Author: u0zp4y

As the 60s swung about them and their iconic mop-tops grew increasingly shaggy, The Beatles enjoyed an unprecedented level of celebrity. Ubiquitous, universally adored, John, Paul, George and Ringo were the four most famous faces on the planet. Their uncanny ability to crank out concise, era-defining hits was the key to their success, and their world-beating charm was significantly enhanced by their easy camaraderie.

The Beatles were a gang; a gang that everybody wanted to join. Boys wanted to be them, girls wanted to be with them. But the private world that they shared remained seductively impenetrable. Somewhere between the musty bowels of Liverpool’s Cavern and the sordid fleshpots of Hamburg, they had developed an understanding that bordered on telepathy, an intuitive harmony that manifested itself in the creation of perfect pop.

But times change. Especially when you live your life under an unforgiving media spotlight, indulged, pampered, preyed upon by divisive sycophants, your judgment almost permanently refracted through a psychedelic prism.

Bound together by the captivity of fame, The Beatles came to resent their essential closeness. And by 1968, as they set about recording their eponymous double White Album, they were pretty much sick of the sight of each other. Just as telepathic harmony between the four Beatles had facilitated the creation of perfect pop, so growing disharmony bred the raw, discordant fury of rock.

The most significant of a series of events that activated The Beatles’ metamorphosis from exemplary pop group to prototype rock band was the death of Brian Epstein. The band learned of their manager’s barbiturate overdose on August 27, 1967 while studying transcendental meditation with Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Wales. Within the week, they announced their decision to manage themselves.

Without Epstein’s cautious hand on the tiller, The Beatles were let off the leash creatively. John Lennon was hit the hardest by his death, and as he enthusiastically self-medicated with lashings of LSD, the balance of power steadily shifted towards Paul McCartney.

Epstein’s death left a gaping, substitute parent-shaped void in Lennon’s life (an unsatisfactory relationship with his absentee father combined with his mother’s early death left him vulnerable and in constant pursuit of a viable alternative). The drugs didn’t work, and his marriage to his first wife, Cynthia, was on its last legs. So when George Harrison suggested a trip in February 1968 to Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to attend a further course in TM under the tutelage of the Maharishi, John was the first to sign up.

Soon enough, Paul and Ringo followed, along with wives, partners, Celtic folkie Donovan, Beach Boy Mike Love, actress Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence. John had considered inviting Yoko Ono, the Japanese artist he had met at an art gallery in November 1966 and with whom a mutual attraction had grown, but as Cynthia was also in attendance he thought better of it.

Newly decanted into a drug-free zone and with nothing other than TM to occupy their minds, The Beatles soon set about writing new material. And with the only Western instrument to hand being an acoustic guitar, the White Album’s sound was born of necessity. Donovan taught John to fingerpick and, utilising the technique, Lennon wrote Dear Prudence (an exhortation to the shy, young Farrow to join in with the transcendental fun) and Julia (ostensibly about his late mother, though also about Yoko, the ‘Oceanchild’ in the lyric; Yoko literally means ‘child of the sea’ in Japanese). In all, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison wrote 17 of the songs that would appear on the White Album while in India. And, for the very first time, even Ringo wrote one. He was that bored.

But John was still locked inside his own private hell. Trapped in a loveless marriage, obsessed with thoughts of Yoko and unable to sleep (an insomnia diarised in the White Album’s I’m So Tired), he wrote Yer Blues. Reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac and the other blues boomers, the song was indicative of the fact that Lennon was far from happy. “When I wrote ‘I’m so lonely, I want to die’,” he admitted, “I’m not kidding. That’s how I felt, up there, trying to reach God and feeling suicidal.”

Having travelled to India in search of direction and wise counsel from a parental figure, Lennon found only disillusionment. He left Rishikesh in a huff, accusing the Maharishi (falsely, as it turned out) of making a pass at Mia Farrow, an incident chronicled in the accusatory Sexy Sadie. “I was rough on him,” he said. “I always expect too much. I’m always expecting my mother and I don’t get her. That’s what it is.”

Within a month John and Cynthia’s marriage had ended and he was in a relationship with Yoko.

From the dawn of their celebrity, all four Beatles were individually famous. The public was soon able to differentiate which Lennon/McCartney compositions were Paul songs and which were John songs. George’s songs reflected another persona entirely, while Ringo was invariably gifted with the toxic chalice of Paul’s latest novelty song. In the absence of Epstein, and with disharmony in the ranks, the band split further apart into their constituent parts. Rather than drawing the band closer, India had only served to accentuate their differences.

In Rishikesh, away from the skewed reality of London, only George had found enlightenment (along with six songs). Ringo complained about the food and left early, followed by Paul who, between bouts of meditation had knuckled down to write a dozen or so songs. John’s experience may not have been terribly spiritual, but it was certainly profound. Off the acid and stunned into misery by the pin-sharp tedium of real life, he came to terms with the fact that his marriage was over and that he was falling in love with Yoko. During his stay, Lennon wrote 15 of what he later claimed to be some of his “best” and “most miserable” songs.

When the four Beatles finally took their individual songs into Abbey Road Studios in May 1968, they worked more autonomously than ever before. Abandoning the meticulous crafting that had served them so well on Sgt. Pepper, they jammed out a few backing tracks collectively, but generally worked individually.

The majority of the White Album was recorded as if four solo albums were being made simultaneously. McCartney was no longer editing Lennon and vice versa, Harrison was left to his own devices, and Ringo Starr spent entire days twiddling his sticks in the studio’s reception; each songwriter took care of his own overdubs separately. A frustrated George Martin eventually abandoned production duties to go on holiday. His position as omnipresent fifth Beatle had been usurped.

While you can debate whether or not The Beatles were the first rock band, there’s no doubt whatsoever that Yoko was the first Yoko. John’s relationship with her was finally consummated just 11 days prior to the start of the White Album’s sessions at Abbey Road, and it caused him to re-evaluate his pampered existence. He had not been happy with Beatle-life for a long time, and his feelings were becoming clear as the band reconvened for the sessions.

