Reed Mathis: So Many Roads

Reed Mathis has renegotiated his deal with death. After watching all of his live commitments almost instantaneously vanish in the early days of the global pandemic, the prolific, Tulsa, Okla.-bred bassist made the difficult decision to refocus his energy and give up two of his vices, alcohol and nicotine.

“I drank just enough to not really experience angst,” Mathis says, while calling from his current Bay Area home, shortly before regrouping with Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann for a run of Billy & The Kids dates at Morrison, Colo.’s Red Rocks. “There’s this little voice that keeps telling you, ‘You’re not safe here. Get out of here.’ When you’re at a party with people that you know that voice is wrong because you are safe— you’re surrounded by your friends, you’re at Terrapin Crossroads surrounded by Deadheads. But, then there is the voice that keeps saying, ‘You’re a fraud; people are gonna find out.’ So you drink and that voice goes away.”

That same little voice also encouraged Mathis to finally dig into his own archives during the lockdown, leading the jam[1]scene staple to finish up a number of long-gestating projects, including this past June’s The Ladder. A deeply personal solo album, the LP deals with his now ex-wife Ariel’s incarceration and features contributions from Fruition’s Jay Cobb Anderson, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead’s Tom Hamilton, The Slip’s Andrew Barr and many others.

“Reed doesn’t play ‘bass’—Reed plays music,” Kreutzmann says. “And that’s why I love playing music with him. In The Kids, we’re not a ‘rhythm section,’ we are just two friends talking to each other through our instruments. The instruments themselves don’t define us; we’re just two music makers making music.”

Having come to terms with his time in the top-shelf experimental-improv outfit Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Mathis also compiled four thematic live albums from his well of recordings, narrated a short film on JFJO’s circuitous path and revived their 2008 lost masterpiece, Winterland. (That studio LP was initially released in the wake of Mathis’ turbulent departure from the ensemble to focus on the San Francisco jamband Tea Leaf Green and, thus, only widely available for a short window of time.) In addition, a chance text with a friend led him to revisit Tea Leaf Green’s 2009 LP, Looking West and he’s been hard at work with his conceptual Electronic Beethoven band; in total, the bassist says that he will have completed 10 recording projects by the fall of 2021.

“The same voice that keeps questioning me also said to me: ‘Why don’t you open up that bin of Jacob Fred material? Why don’t you write a song today? Why don’t you learn a Charlie Parker sax solo on the guitar?’” Mathis says with a laugh. “So, like for a lot of people, it turned out to be a really good thing that I’ve had so much time off the road. I’ve been talking to Tom Hamilton, Disco Biscuits’ Aron Magner, my Electric Beethoven family and my JFJO family, and none of us have been home this much since the ‘90s.”

Like most touring musicians, the pandemic threw your plans up in the air in March 2020. Once your live commitments were canceled, what was your first move?

It was scary. But the first thing I did was I started doing these livestreams—just putting up my Venmo/PayPal information and playing. Trey [Anastasio] was releasing all this new music [which became 2020’s Lonely Trip] so I would open my set with his new song whenever he posted one. And then Trey started hearing my covers and sending me these beautiful messages. I just dug how vulnerable he was being— dealing with isolation through his music. I did different covers, and I did Gamehendge all the way through, which has been a goal of mine since I first heard it in 1991.

I also learned how to play guitar. I’ve never had the space to do that; I’ve never even owned a guitar before. And I stopped drinking. When the pandemic first happened, something in my gut was like, “Now’s your chance to stop drinking, stop smoking cigarettes, stop doing all the things that a lot of us do to cope with social anxiety.” I had been in bars, surrounded by strangers, since I was 17 and constantly drinking—especially after I left Jacob Fred and joined Tea Leaf Green, which was a heavy drinking band.

How long were you aware that you might have a drinking problem?

Without even realizing it, I got used to having alcohol every time I was around people and performing. A few months after I stopped drinking, I realized how much I had lost to that coping strategy. I don’t regret the past 10 years, but I started to wonder what they would have looked like without alcohol or nicotine. But, the problem with alcohol or nicotine is that they work and, when I stopped, I realized how bored I was.

