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Deluxe: Widespread Panic - Traveling Happiness Machine
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Widespread Panic’s music inspires a family—thousands strong—united by kindness and joy. Discover why their concerts are a place to simply be happy.
TRANSCRIPT:
Strawberry Wanamaker: The first show I saw I was 10. I've seen them 67-ish times since then.
Chuck Reece: That is the voice of Strawberry Wanamaker, and she is a fan of the band Widespread Panic. I talked to her at a Panic show in Charleston, South Carolina.
If you walk around a venue where Widespread Panic is playing and ask random people if this is the first time they’ve seen the band, it is difficult to meet someone who answers, “Yes.” Most say “no,” then tell you how many times they’ve seen the band perform. The numbers are astounding.
On that night in Charleston, I interviewed twenty-five concertgoers and met only one first-timer. When I came home, I did some math. The remaining twenty-four concertgoers——collectively——had Widespread Panic play one-thousand-five-hundred-and-nine times. That averages out to about seventy-two Panic shows per person.
What is it about this band that turns casual fans into lifelong followers?
The answer, I would learn, has a lot to do with the idea of family. But that did not become clear until I talked to a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary. Mary was there with her mother, Ginny. Ginny saw her first Panic show in 1994. Now she brings her daughter.
“So, Mary,” I asked her, “how many Panic shows have you been to?” She said this was her third. Said her parents had turned her on to the band.
I asked her if other sixteen-year-olds she went to school with were into Widespread Panic. Mary said, “They don’t know who they are.” Then she gave kind of a sideways smile. I couldn’t tell if it was the sheepish look of a kid who is just shy——or the look of a teenager who thinks she just might be into something cooler than what her classmates are into.
When I asked if she liked the vibe at the show, Mary got enthusiastic. She surveyed the eleven-thousand people who surrounded her, then looked me straight in the eye and said.
“Everybody’s just happy. It’s hard to find a place these days where everyone just wants to be happy.”
Wow. Out of the mouths of babes, as they say. And I had to agree with Mary. In these times, it is ridiculously hard to find a place where everyone just wants to be happy——and certainly not among tens of thousands of people in one place.
This episode of Salvation South Deluxe is about how a rock ’n’ roll band from Athens, Georgia, has created a traveling happiness bubble that somehow protects and unites tens of thousands of people, everywhere it is inflated.
THEME MUSIC UP
Chuck Reece: I’m Chuck Reece, and welcome to Salvation South Deluxe, a monthly addition to the regular short commentaries on our podcast feed. When we go Deluxe, we dig deep into a piece of the Southern experience and let you hear some authentic voices that make this region unique——and make a Southern mark on the wider world.
THEME MUSIC OUT
PART ONE
Chuck Reece: Tyler Parrot drove with his two sons from Charlotte, North Carolina——over two-hundred miles, about four and a half hours——to see these two shows in Charleston. The Parrot family will hit the road again in September and drive four-hundred miles to see Panic twice in Richmond, Virginia.
Tyler says he’s seen the band over sixty times. Why so many?
Tyler Parrot: You come to shows like all over the Southeast and you see kind of the same people and it's like, oh, you know, good to see you again, man. How's the family?
Chuck Reece: David Hannon also drove down from Charlotte. He first saw the band in 1994.
David Hannon: It's a family… There's no better feeling than to be at a show. The people at these shows are just amazing.
Chuck Reece: That word——family——comes up a lot when you talk to Widespread Panic fans. The shows feel like family reunions to the fans.
Sunny Ortiz: It's a special connection. And I played in hundreds of bands, but never in an environment like this.
Chuck Reece: hat’s percussionist Domingo “Sunny” Ortiz, who joined the band late in its first year of existence, 1986.
Panic’s roots go back to 1980 and a dorm room at the University of Georgia. John Bell——folks call him J.B.——moved from his hometown in Ohio to enroll at UGA, where he met lead guitar player Michael “Mikey” Houser, who grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Virginia native Dave Schools came to UGA in 1983 and joined the pair to play bass. In 1986, they recruited drummer Todd Nance, a high-school friend of Houser’s, to round out the original four-piece band. They named it Widespread Panic for the Panic attacks Michael Houser sometimes suffered.
In those early days, the band rented a house in Athens on King Avenue. They suitably called it the “band house.” This is Dave Schools.
Dave Schools: Hanging out with these guys and playing music…nothing felt better than me and Mikey and J.B. and Todd in the kitchen of the band house at King Avenue coming up with something that just felt and sounded cool to us.
Sunny Ortiz: We slept together, had breakfast, had meals together, cried with each other, laughed with each other.
