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Relix Revisited: Widespread Panic’s Michael Houser Keeping Busy

It strikes me that the sound of some bands, like Phish and Blues Traveler, seems to be dominated by one individual in the band, and you guys seem to have a much more group-oriented sound.

That’s the way we’ve always been really, and everybody contributes as much as they feel comfortable with at a certain time, and sometimes the scale will be tipped towards one person, but then it swings back towards another person. And we enjoy that. I think it gives us a dynamic or depth or something that makes it easier to listen to.

When many bands start to jam or play faster songs, there’s almost a frenetic edge to the music. With Panic, it seems that you are locked into a groove, and it doesn’t sound too busy to mesh well.

We’ve been working on it for a number of years, so yeah, that was our goal, and I hope that we succeed. We’ve been together for over 12 years now, so we can work together with our eyes closed.

What do you see as your role in contributing to the sound? Do you prefer to play fills while J.B. is singing and then do the solos, leaving the chordal stuff to J.B.? Or do you like to do chordal stuff as well?

I’m a busybody, for sure. But all of us are trying to find a place to fit in and contribute all the time, so I guess we all are kind of working at it. And it’s a mixed bag for me. Sometimes I’m playing chords, and sometimes I’m playing leads. And I enjoy that. I like playing in the background sometimes, and I like playing leads a lot obviously.

When you are playing, do you key in on any one person in the group to provide the base for your solos?

Yeah, it’s more a matter of whoever else is doing something that you hear, and I like that, and I want to do something to add to that, and it could be anybody, so yeah, it just depends on where it is.

What effects do you use?

I use a digital delay and a spring reverb, a volume pedal, and occasionally I use a wah wah.

You’re one of the few guitarists in the rock realm to play sitting down.

Over the years, I have developed some kind of back or leg problem or something. Because I use my volume pedal constantly with my right foot and I don’t move around, or I didn’t when I used to stand up, I ended up standing on my left leg constantly for hours at a time. And over the years, it turned into sort of this problem. I was faced with the choice of sitting down or quitting, basically. I chose to sit down and see if people were going to throw tomatoes at me. And you know, it mystifies a lot of people, no doubt about it. But nobody has complained, at least not to me.

Your Sit ‘N Ski tour seems to be a landmark among Spreadheads. I know that JoJo recently mentioned the possibility of a Sit ‘N Surf tour in an online chat.

Yeah, we’ve talked about it, but there’s nothing concrete yet. It’s something that we’re exploring—do some Hawaii dates, Japan, the Caribbean, I don’t know—Sit ‘N Scuba is what I think he called it. We’re interested in doing something like that, but I can’t say when. I think that we would try something different before we did the Sit ’N Ski again.

You did some acoustic stuff on that tour. Have you considered adding acoustic sets to your shows or incorporating acoustic songs into regular sets, the way the Dead had started to do?

Yeah, we’ve talked about it before, but it’s one of those things that we talk about sometimes, it doesn’t really happen. We really like the medium that we have. But like I said, we do talk about it occasionally, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a year or two, you didn’t see us playing semi-acoustic.

It seems you guys are fans of the Doors in some of your cover selections. How do you go about choosing your cover songs?

It’s Halloween mainly that we do the Doors covers, but you know, everybody’s gotta say “That’s great, let’s do it.” Because what one person might think was a great song doesn’t mean that everybody in the band will. If somebody has a song from the ‘70s that they really love, maybe. But usually we come to a pretty quick consensus about what would be good and what wouldn’t. It’s a group effort and a single effort all at the same time.

One of the interesting things I find in your cover selections is that some of them, such as “Peace Frog” and “Over The Hills,” are very much Panic doing covers of the Doors and Zeppelin, while others like “Aunt Avis” and “Makes Sense To Me” are unknown to many as covers.

Right, and that’s two different types of covers. The Zeppelin and the Doors are mainly for Halloween. And the other covers that we’ve done over the years have been songs that we really dug a lot that we could play in a different way and have good results.