; it’s more gratifying.

That’s what he’s looking for all the time. It’s a little scary sometimes not knowing who’s supposed to play what, but once you open your mind up to it, its much more beautiful than it is scary.

Philzone.com: Do you feel that there’s stuff going on there that you are now bringing with you to the Mule performances?

Warren: I think any situation you find yourself in musically especially if it’s with people on the caliber of the people we’re talking about, you’re always gonna bring that back with you to another situation. When Woody and I were in the Allman Brothers and in Gov’t Mule at the same time, playing with the Allman Brothers would influence the way we played in Gov't Mule and playing with Gov’t Mule would influence the way we played in the Allman Brothers. In a way one would keep the other one fresh. About the time we got sick of touring with the Allman Brothers we’d take off on a Gov’t Mule tour, then our heads were swinging in a totally different direction. Then by the time we got back to the Allman Brothers next tour we would be real free, with a lot of new ideas, and open minded and come back with a fresh approach. I think similar thing happens, you know, when I work with Phil, any of the other projects that I’m involved with, it always kind of allows you to forget about some of the other stuff you’ve been doing, and then when you get back to that it’s so much fresher.

Philzone.com: Do you think you’re going to bring any Mule songs to Phil and Friends?

Warren: Well, we’ve already done the Mule version of She Said, She Said even though it’s a Beatles song and Soulshine even though it’s, it’s our current single with Gov’t Mule from our live album, but it’s not really a Mule song. I wrote that in ‘88, and the Allman Brothers did it before Gov’t Mule did it. Its hard to say, maybe some of the instrumental stuff, its hard to say what’ll happen.

Philzone.com: It’s a hard sound to mix. Mule is pretty aggressive.

Warren: Yeah, but again those songs can be interpreted differently too. Anytime you bring different musicians into the mix things automatically change. We did this stuff recently with John Scofield and we played a lot of the Gov’t Mule songs with John Scofield playing guitar with us. He’s an amazing jazz guitar player; played with everybody including Miles Davis. Hearing his input on some of our tunes just kind of opened our minds to a different approach to them. Anytime you add instrumentation to a song it just has to take it into a new direction.

Our mission in Gov’t Mule is to try and find a way of playing the songs as a trio. ‘Cause that’s the challenge, is to make it work with three individuals. Anytime you add more musicians it becomes less of a challenge or less of an obstacle but you have to play for the lineup of musicians that you have at that time. I play differently in a trio than I do in a quartet or a quintet or a sextet or any of that. The more musicians you add the more different your role becomes. In a trio, Woody and Matt have to take up so much more space because there’s only three of us. As soon as we start bringing in other people like Chuck Leavell or Bernie Worrell or John Popper or Derek Trucks or somebody into the mix, then everybody relaxes and plays less and just lets the new chemistry start taking over.

And that’s really what playing music is about. Never having any preconceptions about how you think it should be but being influenced by what’s going on at that particular moment. That’s really what real music is for all of us.

Philzone.com: Do you think we’re ever going to see Matt and Allen come play with Phil and Friends?

Philzone.com: Last month we caught you at Shoreline with Phish. That was some great chemistry, that Misty Mountain Hop . . .

Warren: That was good.

Philzone.com: That was great! That was beyond good. For a Thursday night, having to get up and go to work, you can’t do better than that.

Warren: Yeah, I enjoyed that a lot. That was the first time I played with those guys in quite a few years, it was good seeing them, hanging out and playing music with them again. It’s always a treat for me to play in a musical setting that’s different from the norm. When the Allman Brothers headlined the H.O.R.D.E. in ‘94, and then when Gov’t Mule was on the H.O.R.D.E. in ‘98, I would wind up sitting in with virtually every band on the tour because its a treat for me; I just enjoy doing it.

Philzone.com: That Phish weekend was an example. Seeing you ripping Misty Mountain Hop one minute and seeing Phil on the trampoline the next, and the Viola Lee. . . smokin!

Warren: The Viola Lee was great. The bass duet that Mike Gordon and Phil did was really beautiful. Stuff like that, you can’t rehearse it, it just has to happen. I was so proud of those guys. Mike really just kind of dug right into it and was picking Phil’s brain. I think, it seems to me that Mike was the biggest deadhead of all those guys anyway; so he had studied Phil’s approach and really knew how to adapt to it. I don’t know if most of the people in the audience realize how hard it is for two bass players to do that and not just turn it into a train wreck. It’s really hard. It’s harder with bass instruments than it is with instruments in a higher range. Any small clashes that happen between two bass instruments, the notes get all oscillating and distorted and it just becomes obvious that there’s a clash much more so than if they were in a higher register. I was really proud of those guys that night, I thought they sounded great.

