Gov’t Mule: Mulennium

Three-CD set presenting live recording with special guests.

By Gavin Martin
( Classic Rock )
published

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Featuring the original Gov’t Mule line up, and standing as a tribute to the band’s late original bass player Allen Woody, Mulennium was recorded New Year’s Eve 1999 at the Roxy Theatre in their Atlanta hometown.

It’s a marathon work out that has lain in the vaults unreleased until now – understandably so, as the previous year’s New Year’s Eve show had just been commemorated on the four-CD set Live With A Little Help From Our Friends.

Adding megawatts metal riffs to the territory they covered in a latter day incarnation of The Allman Brothers, The Mule are never a band for half measures. Boosting their power trio jam band credentials with searing sledgehammer riffs, artillery fire drumming and Warren Hayes lacerating He-Man vocals they are a formidable but sometimes indigestible proposition.

On CD one the haunted shimmer of the mighty Towering Fool offers welcome balm before a post midnight cover assault on King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man, The Who and a wildly overcooked Dazed And Confused.

However the guest slot section on CDs two and bluegrass flavoured CD three offers more colour. Then recent studio associate Stax Blues legend Little Milton is foregrounded to blistering effect and The Black Crowes’ Audley Freed is on hand to finesse Crowes’ classic Sometimes Salvation. A feast for the fans but the stodge is unavoidable.

Gavin Martin
Gavin Martin

Late NME, Daily Mirror and Classic Rock writer Gavin Martin started writing about music in 1977 when he published his hand-written fanzine Alternative Ulster in Belfast. He moved to London in 1980 to become the NME’s Media Editor and features writer, where he interviewed the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer, Pete Townshend, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Ian Dury, Killing Joke, Neil Young, REM, Sting, Marvin Gaye, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, James Brown, Willie Nelson, Willie Dixon, Madonna and a host of others. He was also published in The Times, Guardian, Independent, Loaded, GQ and Uncut, he had pieces on Michael Jackson, Van Morrison and Frank Sinatra featured in The Faber Book Of Pop and Rock ’N’ Roll Is Here To Stay, and was the Daily Mirror’s regular music critic from 2001. He died in 2022.