“I was too scared to break away from The Beatles, which I’d been looking to do since we stopped touring [in ’66],” Lennon revealed in 1980. “I was vaguely looking for somewhere to go, but didn’t have the nerve… so I hung around. And then I met Yoko and fell in love: ‘This is more than a hit record. It’s more than everything…’”

Yoko, who wasn’t in the slightest bit impressed by Lennon’s Beatle status, opened his eyes to the vacuity of stardom. “That’s how The Beatles ended,” Lennon said. “Not because Yoko split The Beatles, but because she showed me what it was like to be Elvis Beatle and to be surrounded by sycophants and slaves who were only interested in keeping the situation as it was. She said to me:, ‘You’ve got no clothes on.’ Nobody had dared tell me that before.”

There was nothing particularly wrong with his marriage to Cynthia. It was, as he put it, “a normal marital state where nothing happened”. But Lennon wanted more, just as he always had. Above all else he wanted to be mothered. And with Yoko newly identified and installed as John’s perfect life partner, Cynthia wasn’t the only one facing redundancy. “Once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatsoever,” he said.

Their relationship was way beyond close. They had become two inseparable halves of a single entity, and Yoko a permanent fixture in the studio; she would be found sitting on top of a guitar amp or under the piano. When she became ill, a bed was installed in the studio. The besotted Lennon, oblivious to the feelings of his bandmates, stoked more resentment. The fact that the pair were now using heroin heightened tensions as Lennon became prone to temperamental outbursts.

The LSD-driven Technicolor pop lightness of Sgt. Pepper gave way to darker rock shades as the opiates held sway. Guitars distorted as moods blackened, and Yoko’s very presence initiated an edginess that mirrored the social chaos occurring outside of The Beatles’ bubble: a happy accident that only served to enhance the band’s rock’n’roll relevance.

To their credit, the others reacted to the Yoko-isation of the studio fairly well. They had to ask her to move every time they wanted to adjust their amps, but they generally favoured passive aggression over the frank exchange of fisticuffs you might expect of a band like The Who.

Lennon was hypersensitive to any negative reaction to his newly attached Siamese twin. The indignation of his fellow Beatles was at least understandable, but the negative press and public reaction to Yoko was not. It was this undue criticism (partly born of racism) that particularly rankled. A dormant hard-man persona came to the fore in Lennon. The moptop-era puppy fat was gone forever, now replaced with a lean, mean demeanour: Lennon the Peace Yob. It was the template for Liam Gallagher 25 years later, and a role Lennon himself would inhabit for the remainder of the decade.

Angry John was easily mistaken for Political John. Resentful that nobody liked his new girlfriend, he started ranting about peace, furiously planting acorns and shouting at journalists from bed. In so doing he inadvertently supplied the blueprint for Bono and every other rock star who assumes that just because they can sing in tune they’re Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill and Jesus Christ rolled into one.

The onset of John’s apparent political conscience coincided with Yoko’s arrival. And as civil unrest continued to simmer across the globe, The Beatles suddenly found their voice. The White Album sessions commenced with Revolution, written by Lennon in the foothills of Rishikesh.

“I wanted to put out what I felt about revolution,” he explained in 1970. “I thought it was about time we thought about it. The same as I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnam War.”

But there was ambiguity in Revolution’s lyric. John’s particular strain of revolt was to be purely humanitarian and strictly non-violent. Or was it? As he delivered Revolution’s pivotal ‘But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out’ lyric, he immediately followed it up with an entirely contradictory ‘in’. Conflicted? Perhaps. Mischievous by instinct? Definitely.

The first version of Revolution to hit record stores was faster and more aggressive compared to its bluesy, almost non-committal, White Album incarnation (titled Revolution 1). Re-recorded as an A-side, but demoted at Paul’s insistence to the B-side of the non-album Hey Jude single, this primal scream-propelled invitation to insurrection, replete with distorted guitar riff, managed to Trojan-horse its way into eight million homes. Heavy rock had barely been invented, but The Beatles, having nailed its key components, casually disseminated its message into every corner of the planet.

While John and Yoko were orbiting each other, McCartney was busy in his own world. A one-man Tin Pan Alley, McCartney has long been regarded as the soft pop cheese to Lennon’s hard rock chalk. But he could be just as hard, if not harder, than John. During the course of a particularly unguarded interview, ostensibly to promote Hey Jude in August ’68, McCartney flatly stated that: “Starvation in India doesn’t worry me one bit. Not one iota. It doesn’t, man.” He concluded: “The truth about me is that I’m pleasantly insincere.”

Never prepared to alienate the mainstream audience that had always formed The Beatles’ core constituency, McCartney’s stance in ’68 appeared counter-revolutionary next to Lennon’s. “People seem to think that all we say and do and sing is a political statement,” he said, “but it isn’t. In the end it’s always only a song.”

The final chapter in the Revolution saga, Revolution 9, was never “only a song”. It remains the White Album’s most ‘difficult’ moment. Eight minutes and 22 seconds of tape loops, sound effects and musique concrète, it was John and Yoko’s arty indulgence, and Paul argued against its inclusion.

John and Yoko’s relationship found its genesis in a shared fascination for the avant garde. In early May 1968, while Cynthia was holidaying in Italy, John invited Yoko over to his house. He played her tapes of his experimental home recordings, and over the course of the night the pair contrived to concoct an entire album’s worth of material. By morning they were a couple, and the commercially suicidal Two Virgins awaited its controversial release (it would emerge a week after the White Album, wrapped in the most unflattering nude cover in the history of sleeve art).

Enthused by their efforts, John and Yoko were keen to repeat the exercise, this time under The Beatles’ name. Two weeks later, with George Harrison along for the ride, they set to work on Revolution 9.

So why did McCartney take issue with what could have been construed as the most brave, progressive and genuinely revolutionary statement on the White Album? Surprisingly, it wasn’t down to the kind of musical conservatism one might expect of the man responsible for When I’m Sixty-Four. “I didn’t find that interesting,” he had shrugged of Two Virgins. “The music wasn’t shocking to me, because I’d made a lot like that myself.”

And he had. In January ’67 he’d recorded an avant-garde abstract sound collage of his own, the still-unreleased Carnival Of Light, for The Million Volt Light And Sound Wave show at London’s Roundhouse. Paul’s interest in the avant-garde significantly predated that of Lennon’s. It’s more than likely that his opposition to John’s Revolution 9 had less to do with its radical nature than with the fact it was an inferior version of John Cage’s Fontana Mix, released a whole decade earlier.

