Gov't Mule: The Deepest End (Live in Concert) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The economic law of diminishing returns delicately says that at certain times the more of something you have the less return you will receive. Bands the world over have tossed that handy maxim aside for aimless twenty-minute guitar and drum solos. A quick glance over the twenty-song, two-hour-and-thirty-four-minute double disc live offering from Gov't Mule, The Deepest End, would seem the definition of diminishing returns. (And that's not including the three-hour DVD.) At times this collection adroitly proves the point. Then there's the wicked guitar solo battle between the trio's Warren Haynes and slide guitar legend Sonny Landreth during the epic cover of Robert Johnson's "32/20 Blues" that throws the whole damn theory out the window. To be sure, in the hands of any less talented or traveled musicians as Haynes, drummer Matt Abts and keyboardist Danny Louis -- along with a cornucopia of bassists running from Dave Schools to Will Lee to Mike Gordon to Jason Newsted -- the recording of a five-plus hour show would be a waste. These lads pull it off in fine fashion, economists be damned.

DAVID JOHN FARINELLA
(November 10, 2003)