Features

Widespread Panic’s Michael Houser – Keeping Busy (Relix Revisited: October 1999)

Today is the ten year anniversary Widespread Panic guitarist Michael Houser’s tragic death from pancreatic cancer. Today we look back to October 1999 for this interview that accompanied the Panic cover story in the magazine.

Widespread Panic has, over the last few years, quietly become one of the most popular bands on the improvisational music scene. In a recent interview, guitarist Michael Houser spoke about his music, the band’s new album, ‘Til The Medicine Takes, and plans for the future.

In the past couple of years, you journeyed to other parts of the world including Europe, New Zealand and Australia. Do you have any further plans to stretch maybe to Japan or South America?

Houser: Europe was the place we’d been wanting to go for a long time, and it was really big for us to get to go there. But once on stage, after a little while, you kinda forget about where you are. Every place we play, there’s a tension there until you get used to wherever it is you’re at.

We’ve talked about going to Japan, and we want to go back to Australia and New Zealand. We had a great time down there, and it was a lot of fun. The people were very nice. But right now, we have to concentrate on Europe. And we hope to get to South America someday, too. I don’t know what the market is for our type of music down there, but we’ll go anywhere really.

Your audience has been growing steadily, but it seems as though you prefer the smaller venues to the hockey arenas. Is the intimacy the smaller places provide more appealing?

Houser: We definitely prefer the smaller venues. As far as making a decision as to where we play, that’s usually just based on how many tickets we can sell, unless it’s a special show, like the Fox, for example, where you just want to go and play that room. And we have a lot of shows where people show up that can’t get a ticket, but we also have shows that aren’t sold out. We sell a lot of tickets in the South and the Midwest, and we tend to play the smaller venues in the Northeast and the Southwest. It’s really just a matter of where we think is the right place. And sometimes it can be a tough decision because we get pressure from our manager and then pressure from the promoter to play this or that venue, so it’s all kind of wacky.

Does your new album feature some of the new songs you’ve been playing on tour?

Houser: A lot of it is stuff that people who come to our shows will have heard in the last year or so. And then we always have a surprise or two that we come up with in the studio.

Do you approach the music differently in the studio than on stage?

Houser: It’s just a different thing. You have to approach it differently just by the nature of what it is. And I guess there are musical considerations that we may make, so yeah, it’s definitely a different thing. I don’t know that I could really describe all the ways it’s different. It’s just as exciting, just in a different way. You don’t have the instant adrenaline that you get when you go on stage, but at least for me, I still get nervous when I know the tape’s running. So there’s your own nervous expectations, I guess. And there’s a lot of opportunities in the studio that you get that you don’t have live—to play with a song. If you play a bad note, you get to say, “I played a bad note there. I’d like to do that again.” That’s fun. It’s not live, and one of the things that people like about live shows, at least I think, is that they get to see the raw edges of a band, and on a record, everything is just right. But both of them are fun. We would hate to have to pick one or the other.

Along the lines of live stuff, it seems Light Fuse has been very successful. Do you plan to do more live albums soon?

Houser: Not soon, but definitely in our future. That’s something that we’ve talked about already because we had a lot of material that didn’t make it onto that record that we want to put out in a live form. Again, it’s just a question of time and how the record company feels about it. We’re at the end of our contract with Capricorn after this latest record, and if we have them or another record company, we’ll have to find out how they feel about live records, because most record companies don’t like really like live records unless it’s just a pure merchandising concept. And it’ll probably be a struggle to get the next one out, but we’re definitely up for doing it as soon as we can.

I heard you guys mixed board tapes with audience tapes that people sent you on Light Fuse. Is that true?

Houser: No, that was to correct a mistake. When we started with our digital recording machines, we knew that we had to have an audience mic, and so we set up a mic on either side of the stage facing out towards the audience. When we went back and listened to it, what we heard was just the few people around that mic talking and stuff. The digital tracks, all the stuff that we recorded, were very dry, so we needed to mix in some audience with it to give you the feeling that you were in a place live, because otherwise it sounded like it was just a studio record. When we went to use our audience mics, we found out pretty quickly that they weren’t going to work. We went through a few days of wondering what we were going to do. Finally, we realized that there were tons of people out there who had these tapes if we could just find someone. And it was really easy, once we decided to do it. We had the tapes we needed in a day. It was definitely a case of a fan helping out the band.