Up to and including Sgt. Pepper The Beatles were leaders. Revolution 9 recast them as followers. Yoko might have fast-tracked John into the avant-garde, but whether he had an actual aptitude for it was never considered. His Beatle status guaranteed Revolution 9 an audience, but didn’t guarantee that it was any good, or indeed any more valid, than the efforts of any other enthusiastic novice in the field.

Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention had concluded 1966’s Freak Out (the very first double album, and the only one other than Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde released prior to the White Album) with The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet, a sound collage not dissimilar to Revolution 9. In March 1968 the Mothers’ Pepper-parodying We’re Only In It For The Money had featured the accomplished Varese-esque musique concrète of The Chrome-Plated Megaphone Of Destiny. Rather than being a brave new harbinger of an age yet to come, Revolution 9 was the least influential and, arguably, least original piece on the White Album.

The most enduring lesson Paul McCartney learned while serving his apprenticeship on the Reeperbahn was that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. If you want to keep your audience satisfied while you exercise your right to artistic freedom, he reasoned, you’ve got to give them a bit of what they fancy while you’re at it, no matter how excruciating it might seem.

“We’ve always been a rock group, The Beatles,” Paul said a week before the White Album’s release. “It’s just that we’re not completely rock’n’roll. That’s why we do Ob-La-Di one minute and this [the stripped-back 12-bar blues Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?] the next. When we played in Hamburg we didn’t just play rock’n’roll all evening, because we had these fat old businessmen coming in and saying play us a mambo or a rumba. So we had to get into this kind of stuff.”

With Lennon insistent on the inclusion of Revolution 9, the equally hard-nosed McCartney figured that the only way to render eight minutes of avant-garde medicine palatable was with an awful lot of sugar. He was compelled to balance out Revolution 9’s uncompromising approach with Honey Pie’s syrupy schmaltz, Martha My Dear’s music-hall bounce, and Rocky Raccoon’s kid-friendly yarn of feuding frontier folk. Then there was Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da itself, a song memorably defined by John Lennon as “granny music shit”.

But in between the self-indulgence and the saccharine lay the sheer brilliance. The real reason we’re here: The Beatles’ enduring blueprint for rock.

With the White Album effectively delineated as four solo projects knitted together, the obvious question is: which one of The Beatles was it that first stumbled upon rock’s holy grail? And the answer? All four of them. Every one of rock’s key ingredients can be found scattered between Lennon’s Yer Blues, Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Ringo’s Don’t Pass Me By and McCartney’s Helter Skelter.

Yer Blues is the sound of pure disaffection, rock’s essential fuel. Lennon would retrospectively redefine its unalloyed passion as mere parody, a mocking comment on the burgeoning British blues boom. But there’s no doubt that its suicidal lyrical undertone was genuine. And whether he meant it or not, he certainly sounded like he did – especially on its key ‘feel so suicidal, even hate my rock’n’roll’ a line, a sentiment that encapsulated the disillusionment felt by a generation poised to abandon the utopian optimism of the Summer Of Love for its decidedly darker flip-side. The following year would see the doom-laden Yer Blues template – complete with the iron-booted bass drum thud that Ringo adopted across the entire White Album – echoed in the sound of Led Zeppelin.

Typically, neither John nor Paul took George’s compositions seriously. Frustrated, he persuaded his friend Eric Clapton to the studio, where the presence of an outsider made everyone shape up. “Paul got on the piano and played a nice intro and they all took it more seriously,” Harrison remembered. The resulting song, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, written with the Eastern concept of everything being relative in mind, boasts a brooding darkness that Clapton’s solos ignite and intensify. Rock guitar was never more passionate than this, and its overwrought crescendos set the bar high for all subsequent axe heroes.

And then there was Ringo. Carelessly benched by his self-absorbed colleagues, the drummer temporarily ‘left’ the band for a fortnight in August 1968, though not before recording Don’t Pass Me By. While Ringo finally nailed its lyric nursing a curry-ravaged intestinal tract in Rishikesh, he’d been working on the song for years. Ill-served by a throwaway, guitar-free, piano-heavy McCartney arrangement, the White Album’s incarnation of Don’t Pass Me By practically oom-pahs. Yet buried beneath the customary ‘comedy’ treatment accorded any Ringo vocal performance lay a southern rock exemplar par excellence. Neither his fellow Beatles nor George Martin realised the full boogie-rocking potential of Don’t Pass Me By’s driving, country-laced insistence. But the Georgia Satellites certainly did, granting Ringo’s pièce de résistance the barn-storming arrangement it deserved on their 1986 debut album.

With Lennon focused on Yoko, Harrison and Ringo Starr sidelined and George Martin’s influence receding, it was Paul who grasped the reins to gallop the White Album’s sound in the general direction of rock’s future.

As September wore on and sessions ground toward their fraught conclusion, the four Beatles set about recording the loudest and dirtiest performance of their career. Eighteen takes later, they had Helter Skelter, one of the prime progenitors of heavy metal.

“I read a review of a record [The Who’s I Can See For Miles] which said that the group goes really wild with echo and screaming and everything,” McCartney said in ’68, “And I thought, ‘That’s a pity, I would have liked to do something like that.’ Then I heard it and it was nothing like it. It was straight and sophisticated. So we did [Helter Skelter]… I like noise.”

While very much a group effort by comparison to the majority of the White Album’s performances, Helter Skelter was most definitely Paul’s baby. Both Helter Skelter and their other proto-metal experiment, the re-cut version of Revolution, attained a level of sonic extremity later disparaged by Harrison and Lennon.

“Revolution is pretty good and it grooves along,” said Harrison, 30 years later, “but I don’t particularly like the noise it makes. And I say ‘noise’ because I didn’t like the distorted sound of John’s guitar.” Lennon was even keener to distance himself from Helter Skelter. “That’s Paul completely,” he said in 1980. “It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me.”

Helter Skelter’s influence continued beyond heavy rock and metal into mid-70s punk. Siouxsie And The Banshees recorded the song for their debut album, 1978’s The Scream (though possibly more for its macabre association with Charles Manson, whose bizarre interpretation of the song’s lyric as an incitement to commit mass murder only served to accentuate its enduring appeal in certain quarters).

