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If we’re part of an environment where kids are inspiring themselves then
it’s cool. Folks know what they want. I think folks really want a happy, healthy, fun,
exciting, adventurous life and if we’re helping augment that, that’s cool.
JoJo Hermann, Widespread Panic Keyboardist
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WIDESPREAD PANIC
Widespread Panic (WP) began in 1985 in Athens, Georgia when Dave Schools,
Mike Houser, and John Bell, all students at the University of Georgia, began playing
music with each other and eventually at local clubs. Domingo Ortiz, Todd Nance and
John Herrmann were soon added and the band ventured out on tour. As music journalist
John Swenson explains, it is a band whose evolvement followed the strategies of the
Grateful Dead by relying on interaction with the live audience and dealing directly with a
fan network instead of the institutional bureaucracy of the record industry (p.54, 2002). It
is this connection with the fans and the constant touring that has generated the success of
WP. In 1998 over 100,000 people showed up in Athens for an outdoor CD release
party/concert and in 2001 they saw their best year in terms of ticket sales (playing to over
500,000). They have a best-selling live DVD on the market, a documentary about them is
now in theaters, and they recently released a live 3-disc compilation (Swenson, 2002).
Much of this success is based on the fact that people from all over the country
“tour” with the band during the spring, summer, and fall; traveling from show to show for
weeks at a time. The spring, summer and fall tours allow the band to hit all parts of the
country while also making it easy for fans to move from one location to the next. The
spring tour usually consists of several southeastern dates (GA, NC, TN, AL, VA) and the
summer and fall tours are more extended and include dates all over the country as the
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Quote from interview in Relix magazine. See works cited.
Convention