Chuck Reece: Over seventeen months of interviewing the band members——plus their manager and dozens of longtime fans——I concluded two things.
First, in addition to loving the band’s music, the hundreds of thousands of people who keep seeing them over and over also feel that other Panic fans have become like family to them.
Second, I think that happens because the idea of family radiates from the band itself, from how they’ve lived and treated each other with care——like a family——over four decades.
Dave Schools: It’s a big family. So just imagine like a lot of siblings and cousins around the table at the holidays and you know there's plenty of differing opinions and ideas of how things should be done. And it translates from the way we run the business to the way the people we contract run their businesses to the way we play music as the six of us on stage. It's like it, it goes through everything, but it's family. I mean, that's really the only word to describe it.
I think to preserve our own modus operandi as six band members, slightly expanded by several very close crew members and staff that have been with us for decades, we looked at ourselves as a family. The people that we hired and that go on the road with us, we look at them as family. We want to protect them, and we want to give them a safe place to do what they love. And we put on these events that seem to bring joy to people.
Chuck Reece: Every family, whether formed by blood or choice, must endure trials. Panic has gone through more than a few. Todd Nance, who had a long history of chronic illnesses, left the band in 2016, then died in 2020. But the band’s first great loss came with the death of Mikey Houser.
From its beginnings in the late eighties and throughout the nineteen-nineties, Panic’s path went nowhere but up. From eighty-eight to ninety-nine, they released six studio albums and toured constantly, averaging a hundred-and-twenty-five shows a year, fifteen-hundred in all. And The Home Team, as Panic fans refer to themselves, grew like wildfire.
In 1998, when the band released Light Fuse, Get Away, its first live album, they felt their hometown deserved a free concert. They built a stage on Washington Street in downtown Athens area and invited all comers. This is the woman who was the mayor of Athens in 1998, Gwen O’Looney, introducing the band. Somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand people showed up.
As the millennium dawned, Panic was filling arenas and amphitheaters everywhere. Then, horrible news shook the very foundation of the band. Early in 2002, Michael Houser was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Sunny Ortiz: When Mikey was diagnosed with cancer, I remember to this day, we were riding a bus from Iowa to Milwaukee. Mikey was complaining about his lower back bothering him. I said, ‘Man, you need to go check it out.’ And I gave him the information for my GP. I said, ‘Just go to this guy, you know, because we’re not getting any younger.’”
Chuck Reece: Ortiz recalls that all the band members' families rallied to help Houser’s family: his wife, Barbette, their son, Waker, and daughter, Eva.
Sunny Ortiz: How can we help the families? That’s the question. Everything else will happen as it’s meant to be, which we have no control over when you think about it. We believe—and I believe the rest of boys in the band believe—that there’s a stronger entity that’s higher and bigger than all of us. And whatever happens, happens. We just have to know that we pour our hearts into the families. We make them stronger that way.
Chuck Reece: After his diagnosis, Houser stayed on the road with the band until a show in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on July 2, 2002, then returned to Athens, unable to continue. Panic recruited guitarist George McConnell to fill in. They soldiered on through thirteen more shows, ending with a three-night stand in Berkeley, California. They came home to Athens as July ended.
Sunny Ortiz: I remember when I saw Mikey the very last time. He said he wanted to see me one on one. He was on his bed and he said, ’You just got to keep the band going.’ And I knew deep in my heart that he had discussed it with everybody in the band, one on one.
Chuck Reece: Mikey Houser died on August 10, 2002.
Dave Schools: Mikey did not want us to stop because he had pancreatic cancer and knew that it was terminal. I don't know what kind of state of mind courageousness in the face of impending death or what, but he was, the titular character is named after him, the band. So we did feel we deserved some time off, but management was scared that if we jumped off the horse, we wouldn't get back up on. And it is what it is. We kept moving though.
Chuck Reece: The family endured. We’ll be back after this short break to talk about how it still does.
MIDROLL BREAK
PART TWO
Chuck Reece: That the Panic family has not only endured, but thrived and grown over the past two decades does not stem only from the vibe that radiates off the stage. The Panic family grows because the band, from its very beginning, has openly encouraged fan involvement.
Most bands want contracts with large record companies that have the infrastructure to produce and market recordings globally——and that will strictly control the sales of all recordings. No bootlegs allowed. Catch someone taping a live show? Kick them out of the building and seize their recordings.
Widespread Panic does not follow those practices. Since the very beginning, it has encouraged its fans to tape its concerts and share their recordings with each other. And for the last quarter-century, the only record company the band has worked with is its own——Widespread Records.