Perhaps more significantly, Helter Skelter’s violent nativity was witnessed by one of punk’s leading sonic architects. By this point, George Martin had effectively thrown in the towel by going away on holiday, though not before scribbling a quick note for his rookie assistant Chris Thomas to “make yourself available to The Beatles”.

Thomas (who eventually went on to produce Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols) was to enjoy something of a baptism of fire: George Harrison running around the studio with a flaming ashtray on his head ‘doing an Arthur Brown’ while Paul McCartney screamed ever more demented vocal takes for Helter Skelter.

The 30, dizzyingly diverse components of The Beatles’ ninth studio collection were finally released on November 22, 1968. Housed in a plain white sleeve (embossed with the band’s name and a unique serial number) designed by pop-artist Richard Hamilton in collaboration with McCartney, the apparently eponymous set (a working title of A Doll’s House had been abandoned when Family released Music In A Doll’s House in July) was greeted by an unprecedented chorus of critical disapproval. Writing in the New York Times, Nik Cohn dismissed the album as “boring beyond belief”, while The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called it “their most consistent and probably their worst”.

The truth of the matter was that the critics had, as usual, missed the revolution unfolding before their very ears. They focused largely on the ‘idiotic mediocrity’ of the ‘pretentious’ Revolution 9 and its counteracting anodyne ‘pastiches’. Interpreting The Beatles’ paradigm shift from overworked, ornate mini-symphonies to unfussy production values as sheer artistic indolence, they missed the crucial point that hindsight makes so plain: the White Album’s enduring influence on rock’s future lay in its embrace of the easy over the difficult; of visceral feel over cerebral contrivance; groove over gimmickry.

The Beatles found their way to the clear-headed simplicity of the White Album by pioneering methods that are now so familiar in the rock arena that they’ve become clichés. First in Wales, then in India, they were ‘getting their heads together in the country’; from acoustic demos at George’s to informal studio jams at Abbey Road they were ‘stripping back to basics’.

And not before time. Since Sgt. Pepper, pop musicians had seemed compelled to produce dense, psych-laced production numbers. The charts were clogged with countless kaftan-trussed quartets all desperately over-stretching themselves in the general direction of the cod-classical. This overwrought whiter-shade-of-pompous landscape, where proto-prog pretentiousness and lyrical gobbledygook prevailed, needed saving from itself.

The White Album arrived into 1968 like a breath of fresh air. It was just as influential and game-changing as punk would be less than a decade later. As The Beatles’ sound palette and cardinal frame of reference refocused away from the European orchestral tradition and back on to American roots music (country and blues, rock’s fundamental foundations), so vast sections of the contemporary musical community were almost bound to follow.

The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet often gets the kudos for leading the way in this regard, but not only did The Beatles boast a far broader cultural influence in ’68, The White Album – though recorded later – also hit stores two weeks earlier. While The Beatles’ influence may have been diminished by a combination of the Paul-directed Magical Mystery Tour movie (the band’s inaugural artistic own goal, televised the previous Boxing Day – to almost universal bafflement) and a marked dip in John’s popularity since he’d fallen under the influence of ‘that woman’, they continued to outrank the Stones in the public mind. The Stones, only just recovering from the disastrous, sub-Pepper catastrophe that was Their Satanic Majesties Request, were still widely considered to be slavishly following The Beatles’ lead in all things artistic, whether they’d already moved on or not. And while The Band’s Americana-birthing Music From Big Pink album had been released two months into the White Album sessions, and could therefore be considered as a potential influence on its roots-ward direction, the majority of its core material had been composed in Rishikesh four months earlier. (Even without benefit of the ornate curlicues of quasi-classical multi-tracking, Bach trumpets and reverse tape-loops, the stripped Beatles continued to be progressive with Lennon’s resolutely linear Happiness Is A Warm Gun casually challenging the very nature of song structure.)

They fashioned their look in a similarly simple style. The gaudy showbiz flash of the Pepper era joined the Epstein-dictated sartorial conservatism of their touring years on the cultural scrap heap. In their black waistcoats, white shirts, black hats, snake-hipped, low-slung, tapered and tailored flares, they looked more like a gang than like a marching band. Cuban-heeled, ankle-hugging Chelsea boots, mix-and-match moustaches and meticulously mussed hair suggested the brooding frontier cool of the American West, riverboat gamblers with issues. It was an enduring stylistic template for the likes of the Black Crowes, The Raconteurs and the Temperance Movement. The ’68 Beatles – a one-stop shop for 21st-century stylists – were rock-band-cool incarnate.

Looking back on the White Album, Lennon and McCartney were more than satisfied. “I always preferred it to all the other albums, including Pepper,” John said in ’71, “I thought the music was better. The Pepper myth is bigger, but the music on the White Album is far superior.”

“I think it was a very good album,” Paul agreed, but with reservations. “It stood up, but it wasn’t a pleasant one to make. Then again, sometimes those things work for your art.”

While it is indeed the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl, and great rock’n’roll is more often than not born of friction, antipathy and discord, any relationship based in negativity, even that of rock’s biggest band, cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Marginalised, underappreciated and made to feel redundant he may have been, but Ringo had already found that any decision to break-up The Beatles was way beyond his pay grade. George Harrison too: the guitarist ‘left’ the band for five days in January 1969, and was persuaded back only on condition that McCartney abandoned all plans for the band to return to the road.

In the end, though, there was no saving The Beatles. However much McCartney wanted the band to carry on, it was abundantly clear that Lennon, keen to investigate fresh artistic vistas with Yoko, had completely lost interest in continuing to work within the constraints of a four-piece rock band.

Lennon quit in September ’69, and McCartney, after months in denial, finally turned off the life support machine in April ’70.

The Beatles were a leviathan, a cultural colossus whose influence on their musical contemporaries was wholly unprecedented and remains unsurpassed. They were the first four-piece guitar band to smoulder moodily in leather jackets and shades; the first to grow their hair, to fly their freak flag, to tune in, turn on and flaunt it in the tabloids; the first to India; the first to soundtrack a Revolution; and the first to fall out over the first – and still the very best – Yoko.

With the White Album, The Beatles delivered all the necessary components for what we now know as classic rock, but the disharmony that facilitated its birth proved fatal. As John Lennon himself acknowledged: “The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album.”