Philzone.com: There was points where they became . . .one bass.

Warren: Like one voice, yeah.

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Philzone.com: What kind of involvement with Phil & Friends, other than the upcoming East Coast tour can we look for in the new Millennium?

Warren: You know, I don’t know. It’s one step at a time right now for me, I know I’m doing the second of November through the eighteenth of November. Beyond that, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I know we’re excited about continuing the relationship and doing more stuff in the future, but specifically I don’t know what that’s going to be.

Philzone.com: What about for Gov’t Mule in the new millennium?

Warren: We’re doing Atlanta, at the Roxy theater for New Years, which is where we did our live record last year. Our new studio C.D. is going to come out February 22. So I know we will be doing a lot of touring to support the new C.D., it’s all new original material. We’re all very happy with the way it came out. I think we feel like it’s probably the most accessible studio C.D. that we’ve made to date. The most diverse collection of songs and there’s more guests on it. It’s a little more of a production than any of the studio C.D.s we made so far. So I know we’re going to be very busy promoting it, we all have very high hopes for it. So we’re definitely going to be very present in the year 2000. We’re going to be doing a lot of work. And myself, I enjoy doing all the different stuff so I’m hoping just to keep everything fresh by having four or five things going at once.

Philzone.com: I have this figure, I heard you did 185 shows last year. What do you do in your spare time?

Warren (smiling): I don’t have any spare time.

(laughter)

Philzone.com: That’s not just Mule, that’s you doing everything?

Warren: That was just Mule and that was not counting however many solo acoustic shows I did, which was not many, but it’s also not counting rehearsal, recording, travel time, then you’re way up over 200 days a year.

Philzone.com: Do you sleep?

Warren: You have to make yourself get plenty of rest on the road otherwise you just run yourself down. I don’t have enough of a personal life at the moment. My wife can testify to that. I feel like I’m taking advantage of a lot of the opportunities that are being presented to me and some of them are maybe a once in a life opportunity and a lot of great stuff is being sent my way and I’m very excited about doing it. But I don’t want to maintain this kind of pace forever. I’m still in my 30’s at this point but that won’t be for much longer.

Philzone.com: You got to get it while you can.

Warren: Yeah (smiling) I’m not complaining at all. I just know at some point I will see a time period that I’ll want to spend more time dealing with my personal life. It hasn’t been the last ten or twelve years.

Philzone.com: I understand you’re doing some producing?

Warren: Yeah, I’m doing more and more of that and at some point when I’m sick of the road, that’s gonna turn into my creative outlet. I’ll never stop performing, I’ll never stop recording, and I’ll never stop writing at least if I can help it. At some point I’ll probably want to spend more time producing records and less time traveling. It’s something that I really enjoy a lot but I don’t see that as being anytime soon but at some point though. Plus I learn more and more about it each time I do a project. Hopefully, about the time I get sick of traveling, I’ll consider myself a better producer.

Philzone.com: I just want to go back to Gov’t Mule for a second. You guys do great covers, choice covers. What’s the creative process, who brings them in, who makes the decision?

Warren: It varies. Sometimes it’s just songs I that always wanted to sing but never really thought about it. Sometimes Woody or Matt will have an idea about a song we should cover. In the case of She Said, that was Woody’s idea. We were traveling and I was in the front of the bus and Woody was in the back listening to Revolver and came up to the front and goes, `Hey you know we ought to cover She Said`. That was actually in San Francisco about three years ago or whatever it was the first time we worked it up. The first time we ever played it was at the Great American Music Hall. We played it that night. We listened to it that afternoon and said ‘hey can we play it tonight?’ and said, ‘yeah, sure, it won’t be great but we’ll do it’.

Philzone.com: So he just pitched it to you on the bus and you end up pulling it? That’s a tight band.

Warren: We played it that night. Yeah we just listened to it ran through it a little bit, but that’s part of the beauty of a trio too. You know less margin of error (chuckling). The fewer musicians you have on stage, the less catastrophic things can become really.

Philzone.com: Yeah, if the three of you guys got it, then you got it.