Buck Williams: They, you know, allowed tapers from day one. And it was all about sharing. And if the fans themselves caught other fans selling, they boycott it. It was all trading, not selling.
Chuck Reece: That’s Buck Williams, who has been the band’s booking agent since it began and two years later became its manager.
Buck Williams: We always encourage that because that encourages more people to come to shows and just to spread the music. So we encouraged it by allowing it.
John "J.B." Bell: Much to the dismay of record companies at the time. Record companies hated it. Oh yeah. They thought a bootleg was a lost sale.
Chuck Reece: That’s John Bell, in whose UGA dorm room the first threads of Widespread Panic were woven. He plays guitar and is the band’s lead singer. When we think of a rock band’s lead singer, we typically picture a flamboyant person, strutting all over the stage.
J.B. is different. I learned that in our first conversation, more than a year ago, when I asked him about the remarkably large number of young fans the band was still drawing, even in its fourth decade.
John "J.B." Bell: I’m surprised to see how many young kids are still coming out. That's, and I’m, I don't open my eyes that much on stage. So I’m…I’ve been told that by the people that are watching.
Chuck Reece: You heard that right. This man, who was performed in front of millions of people since the nineteen-eighties, generally stays put behind the microphone when he does. Playing guitar and singing with his eyes tightly shut.
But then, Widespread doesn’t do much at all of what rock bands are “supposed” to do.
John "J.B." Bell: At first we were taping our own shows and making copies. That’s basically what we'd do to create a demo for a nightclub.
That was helpful when we went out of town for the first time, start stretching out, because sometimes the music would, some folks will be familiar with it, at least enough to put 20, 25 people in the club instead of just going from scratch. People dug the music and shared it with their friends or you know looked for you the next time you're coming around.
It helped build the scene a little quicker in the beginning.
Chuck Reece: In the 20th century, Widespread worked with traditional record labels. In this century, they’ve been independent.
John "J.B." Bell: Our first album we did through Landslide Records, an Atlanta based company.
There was a long relationship with Capricorn.
But we, we kind of got away from the traditional deals.That's when we formed widespread records, which is basically just an incorporation to represent ourselves, but just kinda have a little more independence.
Chuck Reece: Record companies have ways of doing things that don’t necessarily fit Panic’s modus operandi.
John "J.B." Bell: They're like, Okay, now here's how you have to do it. It was like, no, no. No, no, no. We already do something a certain way, you know, we're too stubborn to change our way.We thought our approaches were the right thing to do, you know, uh, as, as far as our own personal warm, fuzzy feeling.
Chuck Reece: A few hours after J.B. told me that the warm, fuzzy feeling was important, I talked to a longtime fan in the audience who compared the band to a bathrobe. We were talking about how the band almost never plays the same songs from one night to the next when she said this:
“It’s like an old bathrobe that you love, but it’s like you get the comfort of the old bathrobe with a shiny new finish.”
John "J.B." Bell: We don't just go out there and play like we're supporting an album, even though the things might be coinciding, you know, we don't go into salesmanship mode or anything like that.
You get kids that they wanna come out and be a little surprised. So while there's familiarity in the way we're doing things, the kids really don't know exactly what to expect.
The process has shape-shifted over the years. Like when we first started playing. We would just kinda hint to each other musically…playing a lick that somebody would recognize and then the band would just steer into the direction of another song without a set list at all.
Then as we, you know we started getting, we had more and more tunes, it was kind of good for us to take a, get a little overview.
Chuck Reece: In the green room backstage on the first night in Charleston I noticed a computer printout. It listed every song from all thirteen studio albums, plus somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty songs by other artists. Panic adds about a half-dozen cover tunes into every set, and their mix is fiercely eclectic. The list flowed from “Ace of Spades” by Motorhead to “You Wreck Me” by Tom Petty with everything from Van Morrison to Willie Dixon to Tom Waits to Jimi Hendrix in between.
Someone had highlighted or checked off several songs played in recent shows. From what remained, the band would build its set list for the night.
John "J.B." Bell: Our buddy, Gary, who, uh, who passed away some years ago. He began that system with marking off the last three or four shows, so we know what we have done recently, so try not to repeat it, something that we played too recently.
Chuck Reece: Lead guitarist Jimmy Herring, who’s now been in the band for almost twenty years, says Panic doesn’t have to play the same songs night after night because their fans give them that freedom.
Jimmy Herring: When you have such a beautiful, uh, you know, uh audience that is so, um, you know, open to anything that the musicians want to try, I mean, that that, that brings that makes the audience actually part of the music.
It gives the musician the freedom to, uh, to try something different.
