Happy 25th Anniversary to Gov’t Mule’s eponymous debut album Gov’t Mule, originally released July 27, 1995.
[Note: Gov’t Mule is not currently available via major streaming platforms, so various live versions of select songs originally recorded for the band’s debut album appear below.]
In the summer of 1995, a friend’s dad worked for the Durham Herald-Sun, the daily newspaper for the residents in and around Durham, North Carolina. He came home one day and gave his son a CD that the music critic at the paper had passed on to him (back when local newspapers had music critics). The critic either wasn’t impressed or didn’t feel his readers would care to know about it (probably a little of both). My friend listened to it and decided he didn’t care for it and gave it to me. Knowing my tastes, he figured it was more my speed and said it “reminded him of Molly Hatchet.”
Good Lord, it sounded nothing like Molly Hatchet. Thank heavens.
The CD was by a band called Gov’t Mule, and it was their self-titled debut. Its cover featured their name in red stencil font with an old mule wrapped in an American flag, staring blankly back at me. Before I put it on, I looked at the back cover and saw two familiar faces: Warren Haynes and Allen Woody. They were the new blood in the reunited Allman Brothers Band, in what had turned out to be its best lineup since Duane Allman and Berry Oakley died twenty years prior.
I had first seen the reunited Allmans at Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh in the summer of 1990. I’d never seen such intensity and hunger in a band of veterans before. They were truly energized and it was mostly due to the fire Haynes and Woody had lit under their collective asses. I made it a point to see them every year I could after that at Walnut Creek Amphitheatre, where they played almost every successive year all the way up to 2009.
Back in 1995 however, I somehow missed the formation of Gov’t Mule when it happened. (I’d find out later that they’d already played the Lake Boone Country Club in Raleigh a couple of times that year.) So when I pressed play on the CD player, I was completely oblivious as to what to expect.
The first thing I heard was Haynes singing an a capella version of Son House’s “Grinnin’ In Your Face.” It was intense. It was ominous, like the calm before the storm. As soon as he finishes he counts off, “two, three, four...” and the sound of Gov’t Mule in all its freight train intensity exploded into my living room in a descending, heavy, blues by way of Black Sabbath riff. It was the old Memphis Slim blues, “Mother Earth” and it would plow through my head and into my bloodstream for the next eight-plus minutes.
It was immediately obvious that Gov’t Mule was in no way an extension of the Allman Brothers Band. Haynes and Woody had formed the Mule along with the former drummer for the Dickey Betts Band, Matt Abts (whom Haynes had befriended while playing in the same group before following Betts into the reunited Allmans lineup). All three bonded over their love of heavy, bluesy, bare-bones hard rock. The kind that stripped away all unnecessary accoutrements until there was nothing left but muscle and space. Dynamics were key.
The debut filled the promise of returning you to the days of Mountain, Free, Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, etc. Gov’t Mule wore their influences on their sleeve. In addition to the Son House and Memphis Slim covers, they tackled Free’s “Mr. Big” and brought even more power and passion to it than the original. Woody’s bass plows through the famous solo section with reverence to Fraser’s work while at the same time walking the line somewhere between Jaco Pastorious and Lemmy Kilmister. (It improves upon the original if for no other reason than after the midsection buildup, it settles back down to the second verse again before building again to the final chorus.)
The originals on Gov’t Mule stand as tall as the covers, and most are still being played at their shows twenty-five years on. “Rockin’ Horse,” a co-write with Gregg Allman and sometime-Allman guitar whiz Jack Pearson, gallops along accordingly as Haynes sings about a young man living on the edge, realizing it’s the only way he knows how. “My guardian angel wears a hard hat,” he sings and proceeds to tell you why as the music plays up the danger and reckless abandon of the lyric.
Haynes—a true triple-threat of powerful, soul-drenched vocals, unmatched guitar chops in the tradition of Paul Kossoff, Leslie West, and Duane Allman (he was once ranked in the top twenty of Rolling Stone’s greatest guitarists of all time), and deep, insightful songwriting—left his home in Asheville, North Carolina in 1980 and headed out on the road as David Allen Coe’s guitarist when he was just twenty years old.
While in Coe’s band, he struck up relationships, including Betts, and members of the Nashville songwriting community including Dennis Robbins and Bobby Boyd, with whom he’d co-write country hits for George Jones (“Finally Friday”) and, most notably, Garth Brooks (the number one hit, “Two of a Kind, Workin’ On a Full House”). With Gov’t Mule, he would use the discipline he learned in that world and apply it to the intensity of the power trio format, which is what makes the chorus of songs like “Temporary Saint” and “Painted Silver Light” stay with you much longer than average songs of their ilk.
Tributes to fellow North Carolinian John Coltrane (the staggeringly intricate “Trane”) as well as Frank Zappa (an even more intricate “West Coast Groovies”) solidified it for me at the time: Gov’t Mule seemed to have stepped into my head and peeked at all the music I loved growing up that I thought no one else connected to or cared about: Son House, Free, Zappa, Coltrane, Mountain, and a bit of Sabbath coming from someone just as well-versed in blues, soul, and country music? I’d found a new favorite band.
Sadly, Woody passed away in the summer of 2000, only five short years after their debut album. Before then, however, they would follow up their debut with the superior (and still their best overall) Dose, and finally the excellent Life Before Insanity.
After a trilogy of tribute albums to Woody featuring an all-star rotating cast of his favorite bassists (the Deep End Volumes 1 and 2 and the live Deepest End), the Mule recruited the masterful Danny Louis on keys and session ace Andy Hess to fill the bass chair for two albums, before settling on Jorgen Carlsson who is as close as one can hope to get to Woody’s tone and attack.
Over the years, Gov’t Mule has been incorrectly lumped in with the “jam band” crowd. While, yes, they do jam, they’re actually just a rock band, plain and simple, thank you very much. More Humble Pie than Phish (although Haynes has been a member of both Phil Lesh and Friends and the Dead in the past), illustrating just how compartmentalized and subgenre-obsessed rock music has become over the years. The beauty of Gov’t Mule is that they belong to the bygone era of “if it rocks, it’s good”—regardless of some preconceived and arbitrary category.
Their self-titled debut announced their arrival to the world, loudly. And twenty-five years later, Gov’t Mule is still playing music for your ass.
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