Philzone.com: Well, it looked like it was going to be a relatively calm summer for you this year...

Jimmy Herring: Well, I thought it was going to be the calmest one for a while, but you know man, five years of not being in the clubs, I was missing it. I had an opportunity to go and play with [Colonel] Bruce [Hampton] in April and I had an opportunity to play with Rob Barraco's band [The Dragonflys] in July and then another one to go play with Bruce again in August. I figured I would have some free time - you know, without The Dead or Phil & Friends playing. The July gigs with Phil were a last minute thing. So I thought I'd go ahead and commit to do some of this other stuff because I wanted to get into a position where the music was the only redeeming factor in the day. And I succeeded! (laughs) The point being, it's easy to get lulled into complacency when everything's right. I'm not saying that I wanted to be abused, but I needed to go out and play music in the clubs again. I didn't need to do it once or twice, I felt like I needed a good dose of it. I got it! It was really just what I needed.

PZ: How was it playing with The Dragonflys?

JH: I really like the music Rob wrote for his new album, When We All Come Home. He asked me to play on the record, and if I could have I would have, but it came at a time when I just didn't have the time to do it. When he said something about doing a tour, I said, "Yes! Definitely!"

PZ: I made it out to see one of the shows at Mexicali Blues, in Teaneck, NJ. You were all on fire.

JH: Yeah, that was the last gig on that tour. Barraco was so happy with that gig, he sent me a CD of it and said he was thinking about releasing it at some point. He said it came out better than they could've ever expected. I just remember - well, all of those shows were just so much fun - but that show, I remember thinking, "Well, this is the last show" and everybody seemed to think that it really had a special energy to it compared to the other gigs. The guys in the band were almost sad that it was the end of this particular little run.

PZ: Since you didn't perform on the album, how did you prepare yourself for playing live?

JH: I learned the music at home and didn't really have the chance to rehearse. I wrote out charts for the songs. By the time we started playing them, I didn't need the charts anymore. I learned the key lines in the music and the rest was pretty much improvised. As far as the songs went, there were definite melodies to learn and I mostly played the violin parts that are on the record. The rest was pretty much improvised. But then we thought, you know, we should take a page out of Phil's book here because one thing we've learned that we love about playing with Phil is that the music doesn't really stop a lot of times. One song will end and we'll just keep on playing on the outro and then somehow find our way back into a new groove. I love that because I hate "dead" time on stage. We thought, "Let's just have no dead spots." Once we started doing that - really by the time you heard us play at Mexicali Blues - it had really started to take on its own thing. That was the whole philosophy behind the Project Z stuff too.

When we flew to Denver to do the rehearsals with Phil we also rehearsed with Rob's band for a couple of hours. We really only had two really short rehearsals all together. I basically learned the music before the gig and the rest of the guys had been rehearsing in New York before they came out on the road. So the gigs kind of started as rehearsals. That first gig in Boulder was really fun. The worst gig that we had on that run was when we opened for Phil, but that's normal. When you're opening for somebody, your set's a lot shorter and you're thinking more about watching the time, plus Rob and I were playing with Phil and Friends for another three hours that night.

PZ: How would you compare playing with The Dragonflys to playing with Phil & Friends or The Dead? It seemed to me that you let loose a bit more with Rob's band.

JH: Well, you know the situation is a little different with Rob's band. It's a smaller group - 2 guitars, bass, drums and keyboards. Really more of the point is that it's just different. It allows you more space. Plus a lot of my musical vocabulary just isn't appropriate for certain Grateful Dead related stuff. It's just a different animal. If I try to squeeze too much of that type of thing into dead related stuff it would be like grinding a square peg into a round hole. I love that though because it keeps me from just playing the same old stuff. Ultimately you're always looking for new stuff to do. If you're in a situation that keeps you from just playing what you're used to playing - as improvisers we try to play something that we've never played every time we play. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. When you're playing in a band that's big - like Phil's band when there's two guitar players or like last summer with The Dead with three guitar players - it just makes you realize that it's not all about me. There's a big band there that forces you to listen and be ready for just about anything. Playing with Rob's band, it was a smaller group and the music itself allowed me to feel that I could pave some of my own road. The Dead's music has already been paved and you're supposed to bring something new to it, but at the same time, tip your hat to the original. The more that I play Dead music with Phil or anybody else, the more comfortable I get with it, the more I feel that I have the liberty to take it into a direction where I might go improvisationally. I love it man. It's a challenge to go out there and have that situation. I try to make it somewhat of my own without dragging the rest of the band to an inappropriate place.

PZ: It must've been a nice change up and a cool return to some of your roots playing with Col. Bruce and The Code Talkers again.