Then, I started to feel how I felt in high school, when I put 10 hours a day into my instrument and wrote hundreds of songs— before we had the option of being on our phones all the time. And I realized that boredom is actually the root of creativity for me. I realized: “You can feel weird. You feel awkward. You feel fear. You can either drink or write some music.”

It was like I had some new relationship with mortality, like I renegotiated my deal with death. I realized how much music I had in my archives that would otherwise never get heard—the Jacob Fred guys, the Tea Leaf Green guys, the Electric Beethoven guys don’t even know what I have in there. So I realized that now was the time to go through that bin of CD-Rs and half-baked ideas and open it all up. I wrote down and cataloged everything.

When JFJO had a good show, [keyboardist] Brian [Haas] would laugh and go, “Yeah, we got lucky.” And I always dug that because improvising is a risk. If we had done less improvising and more scriptwriting—which is what most jambands do, they stick to the script— we might have had more consistent shows, but we also might not have gotten to those highs.

During the pandemic, you also completed a deeply personal solo album, The Ladder, that had been in the works for a decade. What led you to finally put the finishing touches on that project?

While I was in Tea Leaf Green, some really fucked up shit went down. After we moved to California, my lovely wife was working with some people who were moving cannabis around the country, as a lot of people did before legalization. And she drew the shortest straw and got caught with a large quantity in a red state. The judge told her to say who in California she was working with. She said, “No” to that so she got three years in a prison in Ohio. And it was pretty intense, as you can imagine.

We stuck it out—she got out and came home and we stayed married for a while, but it just wrecked her. She was not built for a women’s prison, where her cellmates had killed their children and robbed banks and all that shit. She’s this cute, little hippie girl that was a National Merit scholar. So I wrote a song cycle about this brutal experience. My goal was to have all the songs be conversations. I didn’t want to describe what was happening; I wanted them to actually be quotes from us talking and fighting while she’s in jail and I’m suddenly living on one income and without support.

I started recording the album in 2011, using the Tea Leaf Green studio and those guys when I needed drums, piano or something. Then, I abandoned these dark songs when they were only halfway recorded. After she got out of prison, I just didn’t want to go back to those feelings. But, during the pandemic, I thought, “Well, I guess I can finish that thing.”

I pulled those songs up, and I re-sang most of them. And I sent the tracks around to my fellow touring musicians who were out of work. I figured that one of the best things I could do—since this community had been so supportive and humbling— was to use the money I received in tips for the livestreams and hire my friends to play on these songs about Ariel going to jail. So I got Robert Walter, Jay Cobb Anderson, Tom Hamilton and a bunch of homies and had them help me finish this album.

You started these songs when you were at a very different point of your life. Since then, you have gone through a divorce, experienced the pandemic and, as you mentioned, dealt with your substance dependency issues. Looking back on the material, do you still relate to the voices in these stories?

I stand by all the songs, I’m really proud of them. It’s the only music with lyrics I’ve ever written that I feel that way about. It was this gut-wrenching grief that punched me in the stomach. And those songs needed to come out. We have been playing “The Ladder” with the Golden Gate Wingmen, which is Jeff Chimenti, Jay Lane and John Kadlecik, for six or seven years. That’s the only one of them that has really been performed. And people fucking love it. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever written to a hit. And no one had even heard the studio version before the album was released this summer.

There’s this Bob Dylan lyric from “Chimes of Freedom” that I always think about. He’s talking about all the people in the world that need our compassion and he says, “For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale/ An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail.”

Ariel was part of the last wave of people who got caught up in the cannabis prohibition, and the War on Drugs robbed this beautiful creature of her future. She still has a future, but it’s very different than where she was heading. When I sing that song onstage, people are really moved by the need to find some light in a situation that is senselessly awful.

Shifting back to your newfound sobriety, now that you have played some shows with Billy & The Kids and a few other projects, have you felt differently onstage?