It gives a musician the freedom to get out on, on, uh on a limb and not be afraid to fail. You know? And, and, and you know that they've got your back.
It fosters a musician to be able to get out of their own way.
Chuck Reece: The fan family doesn’t demand Panic play the hits night after night. Perhaps one reason for that is that they’ve never had a hit——at least not by conventional standards.
Widespread Panic has never put a single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which tracks individual songs. The highest a Panic album has reached on the album chart is No. 27.
By standard music-business measures, having a band that draws tens of thousands of people everywhere it plays without lots of chart action just does not compute. But everything in Panic World centers on the experience of seeing a show live.
The band makes it super easy to have that experience, even if you can’t be at the show physically.
Chuck Reece: When the band played three sold-out nights at Colorado’s legendary Red Rocks Amphitheater in June, it live-streamed every show on the internet. Or let’s say you think to yourself, wow, that second show in Charleston just blew me away and I’d love to have a recording of it, well…no problem.
Just visit the Tour Archive on the band’s website, and you can stream or download shows going all the way back to 1999. You can subscribe and stream any show you want, or buy and download files you can keep. Heck, for twenty-six dollars and ninety-nine cents, they will burn a CD and mail it to you.
Buck Williams: Every show is for sale the day after we play it, every single show. Tomorrow, you can buy tonight’s.
Philosophically, this band is very different from almost every band out there in the world from this standpoint of being totally apolitical and sharing the music and being, you know, very, very, very generous.
Chuck Reece: The generosity Williams talks about comes out in many ways. A major one is an operation called Widespread Panic’s Tunes for Tots. For the last twenty years, Tunes for Tots has outfitted music education programs in primary, middle and high schools with more than three million dollars’ worth of musical instruments.
Buck Williams: We outfitted the whole Lakota Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota——their four high schools, with every instrument they wanted. Four high schools. Everything they wanted tubas, pianos, amplifiers, everything. We bought it all.
We've done it all through Georgia and Tennessee and places that we played where we raised the money, we try to give back.
We go out and find these places that are using soldering irons to, you know, keep their tubas together and see what they want.
All we ask is that you take with your phone a little thank you to the people who contributed. Ten seconds or something. That's what the school does. And they send it to us. It'll bring a tear to your eyes because these schools, they have nothing.
Right now we're working on some schools in the mountains of North Carolina that lost everything.
Chuck Reece: Another part of the Panic organization funnels donations and food by the ton to food banks in cities where Panic plays.
That effort began in 1999, sparked by fans——not the band——and, oddly enough, by a visit from the Dalai Lama.
His Holiness spoke at Emory University’s commencement ceremony in Atlanta in 1998, and he handed each graduate their diploma. One of those graduates was Josh Stack.
Josh Stack: The Dalai Llama spoke at my commencement and his message was sort one of. If you have the ability to do so, it's kind of your duty to make the world a better place in an ongoing sense. And I was working in a corporate law firm, kind of pre-law, and I didn't feel like I was... Making that difference and really dedicating time and energy to that as much as I could have been.
Chuck Reece: Stack saw his first Panic show in 1994 and kept coming.
Josh Stack: I stopped counting at 100 and that was in 2003.
Chuck Reece: In 1998, Josh pitched to the Panic’s management the idea of setting up a table for food donations at Panic shows. The early response was a no, but Stack was persistent, continuing to pitch the idea as a way to ensure that communities where the band played thought well of the fans who descended on their city for each show.
Josh Stack: This is a good way to ensured goodwill around the country. The band would get labeled as a... Ne'er-do-wells who attract a certain element that might not be desirable for certain communities. you know.
A lot of us didn't really fall into that, under that umbrella. We also wanted to make sure that it was an environment that was, that could support local communities in some way, and leave behind…sort of a legacy of giving back rather than just coming and partying in your town for a night, moving on and leaving trashed parking lots and whatnot.
Chuck Reece: When he got the band’s blessing, Stack started small. He showed up during sound check in the afternoon before Panic’s 1999 Halloween show in New Orleans, with a table and a sign he had hand-scribbled on poster board.
Josh Stack: After a couple of hours and a few donations, some guy pulls up with a pickup truck loaded down with a few pallets of food. And that's kind of when I knew, all right, there’s legs to this.”
Chuck Reece: He moved on to other venues, building partnerships with local food banks and issuing press releases before each show. Panic fans would arrive early and drop off financial contributions or food or both.
Josh Stack: We would kind of wait around for the food bank people to come and get the food and help load it up. And then they would go on about their business and we’d go on to the show.
