A Conversation with Widespread Panic’s John Bell – 5.17.10

Mike Ragogna: Next year is going to be your twenty-fifth anniversary, right?

John Bell: Yeah, that’s pretty startling.

MR: What’s the secret of longevity?

JB: We exercise every day and eat right and think pure thoughts.

MR: Does your music do the same?

JB: You know, I think the music really covers any and all territory that pops up in our little imaginations.

MR: Especially blues-rock and southern rock with jazz influences. But there’s a lot more going on with your new album, Dirty Side Down, and one of my favorite is “Saint Ex” that you must explain because the topic is pretty different.

JB: It’s got a couple of elements in there, but it’s about the French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was the author of The Little Prince. There’s really heavy stuff too, like a collection of his letters from World War II where he was almost prophetic with his thinking about humanity in general.

What triggered the song was my dad read a New York Times article. His death had been somewhat of a mystery, he was an aviator who was on a reconnaissance mission in 1944, I think, and they never found his plane until like 2003, something like that. They even found some of his identification and stuff. This 91-year old, ex-Luftwaffe pilot recognized the story, put the times and dates together, and said he’d been on a reconnaissance mission in the same air space. He just kind of happened upon Saint Ex and shot him down totally by surprise. And it wasn’t a combat mission for either of them. But here was the kicker. Saint Ex was a lot older–he was in his forties when he was in the air force, and this guy was of regular young combat age. Turns out that Saint Ex was one of his favorite authors. He had said that if he’d known that he was flying in a French aircraft, he would have let it be and not shot him down.

MR: Oh my God, that’s like the most horrible story I’ve ever heard.

JB: Yeah, really twisted. This author shaped a lot of our childhood ideas, fantasies, philosophies, and “The Little Prince”–even though it’s a kid’s book–it’s got some really heavy undertones in there of basic life philosophies and more.

MR: What a nice tribute.

JB: Yeah, so that was that. That kind of triggered it. My wife had also, when we first met? That was one of our mutually favorite books. And she casually mentioned that she always thought “The Little Prince” would be a cool subject matter for a song. So, twenty years later, when my dad hits me with this article, I started doing a little research and a lot of reading to kind of just get a feel of where how I interpreted Saint Ex’s head was at. Then I tried to put it in a song form.

MR: And your take on that story relates it to current events.

JB: Here we are, it’s war time too, you know? You read back on some of that stuff and the issues don’t really change, just the names and the places and some of the core issues that remain are different. Some of the heaviness of war that comes into your life and your families lives, those things haven’t changed too much over the years.

MR: What is your view about our current wars? Do you feel like anything’s moving forward?

JB: To me, I don’t really apply my thoughts or impressions based on a political viewpoint. I would classify myself as a kind of gentle pacifist guy. I’d love to find some other ways to solve our world problems other than getting down and knocking souls off. The issues are more complicated than that. I mean, wars have been happening since the beginning of time. You almost want to take the idea of good and bad out of it, and just try to get back into remembering that the relationship that you have on a human level might even extend to a social once you get to really know your “enemy” and hopefully work around things. You know, we tried, there are peace talks and things like this. There was the Geneva Convention which always blew me away when I was a kid, that people could sit down and make up rules for a war when the bottom line was you’re killing each other. It blew me away too, that all of a sudden, well, there’s no shooting today because it’s Christmas! If we could do that, why can’t we kind of take it to the next step?

MR: You were friends with Vic Chesnutt, and you recorded his “This Cruel Thing” for your album. I had the privilege of interviewing him for HuffPost a few weeks before he died. In it he said, “Yeah I tried suicide. I’m just not very good at it.” I loved his interview, and I’ll always kick myself for not taking him up on carrying on a friendship past the interview. Anyway, at the time, he had such strength regarding his health issues that his eventual suicide really was a shock. Now, you guys were very tight. What are your thoughts about Vic and what happened?

JB: We were all pretty…you’re always shocked when you lose someone way before the usual human expiration date. But then again, we’ve known about Vic’s antics for three years. It was like, well, it wasn’t a total surprise. That being said, you just start thinking about Vic, the way he was, and how he conducted himself in life. He was really funny, really cynical, very opinionated. If something didn’t feel right to him, he was the first one to call it BS. He did it in conversation, and he did it in his music of which he was extremely prolific. We were going in the studio about a week after Christmas when Vic passed away, so naturally, we started kicking around the idea of doing a Vic song because it kind of completes the set with our other songwriting friends. Also because it’s another way to kind of go through the process of digesting what had just occurred with losing a friend.

MR: It’s horrible you had to go through that as well.

JB: You know we had to do it when Mikey (Houser) passed away too. Actually it was pretty rough. We’ve lost a bunch of folks. So, this was a way to stay in the task at hand which was putting an album together and still get to process Vic’s passing. Invariably, we were processing other friends who had recently passed too. So what happened at that point was John, our producer, who was part of the conversation, had a couple of songs that Vic had done demos on that had not gone on any of his previous albums. So, he shared those with us. That’s when this cool thing popped in which was very Vic and very spooky; it talks about death and also uses, again, war as a metaphor for you know, internal struggles as well.

MR: The song title “Shut Up and Dance,” especially how you use it as a song lyric, is a great line, something we sometimes all want to say. The track’s melodic breakdown is totally unexpected, it’s like taking pit stop during the road trip. In general, are your arrangements spontaneous, group efforts?

JB: Yeah, it’s done spontaneously but thoughtfully. But everybody’s at the gate ready to experience their own personal inspiration and to share it. Then there’s all that action, reaction kind of thing that goes on among the rest of the members of the band.

MR: That’s probably how you stayed together for twenty-five years.

JR: Yeah, you know the process itself is fun. It’s always new because you’re not just relying on your head. You’re getting constantly surprised by other ideas that come across which, in turn, start triggering other ideas and notions in your head that are a surprise to you. It’s like, “Hi head, no idea my subconscious was holding that one around for something like that.”

MR: Maybe that’s also the result of your playing live together for so long.

JB: Yeah, we do a lot of thinking on our feet, a lot of playing on our feet. There’s a huge improvisational aspect to our stage performance. That freedom of going on a little adventure still takes place when you’re putting a studio album together, mostly in the sense that you’ll follow an inspiration. By the time you’re putting it down on the record, you’ve collectively decided what the blueprint of that song is going to be, and basically, how you’re going to approach it. But that feeling of adventure is still there. Something crazy like that or eastern sounding (makes sound)…that sound in the middle of that song was like…”Where the hell did that come from?” Then it starts lending itself to other imagery, more like a desert scene or something like that.

MR: What is your advice for new bands?

JB: Well, there are a few aspects to being a band. One of them is kind of the social, friendship aspect which, if you’re involved in a collaborative environment, it’s good to work in that realm of forgiveness and trusting the other guy’s inspirations and to be willing to do a lot of give and take. That helps build a song way beyond where you might take it all on your own. When the social part comes in, it’s like keep checking yourself for your own amount of BS that you’re adding to the mix. It’s like I remember an English course I had where the professor had us keep a daily journal, which we were supposed to turn in at the end of the term. So you go back to the thing and you start reading what you’re writing, and you could see, “Hey, I was really writing spontaneously and I was off in a creative receptive mode.” And then other times you’d say, “Oh look, this is pretty much full. I’m not just trying to write to impress someone who’s going to be reading it, namely the teacher.” So that’s what I have to say about songwriting.