Ultimately, having planted the seeds of sonic revolution in the fertile soil of the late 1960s, The Beatles’ work was done. With the spiritual progeny of their final incarnation on the rise, the artistically drained former Fabs were suddenly rendered old and in the way, an immovable reminder of a lost innocence, too ubiquitous to ignore, too enormous to eclipse.

For the green shoots of rock to thrive, The Beatles had to die.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 202, September 2014

Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records. 

On May 24 1988, Faith No More played their last live show with Chuck Mosley as frontman, at London’s Town & Country Club. A punch-up in a hotel lobby several days prior brought long-brewing tensions to a head, and while relationships were mended (barely) enough to see out the end of the band’s European tour, it became apparent that the four-year partnership between Chuck and the rest of the band wouldn’t last.

Singer-less but not rudderless, the remaining members of the band – drummer Mike Bordin, guitarist Jim Martin, bassist Billy Gould and keyboardist Roddy Bottum – began work on their third record, a release that would change the musical landscape. Returning home to San Francisco, a furious summer of writing and demoing followed, yielding much of the material that would make up their third album, The Real Thing. The entire record had essentially been written before a replacement singer had even been considered, and while a steady number of people applied for the position, there were few the band contacted to try out. In one of music history’s great ‘what if’ scenarios, one of those people was Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell.

“Faith No More asked for Chris Cornell because here was a band that was poised to be great – they just needed an exceptional singer,” explains Matt Wallace, The Real Thing’s producer and longtime FNM collaborator.

More a ‘how’s about it?’ than a genuine request, FNM instead looked to another distinctive vocal talent. Living almost five hours up the Californian coast in the town of Eureka, Mike Patton was already earning some notoriety as the vocalist of the experimental act Mr. Bungle, a band as likely to launch into proto-death metal howling as they were to blast out an R&B crooner. That band’s bootlegs had impressed FNM founders Billy Gould and Mike Bordin enough to invite him down to rehearse, and soon Faith No More had landed themselves a new vocalist.

“Mike Patton was the only guy around who understood the music we were writing,” admits Billy. “We just focused on what made the music better – Mike did that more than anybody else.”

“The Real Thing was us having one last shot at things,” Mike Bordin reveals. “England was the closest any audience had come to understanding us, but even then with the new singer nobody knew what we were going to sound like. As for ‘Why Mike Patton?’ Well, at the time you’d have, like, the pop, Bryan Adams guy, the androgynous glam rock guy, the evil, satanic Sunset Strip metal guy – but we didn’t want any of those fuckers, because we weren’t any of those fuckers. Mike [Patton] didn’t fit in anywhere, either – he could be any of those guys and none of them at the same time.”

FNM couldn’t afford to give Mike Patton time to acclimatise to his new environs; the album had already been written and they were itching to get into the studio while the iron was hot. Luckily, it turned out they had landed themselves an artist whose work ethic could put most industrial assembly lines to shame.

“He was very focused – he wrote all the melodies and lyrics in a two-week span,” Matt recalls. “It was exceptional – Chuck needed to be pushed uphill sometimes and be cajoled into the recording process, but Mike Patton was ready to work.”

If such time constraints stifled Patton’s creativity, it doesn’t show – he channelled everything from his inner Tom Araya on Surprise! You’re Dead! to sleazy lounge singer on Edge Of The World. “Having Edge Of The World and Surprise! You’re Dead! on the same record are the bookends of what Faith No More do,” says Matt. “I’d liken them to a five-pointed spiderweb pointing in equal and opposite directions; that’s what made them unique.’”

Gelling as a unit in the studio, the band’s next test would be to introduce their new vocalist to their fanbase. The opportunity came on November 4, 1988, at a hometown show at the i-Beam. As with most singer changes, it was met with resistance. “After Mike did his first show with us, he got this letter and he was like, ‘Holy shit, my first fanmail’,” Mike Bordin remembers. “He opened it up and this guy was like, ‘You’re a macho creep and an asshole. Fuck you, pig – we want Chuck back.’”

Possessing the kind of tour schedule that would give most 80s hardcore bands a nervous breakdown, FNM set out to prove the doubters wrong. By the time The Real Thing was released in June 1989, the stars had begun to align. A&R reps and industry bodies descended on Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre the night before to see the band put on an incendiary performance that signalled the birth of a new era. Closing on a howling rendition of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, accompanied by Slash and Duff McKagan, the band were no longer outsiders – their infiltration of the mainstream had begun.

“By the time the band came back to Hollywood from being on tour they were amazing,” recalls Matt. “They were returning conquerors – they weren’t the band I knew as kids. The change in Faith No More from The Real Thing onwards is so much more than just getting another singer – it was a transformation of the whole band.”

Like most metamorphoses, FNM’s success wouldn’t come overnight, but the band were determined to play as often as possible to get the word out. Their success was mixed – tours with enormous acts such as Metallica and Robert Plant exposed them to whole new avenues of fame, but they still had to play almost every night to keep their profile up. It had its upsides, though – it also meant they could reconnect with old friends, as they did when on a two-leg tour with Soundgarden and Voivod in January and March 1990, and it also allowed the band to witness history in the making when they played at The Loft in Berlin on November 9, 1989, the same night the Berlin Wall fell.

“The funniest thing in being part of monumental events, is that when they all stack up they start to feel almost normal to you,” admits Billy. “We got used to it pretty quickly – but that first year was particularly tough. Some of us didn’t have homes to come back to, and a lot of us were living off our per diems [a daily allowance given to the band by the label].”

Everything changed for Faith No More with the release of the album’s second single, Epic – a fitting name for a song that would launch Faith No More’s career into the stratosphere.

“The label had spent their wad emotionally and financially on supporting From Out of Nowhere and it did nothing – literally nothing,” admits Bordin. “They came to us in London and met us at the Columbia hotel and they basically said, ‘Rather than have us pick the next single, we want you to tell us what single to put out.’ We unanimously wanted Epic, because we loved the song at that point and how it worked for us onstage. It had many different elements to it that weren’t traditional in approach.”