Chuck Reece: Over the next seven years, Panic Fans for Food, as the self-sustaining movement came to be known, wound up collecting $70,000 and 13 tons of food in twenty-eight cities around the county. In early 2008, the band’s team took the load off the volunteers and put it on the organization, building partnerships with local food banks around the nation and managing the donations. The operation still continues under the name Feeding People Through Music. Since then, the most recent data show about three-hundred-thousand dollars raised and forty-three-thousand pounds of food collected.
Sheila Scroggs of Atlanta first saw the band more than thirty years ago, and she volunteers for food drives when the band comes through town.
Sheila Scroggs: I started about fourteen years ago, helping at each food drive for Widespread shows in town…asking for donations when people are walking into the venue. $1 feeds four families. So it's a really easy sell when you're talking to people, when you say, hey, support the band and support their charity, you know, you get a lot of people will give you a dollar.
Chuck Reece: A reason Scroggs returns is that the band empowers fans to assist their communities.
Sheila Scroggs: I really love the fact that they really… They walk the walk and they talk the talk. They are as genuine as they are, they're not the rock stars that you meet that are just really cool for the interview and then they won't acknowledge you if they see on the street.
The fact that they really care about keeping music in school A musical instrument can really bring out the light in some kids' eyes.
Chuck Reece: But the other factor is that over the last three decades, the band has helped her build a family of her own choosing.
Sheila Scroggs: I've seen them in two different countries, all throughout the United States and i have really cultivated a really great friendship base. I have met some lifelong friends through this band. Panic is the reason why I met some dear friends.
OUTRO
Chuck Reece: While I have never seen the same band perform hundreds of times, live music has been a huge part of my own life. I’ve seen thousands of concerts, in venues ranging from tiny nightclubs to baseball stadiums.
Nowhere have I encountered a band whose fans feel such genuine affection. Their admiration is rooted in kinship of spirit rather than celebrity allure. For such people, following Panic isn’t just about the music——it’s about embracing a way of life that values kindness, community, and freedom.
And it is important to note how often the band members express similar appreciation of their fans.
This is JoJo Hermann, who has played the keyboards for Panic since 1992.
Jojo Hermann: It just feels like we’re in a great groove right now. We’ve been doing this now for over thirty years, and I’m just thankful that I’ve been able to do what I’ve done for so long. If somebody comes up to me and says, ’Hey, I’m so thankful for your band’ or whatever, I just want to hug them.
Chuck Reece: In Charleston, I met a woman named Hollee Kelley who had driven with her husband four hundred miles from their home in Dothan, Alabama, to see the two shows there.
She told me her first date with Zach, her husband, had been at a Panic show in 2011. In 2024, Panic released a new single called “We Walk Each Other Home.” Hollee told me she loves that song, because it expresses, to her, how Panic fans take care of each other. She looked at a stadium full of people and said, “It’s just such a loving and accepting atmosphere.”
Thinking about what Hollee said reminded of a passage from Maya Angelou’s memoir All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, which was published in 1986, the same year as the first Widespread Panic show. Angelou wrote:
The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
This band from Georgia night after night creates exactly such a place——where people can be happy and be themselves, without question. It amazes me it still happens even in this modern world, filled as it is with division and anger.
I think there is only one word to describe it, and that word is “miracle.”
OUTRO
Chuck Reece: We have so many people to thank for their help and cooperation for this episode. Every member of Panic was generous with their time and hospitality, and talked to us repeatedly, beginning in April of 2024. The same goes for manager Buck Williams and all the crew members we met in Charleston and PR man Dan Beeson. And a special thank you this month to our always mighty producer, Jake Cook, who tracked down Josh Stack and Sheila Scroggs and interviewed them.
You’ve been listening to Salvation South Deluxe, proudly produced in cooperation with Georgia Public Broadcasting and its network of twenty stations around our state. Every week, we add a new three-minute commentary about Southern stuff to the radio airwaves and our podcast feed. Then every month or so, we add longer, dee-luxe stories, such as the one we’ve just told you.
I’m Chuck Reece, your host and the editor-in-chief of Salvation South, which you can find twenty-four-seven at SalvationSouth.com.
GPB’s director of podcasts is Jeremy Powell, and none of this could have happened without wonderful people like GPB’s Sandy Malcolm, Adam Woodlief, and Bert Wesley Huffman. Please consider giving your financial assistance to Georgia Public Broadcasting to our entire nation’s system of public media.
We’ll be back next month with another full-length episode of the Salvation South Podcast.
Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Wednesdays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on GPB Radio. Salvation South Deluxe is a series of longer Salvation South episodes which tell deeper stories of the Southern experience through the unique voices that live it. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South and wherever you get your podcasts.
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