Jacob Threadgill

The Clarion-Ledger

For two days this week downtown Jackson was turned into a festival-like atmosphere with the arrival of Widespread Panic shows at Thalia Mara Hall.

The 30-year legacy for the band has included 12 studio records and 43 live albums, while becoming one of the most successful touring bands in the world. The band is also intrinsically connected to Mississippi.

The band reached its peak in 1998, six years before the death of founding guitarist Michael Houser when an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people descended to the band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia, for a CD release show.

A large percentage of those fans traveling the country were from Mississippi. Hardcore fans claim that for a period in the early 2000s, the Magnolia State bought more physical albums that any other state, a fact that wouldn’t surprise the band’s keyboardist and longtime Oxford resident Jo Jo Hermann or those who were on the road.

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Jackson native Tommy Conner remembers the exact date and location of his first Panic show, February 23, 1990, at the Antenna Club in Memphis. Over the last 26 years, Conner estimates that he has attended over 450 Panic shows. Conner entered college as a Grateful Dead fan, but said he immediately embraced the southern twist of Panic’s music.

“People up North like Phish, but like Panic down here,” Conner said. “It fulfills me. If I get stressed out, going to a Panic show cures all ills. It’s like going to the well.”

As a student at Mississippi State in the late 1990s, Nick Crews said college towns of Starkville and Oxford produced the largest contingent of Panic fans on the road, in addition to Jackson, from where lead singer John Bell’s wife hails. The couple was married in a ceremony at Hal & Mal’s.

“We’d be in Davenport (Iowa) on a Tuesday and back in class for a test (later in the week),” Crews said. “I wouldn’t trade those days for anything. It’s the closest sense to freedom you’ll ever have. You answer to no one; you beckon to none. It’s almost Kerouacian.”

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The band’s first shows in Jackson since a 2005 performance at the Mississippi Coliseum brought fans streaming into downtown as vendors set up outside the venue and nearby Martin’s Lounge selling tie-die t-shirts, band-related art, hacky sacks and other Panic-related accouterments.

Outside of Martin’s, Ben Mullen operates a store selling trinkets and apparel while giving twirling demonstrations with glow-in-the-dark juggling sticks in an effort to raise money for Troy Goode, who died in police custody during a 2015 Widespread Panic concert in Southaven.

Promoter Arden Barnett said it meant the “world to him” to bring Panic back to Jackson for the first time in over a decade. “It was like a family reunion. After working with those guys for close to 20 years, it was a great time.”

Mississippi Jo Jo

Born in New York City, Hermann became entranced by the music of the South like Professor Longhair, Dr. John while running sound at a tiny blues club for the likes of Otis Rush, Lightning Hopkins and Cedell Davis as an 18-year-old.

A mutual friend offered a place to crash in Oxford, and he remembers thinking, "I got to get out of New York. It’s all new wave bands and synthesizers.”

He moved to Oxford in 1986 as the town was in the process of a bohemian underground revolution led by writers Willie Morris and Larry Brown. Hermann picked up work playing an old upright piano at Ron Shapiro’s The Hoka, the unofficial headquarters of Oxford's counter-culture.

“I never imagined there was a place like Oxford. I fell in love with it instantly,” Hermann remembers.

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While surviving off of “rasta pasta” and a “cheese my baby” sandwich from Shapiro, Hermann fell in with the Grateful Dead cover band Beanland. The Oxford music scene in the '80s was largely built around cover bands, Hermann said, with the town not having a band perform original songs since the White Animals.

Beanland continued its run until 1993, not long after Hermann left to join Panic. He said that for the first year in the band, he was content to play his parts and stay in the background, but he began to contribute to songwriting, and those took from his Mississippi experiences.

The song “Tall Boy” describes the images that dotted his mind after his Volkswagen Bug broke down for good outside of Itta Bena. “ Thin Air” conjures Civil War and other Southern imagery, while “Blackout Blues” is about wanting to get back to Oxford.

“Mississippi is so inspirational,” Hermann said. “There is such a romantic notion for the people who love music.”

The Mississippi show that lingers with Hermann is the 1995 set the band played with Hill Country bluesman Junior Kimbrough at the Jackson Zoo. The band combined arrangements from Kimbrough songs “All Night Long” and “Stay All Night” to create their song “Junior,” as a tribute to the only bluesman who played exclusively original songs.

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“Nobody sounded like Junior. He would put you in a trance. At its core, Widespread is trance-dance music. I think there is a connection between Mikey (Houser) and Junior. They were kindred spirits in my book.”

Hermann now lives in Franklin, Tennessee, but is hoping to get back to Oxford more frequently after this year. After 30 years, Widespread Panic will end extensive touring after a New Year’s Eve show this year.

“We’re really wearing it out this year because we’re basically going to call it touring-wise after this year; we’re not going to tour anymore,” Hermann said, emphasizing that the band isn't breaking up or retiring. They will continue to play shows at places like New Orleans Jazz Fest and at Red Rocks.

“We’re still all brothers and still going to play together ... It is really not that big of a deal, I don’t think,” Hermann said. “It’s part of life… I’ll go home and figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I will probably go back to Proud Larry’s (in Oxford) and set up a piano.”

Contact Jacob Threadgill at (601) 961-7192 or jthreadgil@gannett.com. Follow @JacoboLaSombra on Twitter.