Armed with his vintage Gibson ES-335 and PRS amps, Haynes discusses a tune with saxophonist
Ron Hollaway at Willie Nelson's Pedernales Studios in Austin, Texas. Photo by Stewart O'Shields
FEATURE > WARREN HAYNES
Did you cut your solos live?
All the guitar solos were recorded live on the
basic track with the band—I don’t go back and
overdub them later. I find that’s pretty futile
in improvisational music. For me, capturing
the spirit of the whole band hitting on all
cylinders is the most important thing, and the
best way to capture that is to have the whole
band in the room looking at each other while
we’re playing. That’s what I am accustomed
to. It’s how we make Gov’t Mule records and
how we did the last Allman Brothers record.
Sometimes I think, “Well, maybe for the next
record I will overdub more,” but it never turns
out that way. I always find I’m happier with
the solos I play on the live track.
How did you approach recording the
horn section?
That’s an Austin-based horn section that we
added after the fact. All the tenor sax solos,
including the sax through the wah on “Sick
of My Shadow” and the harmony saxes on
the end of “Real Lonely Night” were played
by Ron Holloway. He has been a good
friend for many years and will be in the
band I tour with.
With all the horns and keyboards, it’s easy
for some instruments to get lost in the
shuffle. How did you avoid having a cluttered mix?
solid as a roCk
Legendary bassist George Porter Jr. talks
about holding down the low end on Man in Motion.
Armed with his vintage Fender P bass, George Porter Jr. established the sound and feel of modern New Orleans
music with the seminal R&B band, the Meters. Even
though Man in Motion was the first full studio record Porter
has recorded with Haynes, it wasn’t the first time they had
worked together.
“A year or so after the Mule’s original bass player passed
away, Warren was doing a record and Art Neville and myself
got a call to come up and play on the record,” remembers
Porter. “Pretty much from there, the handwriting was on the
wall. When they decided to go out on the road to support that
album, Greg Rzab and I got the call to do the tour.”
Although the band Haynes assembled for the new album
had never played together before, the rhythm section had
some history together. “I had played with both Ivan Neville
and Raymond Weber before,” says Porter. “They grew up in
and around the scene in New Orleans, musically and oth-
erwise, their whole lives. The three of us had a connection
that was pretty developed. When Warren showed us the
songs, we could tell it was right in the vein of the music
we grew up with.”
When it comes to the tools of his trade, Porter is
rarely found without his iconic Fender P bass. “The
neck on the P bass is a ’ 63 and the body had a
fretless neck on it when I bought it in 1970.
The Meters didn’t like the fretless concept,
and I was ordered to get rid of it or ‘they
Even though the band didn’t like the fret-
less sound, Porter didn’t abandon the axe
completely. “Basically, I really liked the tone
of that particular bass and the CBS pickups
more than I liked the sound of the original
P basses. The CBS basses seemed to have
a lot more punch to them. So instead of
looking for another bass, I went looking