But out on tour, the band didn’t have a chance to savour their success. “We were playing on the road, working our asses off and fucking with each other, so we completely missed it when it blew up!” laughs Bordin. “Somebody would be like, ‘It’s charting here’ or ‘It’s getting radio play there’, but we were just looking to make sure the tour made it all the way to L’Amour in Brooklyn, right? We had no way of knowing it was blowing up as far afield as Australia. Epic allowed us to keep working and upped the narrative so far as crowds and people being aware of the band goes.”

FNM were now media darlings, the vanguard for an oncoming crashing tide of alternative music that would dominate the next decade. A couple of award ceremonies and an appearance on Saturday Night Live brought 1990 to a close, and the following month they were back in front of a massive live audience, at the illustrious Rock In Rio II. They played alongside titans such as Guns N’ Roses, Megadeth, Judas Priest and, er, New Kids On The Block.

“Things were changing; it was still the Whitesnake and Poison world, the new breed hadn’t come around just yet,” Bordin says. “We were insinuating ourselves into the mainstream, taking up the charge from bands like Metallica. You needed bands like Metallica and Guns N’ Roses to make it huge but keep in that punk rock energy – it’s the difference between [Ted Nugent songs] Stranglehold and Wang Dang Sweet Poontang. There was less and less nutrition and more acts just surviving, so there had to be some kind of change in there, opening up new fields where something could grow.”

The Real Thing had done more for Faith No More than they could have imagined, ambitious vision or not. Having played harder and experienced more in the frantic three years since recruiting Mike Patton, the band had managed to completely infiltrate the mainstream and push themselves as an entirely new movement, standing alongside bands like Jane’s Addiction, Living Colour and Soundgarden to present a vision for alternative metal, proof positive that a band can do anything and still change the world.

“The Real Thing definitely impacted on future bands,” agrees Matt. “Over the years I’ve had a bunch call me up to work with them simply because of that record; System of a Down, Korn, Hoobastank… a bunch that were obviously impacted by that music and what Patton was doing vocally. It truly changed the changed the face of music.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 326, August 2019

Staff writer for Metal Hammer, Rich has never met a feature he didn’t fancy, which is just as well when it comes to covering everything rock, punk and metal for both print and online, be it legendary events like Rock In Rio or Clash Of The Titans or seeking out exciting new bands like Nine Treasures, Jinjer and Sleep Token. 

Iron Maiden have kicked off the North American leg of their The Future Past tour with shows at the North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, CA, and at the Michelob Ultra Arena in Las Vegas, NV. The band have now released official photos from the first night, a 20,000-capacity outdoor arena 15 miles south of San Diego city centre.

Iron Maiden’s setlist remains unchanged from the first night of the tour at the Arena Stožice in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in May 2023, which saw them give live debuts to five songs: Days Of Future Past, The Time Machine, Death Of The Celts and Hell On Earth from Senjutsu, and Alexander The Great from Somewhere in Time.

Last month Iron Maiden announced the first dates of their 50th anniversary Run For Your Lives world tour, which will kick off in late May 2025 in Hungary and include the band’s biggest-ever UK headline show at the London Stadium on June 28. The next show on the Future Past tour is at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, CA, tomorrow night (October 8). Full dates below.

Iron Maiden: North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre setlist

Caught Somewhere In Time
Stranger In A Strange Land
The Writing On The Wall
Days Of Future Past
The Time Machine
The Prisoner
Death Of The Celts
Can I Play With Madness
Heaven Can Wait
Alexander The Great
Fear Of The Dark
Iron Maiden

Encore
Hell On Earth
The Trooper
Wasted Years

Iron Maiden: The Future Past

Oct 08: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA
Oct 12: Sacramento Aftershock Festival, CA
Oct 14: Portland Moda Center, OR
Oct 16: Tacoma Dome, WA
Oct 18: Salt Lake City Delta Center, UT
Oct 19: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 22: St Paul Xcel Energy Center, MN
Oct 24: Rosemont Allstate Arena, IL
Oct 26: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Oct 27: Quebec Videotron Arena, QC
Oct 30: Montreal Centre Bell, QC
Nov 01: Philadelphia Wells Fargo Center, PA
Nov 02: Brooklyn Barclays Center, NY
Nov 06: Worcester DCU Center, MA
Nov 08: Pittsburgh PPG Paints Arena, PE
Nov 09: Newark Prudential Center, NJ
Nov 12: Baltimore CFG Bank Arena, MD
Nov 13: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 16: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Nov 17: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX

Iron Maiden Run For Your Lives 2025 tour dates

May 27: Budapest Aréna, Hungary *
May 31: Prague Letnany Airport, Czech Republic *
Jun 01: Bratislava TIPOS Arena, Slovakia *
Jun 05: Trondheim Rocks, Norway ≠
Jun 07: Stavanger SR-Bank Arena, Norway *
Jun 09: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark *
Jun 12: Stockholm 3Arena, Sweden *
Jun 13: Stockholm 3Arena, Sweden *
Jun 16: Helsinki Olympic Stadium, Finland *
Jun 21: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK ^
Jun 22: Manchester Co-op Live, UK ^
Jun 25: Dublin Malahide Castle, Ireland *^
Jun 28: London Stadium, UK *^
Jun 30: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK ^
Jul 03: Belfort Eurockéennes, France ≠
Jul 05: Madrid Estadio Cívitas Metropolitano, Spain **
Jul 06: Lisbon MEO Arena, Portugal **
Jul 09: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland **
Jul 11: Gelsenkirchen Veltins-Arena, Germany **
Jul 13: Padova Stadio Euganeo, Italy **
Jul 15: Bremen Bürgerweide, Germany **
Jul 17: Vienna Ernst Happel Stadium, Austria **
Jul 19: Paris Paris La Défense Arena, France **
Jul 23: Arnhem GelreDome, Netherlands **
Jul 25: Frankfurt Deutsche Bank Park, Germany **
Jul 26: Stuttgart Cannstatter Wasen, Germany **
Jul 29: Berlin Waldbühne, Germany **
Aug 02: Warsaw PGE Narodowy, Poland **

* = Halestorm support
^= The Raven Age support
** = Avatar support
≠ = Festival date

Tickets for all shows are on sale now.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 38 years in music industry, online for 25. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.  