(laughing)

Warren: Yeah then we’re O.K.. But you know sometimes there’s a lot of stuff that I’ll pull out just from my childhood, stuff that I loved growing up and maybe is a little obscure and people wont recognize it and I can turn people on to what I think is a great song. We’re doing more and more of that, like people go, `Oh is that you song?’ I go `No that’s an old song by so and so, but you probably never heard it.’ So, it enables us to turn the audience on to some music maybe they’ve never heard before too and at the same time have fun exploring these songs.

It has to be for the most part something that I can feel comfortable singing. That I can feel like I can interpret it myself, you know there are a lot of great songs that I just don’t feel comfortable singing so unless something changes that, I don’t feel good about performing the tune. An example of that would be Zappa. We all are huge Zappa fans but it’s hard for me to feel like, feel comfortable singing a Zappa tune. He had this comical talk singing voice, that’s why when we do Pygmy Twilight - it’s an instrumental because I just don’t have the courage to get up there and sing Frank Zappa lyrics and try to interpret them. I’m a soul singer, I’m not a comedian.

Philzone.com: What’s your favorite Phil & Friends song?

Warren: You know there’s so many, I really love Days Between. I told Phil at some point I might even do a version of that myself. I really love that song a lot. I like the way we do Wish You Were Here, I think that’s really cool . . .(interruption) . . .um . ..that’s a tough question.

Philzone.com: Are there any other tunes floating around in your head that you might want to bring to the Phil & Friends repertoire?

Warren: There are a few things I been thinking about but I don’t know if off the top of my head I’m going to remember what they are. I’m sure I’ll think of a few between now and show time.

Philzone.com: You’ve done two Brent songs. Can we expect any other Brent songs?

Warren: Maybe, you know it’s hard to say. Maybe so. A lot of those songs I had to learn from scratch. And it’s kind of odd, it’s an odd feeling to know that everybody in the audience knows the songs better than I do and I’m up there playing them. (laughing) That’s a strange feeling. It’s a strange thing. As one of the guys, I think Steve Parish, pointed out the Dead’s audience is an extremely forgiving audience. Even if you screw something up royally ten minutes later they’re back with ya’ and everything is great, you know what I mean?

Philzone.com: In fact, we love it, it’s kind of fun!

Warren: Yeah, and that’s one of the things I think Gov’t Mule has in common with the Dead. It’s that we’re not scared go after it and fall on our ass trying to find something that maybe isn’t meant to be found that night. But we’re gonna damn sure try and our audience understands that and they go right with us and hey, if we fall, we fall and we get right back up and start right back where we were. And the Dead were the kings of that. They weren’t scared to try anything and their audience loved them for it.

Philzone.com: That’s what kept people going.

Warren: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the things that I wish the rest of the world understood is that music isn’t meant to be perfected. I mean, music is really a transference of emotion anyway and to try and perfect that, you can’t perfect your emotions, your not supposed to; they are what they are. I really feel as if to try and rub off the rough edges of music is just one step closer to muzak. I don’t really dig that. You know what they call jazz today, I can’t stand it. Some of the rock `n roll music today, even some of the blues today is just so refined and so polished and smooth it’s just, we’ve taken the life out of it. I couldn’t possibly imagine somebody comparing modern smooth jazz to Charlie Parker or Coltrane or Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk. There’s miles and miles of difference in between those two things.

I think one of the things that listeners are guilty of these days is accepting that smoothed down version of music. There’s so much pop rock, I don’t know between technology and the search for perfection, we’re just ruining a lot of music. When I go back and listen to Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or BB King in the 1950’s or any of that great music like that the mistakes and the imperfections, I guess is a better word for it, they’re part of it. When Otis Redding sang a vocal, he sang it one time maybe twice, three at the very most and that was it. He didn’t go back and try and fix it and spend hours and days making it better.

The difference between that and what they call soul music these days; there’s no comparison. In the day that it took to be Ray Charles or Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin you had to really be special, back then, to cut it because the competition was really high and the technology didn’t allow you the luxury of singing something thirty times until you got it right. You had to get it right, right then. So a lot of the mediocrity was weeded out because of that. Only the people that were really great rose to the top, because they had to be great all the time.

It’s easy to say I got $300,000, I’m gonna go make a record and I’m just keep redoing things until its good. But it’s not easy to go in and play everything on the fly, first take, and your heart’s out there and you stand behind it and go ‘This is me, this is what I am’. I think that’s part of what’s missing in music today. The Grateful Dead were just the epitome of that. There was no pretension about `it could be better`. It was always whatever it was supposed to be for the moment and the audience dug that and that’s one of things that I’m hoping people will learn from history is that the more you try and perfect music the more your just going to screw it up. I don’t mean to be some purist.

