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.

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.

Houser: 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.

Houser: 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?

Houser: 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?

Houser: 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?

Houser: 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.

Houser: 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.

Houser: 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?

Houser: 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?

Houser: 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 everyone 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.

Houser: 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.

As far as the band’s originals, does one person write most of the songs or are they a group effort?

Houser: Sometimes they’re a total group effort, and sometimes they come out of practice or a jam or something that we make into a song. And there’s others that I’ll write or J.B. writes or JoJo writes, and Todd has written a song now, and Dave is working on a song, so they come from wherever. Sometimes we’ll come in with a song that’s 80 percent there, and we’ll just fine-tune it or something. J.B. has written the most songs probably, and then me and JoJo write a couple of songs a record or so.

Is the person who writes it the one who gets to sing it?

Houser: Sometimes, although there are several songs that J.B. sings that I wrote. But if me or JoJo’s singing it, then me or JoJo probably wrote it. There’s some songs, like I said, that I wrote that J.B. sings.

As far as the songs and their live presentation, do you guys go in with a setlist?

Houser: Yeah, we do. We found that a couple of years ago we were starting to play the same songs. We were stuck in kind of this mode where we would play the same 30 songs or so. And we wrote down all our songs and realized that we had 100 songs or so that we could play. So from that point on, we decided to start not repeating songs for like three nights, and that makes us go through our songs and play at least 80-90 percent of them on a regular basis.

Do you occasionally junk the setlist partway through?

Houser: We’ve had times where something has gone wrong, or something has happened, and we had to go with whatever we felt like. But usually we’re all pretty aware of where we’re at and what we’re doing.

There are some songs that you don’t play that often like “Coconuts.” Is there a reason why you don’t do some of those songs that much?

Houser: That’s a funny story. You know “Coconuts” was the first song that we wrote that we played a lot. And so we ended up playing it every night for like five years. And one day J.B. just said, “I can’t do it anymore.” And that’s when we quit playing it for like, I don’t know, three or four years or something. And now we’ve kind of gotten back to where we’re comfortable with it, and we play it like once a tour or something like that.

Let’s talk about influences briefly. Are there any guitarists or musicians who have influenced the way you play?

Houser: Yeah, lots of them. I guess my favorite guitar player is Steve Howe from Yes. He’s a great guitarist. And I used to listen to a lot of Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Rush, Ted Nugent and stuff like that. That’s who I learned to play guitar to basically. And then, just whatever was on the radio.
Are there any current artists that you particularly like?

Houser: I like Vic Chesnutt a lot. I like Bloodkin a lot and Jerry Joseph. And I’ve got the new R.E.M. on right now. I listen to a lot of classical music. A lot of days I just turn on NPR and listen to whatever they’re playing – jazz, and really just about anything that we like. My wife just got a Bruce Cockburn record. I’d never really listened to him before, but it’s a great record.

Have you guys run into any problems where people try to lump you into the “Southern rock,” Allman Brothers, Dixie Dregs category?

Houser: Not really. I don’t think a lot of people think we’re Southern rock. We get the Allman Brothers comparison, but we get the Dead comparison more than that probably.

That’s sort of an unfair thing for you guys, because the Dead was the Dead, and what you are doing has a similarity in that you are an improvisationally-based band, but beyond that I think the similarities end.

Houser: You know, people are always looking to put you in a category if they can.

What are you looking forward to in the near future?

Houser: Like I said before, I’m looking forward to going around the world again if we can, and putting out this next record, which we’re all very excited about. I think we’ve got some good stuff for it, and we’re all kind of thinking about that right now.