Warren Haynes and his band Gov’t Mule are one of US rock’s not-so-secret-weapons, appealing to rock fans, blues fans and the jam band fans alike, unafraid to dabble in psychedelia and even reggae. In 2013, Haynes sat down with Classic Rock to look back over a career of a group who have marched entirely to their own beat.

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In 1997, Warren Haynes and Allen Woody were forced to wrestle with a conundrum. For the previous three years the guitarist/singer and bass player had been moonlighting from the Allman Brothers Band with their own group, Gov’t Mule. Now it was time to choose.

For Haynes especially, the opportunity of being a Brother in a band he’d idolised in his youth was heaven-sent. But on the flip side, the Mule represented a gleaming blank canvas, and when their self-titled debut record had been released two years earlier it garnered immediate cult success, allowing the band (completed by drummer Matt Abts) a platform for their Cream, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mountain and James Gang power-trio-inspired fantasies. With heavy hearts the pair eventually turned their backs on fanboy loyalty and what had appeared to be a comfortable long-term gig to take the proverbial leap of faith.

“It took us around eighteen months to reach a decision. There was a lot of turmoil within the Allmans back then, especially between the original members,” Haynes explains, referring to Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, ‘Jaimoe’ Johanson and Butch Trucks. “Communication was lacking and rehearsals had dried up, just like the writing or recording of new material, whereas in the world of Gov’t Mule all of those things were going on.”

Today, that choice now seems like a complete no-brainer. Fêted by fellow musicians and fans alike, Gov’t Mule are among rock music’s hardest-touring acts, rolling out sets of more than three hours’ duration night after night, each one different. The band are proud that, drawing on the 300-plus songs in their repertoire and often featuring special guests, no two shows are alike. Collaborations with a Who’s Who of the rock world, from Jack Bruce and John Entwistle to Slash, Chris Squire, Billy Gibbons, Flea, Roger Glover, Robby Krieger, Steve Winwood, Tony Levin, Jerry Cantrell and Bootsy Collins, reflect Haynes’s status. The support he received when Allen Woody passed away in the summer of 2000 played its part in the band’s decision to continue.

“I got cards and emails from Leslie West [of Mountain, whose bassist Felix Pappalardi was shot] and a beautiful message about losing Cliff Burton from James Hetfield [Metallica],” Haynes reveals. “Dave Grohl also contacted me to talk about how he had felt when Kurt Cobain died.”

From the ZZ Top-esque Bad Little Doggie to the rhythmic Thorazine Shuffle and Soulshine’s heart-melting psychedelia, Gov’t Mule’s often southern-tinged rock can be radio-friendly as well as muso-intensive. Each year the band – completed by bassist Jorgen Carlsson and keysman Danny Louis – grows a little bigger, although without really showing up on the radar of the casual fan. This is because they come from the ‘more is more’ mind-set: more notes, longer sets, extended jamming and an overwhelming choice of product. Haynes knows his band won’t be for everybody. But, following the apparent retirement of the Allmans – who he rejoined for a second, 14-year spell at the millennium’s turn – in many ways what they do is now unique..

“We’re much more of a rock band than most of the jam-bands out there,” he says. “And I would imagine that post-Allman Brothers we’ll probably end up inheriting some of those songs because they need to stay alive.

“My favourite thing about Gov’t Mule is that it’s a laboratory for us to experiment in just about any way we choose. Our audience travels with us each time we go out on a limb, releasing a reggae album or paying homage to our heroes. That’s not necessarily true of too many other bands.”

Haynes is referring to Dub Side Of The Mule, a triple-disc set which pulls together three hours of Mule originals and reggae covers, some of which were performed with Toots & The Maytals leader Toots Hibbert, and Dark Side Of The Mule and Stoned Side Of The Mule, their in-concert re-recordings of songs by Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones.

“Our audiences really show their loyalty through our live performances. Playing for three hours each night, we tend to get away with murder,” Haynes says, “but the fans love us for it. Whether it’s your first Gov’t Mule show or your hundred-and-thirtieth, with an all-new set-list you won’t have seen it before.”

The Mule are tolerant of concert recorders, despite the existence of Mule Tracks, a self‑run website that enables fans to purchase live album-quality downloads of their concerts. Haynes admits that Mule Tracks provides an important additional revenue stream that goes towards helping them retain their independence.

“People can bring their microphones and record us – we even set up a taper section if the venue allows it. As long as no money changes hands, we’re cool with that,” he explains. “But Mule Tracks has been very successful for us, compensating for the fact that just about every band’s album sales are shrinking. We’re not driven by record sales or media interest, but those changes do affect us. Bands in general are struggling to reinvent themselves, figuring out how to survive.”

Just like the bands that pioneered rock music, Gov’t Mule eschew pizzazz of any sort. On the day we meet, in a Central London hotel, Haynes, wearing a smart dark shirt, could be mistaken for a middle-aged Silicon Valley exec about to chair a business meeting, but on stage he dresses down. If someone said he looked like a roadie, would he be offended?

“No. It’s something I’ve dealt with my entire life. And there have been very few times in my career when I’ve felt the need for sartorial elegance.”

As you might expect of a band named after a term from the Deep South that describes a woman with a large posterior, Gov’t Mule’s live show is equally gimmick-free – there’s no backdrop or intro music, for example.

“That’s something we inherited from the Allman Brothers. Also from the Grateful Dead to a certain extent, this whole unpretentious way of playing music. Bands weren’t expected to jump around or be ‘entertainers’. We’re musicians, and we’re more humble about our appearance on stage than a lot of other types of band. And people kinda like that. No one would want to see us dancing, I can assure you.”

With Gov’t Mule the music is everything. Haynes appreciates that expecting audiences to listen for three hour asks an awful lot, unless you’re a particular kind of fan. “It’s demanding of their attention spans but it’s what the fans want. And in some ways we have painted ourselves into a corner,” he admits. “A few nights ago in Rome there were complaints when we played for just two hours and thirty-five minutes. But that was due to the curfew – it had nothing to do with us being ‘tired’. It’s why we didn’t take a break between sets that night.”

Haynes believes strongly that his band are a part of what Skynyrd recently called ‘the last of a dying breed’. “A whole generation of bands are standing on the brink of extinction. And although I’m younger than a lot of the names that we’re starting to lose, it includes Gov’t Mule,” he acknowledges. “Let’s start with the blues. Now that BB King is gone, Buddy Guy is the last surviving truly iconic guy that from genre. And just think about the names we’ve lost from the world of classic rock. Look around and see how many have gone. It’s quite an awakening.”