JH: Yeah, and that's a different thing too. That music is mostly Blues and Funk based. I've been blessed because between playing with Phil, learning all of these Dead songs, learning Ryan Adams songs, Chris Robinson songs, Warren Haynes songs, through the years, and now I get to play this thing with Barraco - it's different yet, it's been beautifully influenced by that other stuff. This stuff with The Codetalkers - Bobby Lee Rodgers, man, holy cow - that dude is incredible! That group is incredible. I had a really great time playing with them through most of April. They were like, "What are you doing in August?" and I said, "I'm playing with you." (laughs) We just finished up another three week tour and it was fun!

PZ: Now, did you have to rehearse much for that?

JH: No, but I did spend a lot of time - again - at home trying to learn the songs. Bobby Lee is a prolific songwriter. I'm talking really prolific like over two hundred tunes. Now, his band knows a lot of them. Bruce doesn't know them all. The way that they usually do it is play a Bobby Lee tune, then a Bruce tune, then another Bobby Lee tune and so on. I knew most of the tunes that Bruce was playing because some of them were Aquarium Rescue Unit type stuff, but Bobby just has so many songs. I called Bobby right before April and said, "Look, I don't want to be the guy that just shows up and sits in with you guys and plays all of the solos. I want to learn how to play this music. I don't want all of you to look at each other and say, 'Oh, there he goes on that again.'" I figure that if you're going to do it, you need to do it right. [CLICK TO LISTEN] That's one thing I've learned from playing with Phil, and with The Dead, and even before that with the Allman Brothers - I had to learn a lot of songs in a short amount of time. That's actually become a big challenge because before, my technique and finding new things to improvise with was the focus of my playing. Then I had this opportunity to play with Phil Lesh, and then with The Allman Brothers and then with The Dead, and their whole thing isn't about technique so much but they've got a lot of songs.

PZ: And there is a lot of structure to them even though there's a lot of improvisation going on...

JH: Yeah, there's a lot of improvisation going on in both camps but it really prepared me for trying to learn a lot of these Bobby Lee tunes. It's really cool because now I can sit back and say, "What have I learned in the last five years?" and sometimes you won't know the answer until you go and try playing something different. Then when I was playing with someone like Bobby Lee or Barraco I realized that five years ago I would have been struggling with all of the material because that wasn't my focus. In the last five years, my focus has had to shift from playing a lot of guitar to playing a lot of music. I think that music is a lot more important that the instrument that you play. Playing with all those guys has been a blessing to me and it's prepared me for just about anything that could come later.

PZ: That's all especially interesting because I remember reading an interview with you from back in your Aquarium Rescue Unit days and you had heard the Grateful Dead jamming for the first time and you were interested in listening to them to see what they were doing but then at some point you said to yourself, "I don't want to listen to them too much because there are so many other bands that are influenced by them. I don't want them to have too much of an influence on me." It's kind of ironic...

JH: (laughs) Yeah, it's too late now. You're absolutely right because we were playing with Phish, Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews and Widespread Panic. This was the early 90's scene. Everybody was a huge fan of The Grateful Dead and everybody was really influenced by them. I thought, "I could really dig these guys. I dig where they're coming from. They're awesome. They have all of these great tunes and when they improvise they sound like nobody else, ever!" I really appreciated that about them. You know, everybody already thought that our band [Aquarium Rescue Unit] was derived from The Dead when in fact, we never listened to The Dead at that point. We were listening to a lot of avantgarde Jazz and other music that we had grown up with.

PZ: I guess people just weren't familiar with listening to people who were improvisational like that and you probably just got pigeonholed into people saying that's sort of Dead-ish.

JH: Yeah, partly that and partly due to the people we were playing with. The scene that was sprouting up and around us - "jamband" was not a term yet. None of us knew what a jamband was - when I say us, I mean ARU guys, Blues Traveler guys, the Widespread Panic guys, the Phish guys. We were all just bands who were trying to do our thing. All of us had different influences, but I think that The Grateful Dead was a thread that ran through the whole thing, except for us. We were hardcore Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra fans.

PZ: How was it playing with Phil and Friends with your longtime friend Jeff Sipe?