My first time flying somewhere and playing in front of a sold-out crowd and not drinking was for a show at the Ardmore, and it was really intense. I felt like my little psyche sent me all the signals, but I made it through. I felt super uncomfortable onstage and off the stage. But, at the end of the night, the feedback I got was like, “You have never played better; you have never sung better. You look so happy and focused.” And I’m like, “That’s so weird because my inner experience was that I was really uncomfortable and awkward.” But what everybody else saw was a clear light.

When I went to Hawaii [for a series of Billy & The Kids shows this spring], I was glad to have Tommy [Hamilton] there because he quit drinking 15 years ago and I knew he had my back. And Billy is “rock star sober,” meaning he still smokes weed.

Billy & The Kids were joined by a few special guests during those shows in Hawaii, including Carlos Santana. How do you think he acclimated to the band?

At first, he was only going to play on a few tunes and, just like with James Casey, we didn’t want to put any pressure on him to do more. I was just gonna steer clear and be glad he was there. But he showed up three hours early and didn’t put his guitar down the entire time he was there. By the time the cameras started rolling, we had already been playing for hours. He figured out that me and James Casey are jazz nerds. And, immediately, we started playing “Naima” by John Coltrane. After that, he led us through “In a Silent Way” by Miles Davis and “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt” by Pharoah Sanders. When we took a break, he paired his phone with my bluetooth speaker and made our entire posse shut up and listen to a 10-minute Pharoah Sanders saxophone solo. And because it was Carlos Santana, everybody shut up and paid attention. I’m looking at him with his eyes closed listening to Pharoah Sanders and helping us all connect with it. He has this ability— the reality of who he is is actually cooler than the cartoon hippie version I had in my head.

And then he jammed with us. We did our one song, and he was like, “Can I stay? I won’t get in the way. I don’t even need a guitar solo. Can I just hang and play rhythm guitar?” He ended up playing every song with us. When we would take a break to get out of the sun, he would jam with whoever was still around. He ended up staying until midnight, just smoking doobies and eating sushi and talking. He looked me right in the eye and said, “This band, we could take it around the world.” And, I’ve never seen Billy so healthy before. He’s 75 and playing as good as ever.

Billy Strings also played with Billy & The Kids in Hawaii as well as at Red Rocks this summer, where the group dusted off “So Many Roads.” Bill Kreutzmann had not played that song live in a decade. How do you feel the shows went?

Those Red Rocks shows, man—beyond special. It was an incredible few days. We played the whole day before at The Mission Ballroom, which was empty and echo-y and awesome. That band is really something else. Kreutzmann feels like home to me, but [Billy] Strings feels like this interesting new territory. I really like improvising with him, and I just enjoy his whole energy. He’s super positive and always game—and what a voice, good God. The Red Rocks shows were perhaps the peak experience of my entire life on this planet. It’s really difficult to verbalize just how perfectly every single element seemed to align and hover. The symbiosis with the dancing audience was beyond any wave I’ve ridden before.

You also spent a good chunk of the pandemic finishing up a few JFJO archival projects and coming to terms with your time with that group. Do you think a live reunion might be on the table?

Haas and I have had a few really good, long talks on the phone during the last couple months. When I finally finished the video [talking about his archival project], and sent it to him, I could tell that he didn’t check it out for a couple days because he only texted me back, “Oh, cool.” But, two days later, I get this message that said, “Holy shit” at 2 a.m. And then 10 minutes later, I got another message that said, “Holy fuck,” and then this wave of gratitude. We talked on the phone the next day. Haas wants to do some gigs and [drummer Jason] Smart would be down. Also, as soon as we started releasing these albums, venues and promoters started hitting us up. We said to ourselves, “Oh, shit, did we just accidentally create demand?”

We actually had a JFJO show booked in New Orleans during Jazz Fest; it was gonna be so insane, but the promoter had to cancel their entire run. But, the odds are high; I doubt we would do a tour, but we could do New York, Chicago, Tulsa, Denver and San Francisco.

Going through all these bins of recordings just made me realize, “God, that shit was special. I’m so happy to have it.” I’m also happy to admit, at this point in my life, I have the space to allow myself to not be numb to the world around me. When you don’t numb yourself, you get all the discomfort, but you also get all that fucking bliss.

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