Although he admits “we’re comparing the greatest music you’ve ever heard to new music, so you must lower the bar a little or be a snob”, there is at least some hope. He cites two New-York-based groups – The London Souls and Earl Greyhound – as names to check out, and also offers praise for a 17-year-old blues guitarist called Marcus King who, he says, “plays great, sings his ass off and writes really good songs. He’s opened for us. And in the same way as Derek Trucks [of the Allmans and Tedeschi Trucks Band] was really good at a very young age, so is Marcus.”

The root of the problem has been discussed many times before – TV talent shows, lack of industry support, and external distractions such as computer games and the internet. Haynes rues the fact that so many of today’s aspiring musos seek a short fix.

“It reminds me of the days pre-Sgt Pepper, when artists were disposable,” he sighs. “Back then nobody expected careers to last anything more than two or three years. And that’s the way we’re going again now. There should be some room for artistic development. Labels like A&M and Asylum would allow that – so long as you made good music and grew artistically, you were given time. Not any more.”

And Haynes himself won’t commit to the quickest fix of all. “I’m not going on to social media,” he thunders. “What’s the point of making every facet of my life available for the public?”

One artist who has succeeded in providing a rare chink of daylight is Joe Bonamassa. He’s younger and better presented than Haynes, and his growing profile suggests that the blues can be popular again if done thoughtfully and well.

“Joe is proving that you don’t have to follow the traditional model or what everyone else expects of you,” Haynes offers. “Talent can pay off. He is an important artist. I’ve known him since he was sixteen and he played great even back then. In the States it had looked as though it wasn’t going to happen, but he persevered and now he’s taken off.”

Business-wise, Bonamassa and his manager Roy Weisman certainly have their heads screwed on, with each touring campaign planned down to the minutest of details. However, some say that both Bonamassa and the Mule release way too much product. Over the course of 18 months we’ve been handed Dark-, Stoned– and Dub Side Of The Mule and an album with John Scofield (Sco‑Mule), now followed by Haynes’s new solo record, Ashes & Dust (see sidebar).

“Those archival releases are linked in with the band’s twentieth anniversary,” he explains. “When the next important anniversary comes along, that’s something that maybe we won’t do again. The sense of overload is multiplied by each product containing a lot of music. None of our CDs are thirty or forty minutes long. We don’t set out to fill every last second of a CD with music, but somehow we always end up doing that.”

Such forms of excess inspire some phenomenal acts of devotion. Haynes knows of fans who have attended more than 200 of his band’s shows.

“I appreciate that, though I admit I don’t really understand it,” he remarks with a chuckle. “I guess the only reason could be that the shows are always different. And that the people concerned are mentally unstable – in a nice way.”

Haynes is ambivalent when Gov’t Mule are lumped in with the so-called jam-band scene.

“What annoys me is the inference that we’re just a bunch of hippies noodling around, in the same way that the Allman Brothers resented being called [just] a southern rock band – especially if your image of a southern rock band is whiskey, rednecks and racism.”

Until the Allmans signed off with what has been termed their ‘final’ gig, at the Beacon Theatre, New York on October 28, 2014, Haynes had served double duty with the Brothers and the Mule, also taking on the Jerry Garcia role in the post-Grateful Dead spin-off group The Dead. He derives a special sense of fulfilment from the total of around 25 years spent with the Allmans.

“That’s maybe because the last versions of that band [before I joined them] really weren’t the greatest in their history,” he points out. Addressing the subject of their ‘retirement’, Haynes chooses his words carefully, mindful of several facts. Firstly, a lack of categorical clarity regarding the band’s state of existence. Secondly, that their most recent studio record, Hittin’ The Note, was recorded as long ago as 2003. And finally their stubborn refusal to tour Europe for the first time since 1991.

“Yeah, there was dignity, but I’m not happy with the way it ended publicly,” he says. “Was it the final tour, or not? Nobody stood up and said: this is what’s happening, this is why we’re doing it. Somebody would say something in the press, and another would contradict it.

“The last shows that we did were very good, and the final one was amazing. But I do regret that we didn’t get to make a final studio album. And I really felt that the band should have tapped into its potential outside of America. It took way too long for some of the guys to understand that it was important in the long run. With the Allman Brothers, communication was always the biggest obstacle – especially the original members – and that kept the band from doing things that it could have and should have done. It’s very unfortunate.”

So is it really over?

“I think so, though it’s not really my place to say. If they want to keep it going, that’s their prerogative, and I would never rule out a reunion. But at the moment that doesn’t seem likely to happen.”

Neither will Haynes be present for Fare Thee Well, the 50th-anniversary shows with four original members of the Grateful Dead – Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir – teaming up with pianist Bruce Hornsby, keyboard player Jeff Chimenti and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio.

“I’d been doing a separate thing from them, and my schedule’s pretty crazy. I couldn’t have done it had they asked me,” he explains. “Fare Thee Well came about via the merging of a lot of different camps. I’m not a part of it but I’m very happy that they’re doing something to celebrate such an important milestone.”

Meanwhile, the Mule trundle on, although Haynes admits that fresh guest contributors are on the wane. In 2010 the band played the Who’s Next album in its entirety, so presumably Pete Townshend must feature on Haynes’s hit-list?

“Oh yeah, and BB King was on there too,” he says sadly. “I’ve never even met Pete, but I would be honoured to do something with him should the opportunity arise. I’ve never played with Jimmy Page or Mark Knopfler, though I recently played with Jeff Beck, which was a very big deal. I’ve played with Peter Green too. But, Peter being Peter, he played harmonica [not guitar]. It was a beautiful experience.”

Haynes admits to often wondering how much bigger a band like Gov’t Mule could become, drawing hope from the smattering of “younger people” beginning to attend their shows, alongside musicians, hippies, jam-band loonies and concert recorders.

“Perhaps we represent something their generation has been robbed of,” he offers. “They’re discovering our style of rock music for the first time. I firmly believe that someone who’s passionate about music who wanders into a Gov’t Mule show is going to leave a fan.”

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 213, July 2015

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.