JH: I'm so thrilled for anything like this to happen for Jeff because he is one in a million. I've been a long-time fan of his too. I got to play with him and Oteil on a regular basis for about six years with ARU and I'm just thrilled to death that Phil loves him too. I mean, I love John Molo. I want to make that absolutely clear. I'm absolutely blown away by his musicianship and his dedication to his craft. There's not anybody that I can think of that is any better than John Molo as a complete musician. That dude is way more than a drummer. He loves music. He knows musical formulas and theories and not just pertaining to percussion. Phil had told us nothing was going to happen this summer. John Molo happened to be on the road with John Fogarty so I guess that's why Phil called Jeff. Noone can really replace John Molo, but I'm thrilled to death that Sipe was there. To me, he's one of the top five musicians that walk the planet. I'm talking about any instrument. He transcends the drums. He's more than a drummer. He's a musician. You know he and I were always struggling to meet back up. He had all these things going on - he was playing with Susan Tedeschi, Shawn Lane and Jonas Hellborg. When Billy Cobham left Jazz Is Dead, I got him involved with that for a while. Rod Morgenstein was there too and it was unbelievable to play with both of them. But now we've this full circle, coming back around again where we're going to get a chance to play with each other. I'm so glad for him because nobody deserves a gig like this more than Jeff - he's just so damn great! Since we got back from those July gigs, I've talked to him now that he's had a little time to digest it and he was just so happy about the experience. He loved playing with Phil, he loved the music, and he just loved the whole scene.

PZ: How was it playing with Ryan Adams? It definitely is a change in dynamic to some degree...

JH: Everything was very different. Ryan's thing definitely made it different. And that was incredible. He's an incredible artist. He's an eccentric. He's one of those tortured geniuses. We all love to look at that kind of person and go, "That guy really is it!" He embodies the music. His life is that and nothing else, which is something that I really respect. I think that he's an incredible artist. Phil absolutely loves him. He told me how he met Ryan at the Jammys and told me about what a great artist he is. I think that if the group plays more together, it'll get tighter. It was loose when we played, but that's what Phil was shooting for. He wasn't trying to make everything perfect. If he wanted to make everything perfect, he'd put his old band back together because we've played together for four years, but I think that Phil just wanted to push ahead and try something different. I really respect that. Look at Miles Davis' career. I mean if you look at that career, every time Miles got really good at something, he recreated himself. Of course, back then I'm sure that there were many of his fans who thought, "Doggone it, I was really starting to like that other stuff. He had a killer band, why didn't he keep that band together?" But Miles was not the type of artist to sit still. He was constantly reinventing himself. All that I can say about that is that I have total respect for that attitude. I've never had to completely reinvent myself, but the closest I've had to come to doing that is once I started playing with Phil. I had to completely change my mode of thinking. Most of my vocabulary just wouldn't fit. That meant that I had to press forward and look for something deeper down inside of myself. That's what Phil does all the time. He's got my respect. I'm looking forward to seeing where this thing goes.

PZ: Phil's never done me wrong! (laughs)

JH: A lot of what I've learned over the years about playing free music without any kind of a net underneath came from Phil. Just being around him and just sitting down and listening to music with him or just talking about a book he read or just anything - that dude just embodies everything that is exploratory in nature - and that transcends into everything he does including music. It's a definite privilege to be a part of anything that he's doing. But it's crazy playing with Phil - you have a 300 plus song catalog and it can be tough because you might play this one song that's really killer only like two times on a tour. I'll be like, "man, if we could just play this song a little more I'd find some new ways to approach it." But that's what you have to do when you're not touring - sit down there in your basement and play something like Brown Eyed women - I mean there's like a million different ways you can approach it - and that's what The Dead's music is all about. And when you listen to Jerry play on these other tapes from different time periods, that dude was constantly finding new approaches to the same songs - it's just really inspiring.

PZ: Speaking of Jerry, what was it like playing his Wolf guitar in Colorado? Did it have a special feeling, a unique tone...?

JH: [CLICK TO LISTEN] Well, you know it's got a lot of switches on it and I didn't get the opportunity to really familiarize myself with it before we played the gig. Phil literally walked up to me like right before soundcheck and he just walked over there and handed it to me. You know this is it, this is got the mojo. And he said, "Here, I want you to play this tonight." And I said, "Okay!" So I had to jump right into it and I didn't really get a chance to figure out what all those switches did, but I found one sound that sounded pretty close to what I was trying to find and it sounded a lot more authentic to me than my guitars did for playing that music. But I haven't heard the tapes, so I don't know what it sounds like. I only played it that one night at The Fillmore. It was unbelievable - I'll tell you that. It's a heavy guitar and I didn't even really realize it until the end of the night when I had a knot in my back. I was like, "Damn this thing is heavy!" But man, it played fantastic. It was pretty surreal. You know, I've seen the footage of The Grateful Dead Movie, you know and he's playing that guitar there. It was just surreal to play that music on that guitar.

PZ: I think that a lot of people, me included, think that that guitar has almost magical qualities.

JH: I do too! I'd like to hear the tapes where I'm playing that guitar and listen to tapes where I'm not playing that and listen to the differences. I'm sure that there's a marked difference.

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