Philzone.com: I think we agree and pretty much everybody we know agrees. The MTV thing kind of, although it did so much for the industry, the music itself . . .

Warren: Video killed the radio star . . .it did man. It is so true because the industry started trying to sign people from that point forward based on what they looked like instead of what they sounded like. A lot of the greatest performers of all time would have never have been signed if they had to look like a star. They just had to sound like a star and had to have this presence. When you look at Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin, they weren’t the most gorgeous people in the world, but there was not an audience that they could walk in front of and not capture. An audience was helpless in front of those people. If you didn’t get it, if you saw Aretha Franklin sing or if you saw Otis Redding sing and you didn’t get it then you might as well be on a respirator. You know what I mean because there is no life left in your body.

Philzone.com: What’s that cold thing sittin’ in your chest?

Warren: Yeah . . .that’s right.

(laughter)

Philzone.com: Do you have any tasty tidbits for the fans on the East Coast and Mid West that you want to share with us?

Warren: Such as . . .?

Philzone.com: For the upcoming Phil & Friends tour, the fans are eagerly biting their nails wondering what to expect.

Warren: I don’t know what to expect myself so I couldn’t possibly shed any light on that subject. The last Gov’t Mule show is Halloween in New Orleans and the next day I fly to Michigan on my day off and then the next day I start the Phil tour. Whatever happens, happens. (laughter) I have no predictions, although I know its going to be enjoyable.

Philzone.com: You must be looking forward to being with Bob Dylan on this tour?

Warren: Yeah, that’s very exciting as well and the possibilities that can happen.

Philzone.com: Have you sat in with him before?

Warren: No, I’m friends with a couple of guys in his band but I’ve never had the opportunity to sit-in with Bob. Hopefully that will present itself on this tour.

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Philzone.com: O.K. here’ the money question, are you ready? If it were Warren and friends, who would it be?

Warren: Yikes, that’s tough! I don’t know if I could do that. You know Matt and Woody are the perfect foil for me and the perfect rhythm section for me and when we add to the trio sound, when we bring in other friends, it’s always a challenge for us. So sometimes I feel like the three of us and then just add this person, add that person, and add that person, and add that person but there are so many musicians that I would love to play with that I’ve never had the opportunity to. That’s why I hope to do more this stuff with Phil because working with him is very enlightening and I learn a lot from it and it’s a very pleasurable experience.

I guess Warren & Friends for me would be somewhat similar to what he’s doing. It would be different every month. You know what I mean, I would just go ‘well o.k. this month I want to play with so and so and so and so and then next month how about these people and the next month how about those people’ because there’s so many people that I love to work with and that I either don’t have time or haven’t had the opportunity or whatever.

Philzone.com: Like who? Who do you really want to work with that you haven’t had the chance to?

Warren: Well, there’s a few ways I can answer that. One way is that at some point we want to do a Gov’t Mule instrumental record and bring in a lot of our heroes, a lot of jazz musicians and just aim high. All they can say is no. You know so we’ll call Sonny Rollins and we’ll call Ornette Coleman and all they can say is no. If they’re not interested then they’re not interested but we’re at least going to ask.

For me personally in ‘94 when the Allman Brothers did Woodstock and as were leaving, `cause we had another gig that night in Boston, we couldn’t stick around and Carlos Santana had asked me and Dicky Betts to stay and jam with him and I was like oh God, I have to like turn down jammin’ with Carlos at Woodstock because were committed to another gig.

Carlos is one of the people I would like to work with. From a guitar standpoint, Jeff Beck and Clapton. There’s so many, but there’s so many that I have worked with too which is a real pleasure. A lot of the people I grew up listening to I’ve had the opportunity to work with, more so probably than people I haven’t had the opportunity to work with. I’ve worked with John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon and Albert Collins and a lot of my favorite blues musicians. And of course working with the Allman Brothers was a great experience. All the new young bands from Phish to the Black Crowes to Widespread Panic, Medesky Martin & Wood, all those kind of bands, it’s fortunate for me to be able to have worked with all those guys as well.

Philzone.com: Have you worked with Ben Harper recently?

Warren: Ben’s on our new record. He sang a duet with me and played lap steel on a song on the new C.D. That was a great experience. We really had a lovely time working with Ben.

Philzone.com: What about Galactic?

Warren: Love those guys, you know we’re old friends, we love those guys. All the above for me, let’s just keep doing it all.

Philzone.com: Yes. Please do! Well, that is all we have formally. Thank you Warren.

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