The deep end Sinking into Gov’t Mule live and on DVD BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Warren Haynes looks like a hippie Muppet as he stands on stage at the Palladium in Worcester, flanked by the rest of Gov’t Mule and framed by a giant psychedelic-lit mandala on the curtains behind the band. Not that he’s wired. Far from it. Haynes barely moves as he wrenches notes as beefy as his own frame from an assortment of heavy Gibson guitars or inches closer to the microphone to sing in a bold gravel-dusted voice that he rarely uses to speak. What with the crown of hair flows into curls as it tumbles past his shoulders, it’s as if a toddler version of Cousin It had perched on his head to get the best vantage point of his sweet ’n’ dirty picking, and Haynes feared the slightest sudden movement would topple the little bastard.

The stage-stoic Haynes, who favors a musical approach and songs that were minted three or more decades ago, is an unlikely messiah in today’s Jam Nation. Nonetheless, in a scene that’s evolved from the dawn of the Dead to embrace everything from DJ swing to steel-guitar gospel to lap-top boogie, he’s a delightful throwback — a linchpin connecting Jamland’s past to a hardier sonic strain that draws on blues, metal, funk, and even Afro-Cuban roots without getting fancy or wussy about it. His importance to the culture that made Bonnaroo last year’s most influential music festival is reflected by his summer schedule. After he finishes the current Gov’t Mule tour and an album with the band’s new line-up, which includes co-founding drummer Matt Abts, keyboardist Danny Louis, and new bassist Andy Hess, he’ll tour with both the Allman Brothers, which he first joined in 1995, and with the reincarnated Dead.

But at the Palladium back on February 21, the business was all Mule, more or less. The trouble was in the cover-heavy mix of music. When Gov’t Mule arrived as a trio 10 years ago, they played a blend of daring originals like the jazz-fueled "Trane" and heavyweights like "Rockin’ Horse" along with epic covers like bluesman Son House’s "Grinnin’ in Your Face." It was all dipped in psychedelia. Each number opened wide for instrumental jams led by Haynes’s sophisticated guitar thunder — a strain of from-the-hip blues painted in shades of oscillating tones and jerked in odd directions by a playful instinct for unpredictable chord resolutions and leaps between major and minor keys and turn-arounds that cancelled subscription to any rule but impulse. It put Haynes somewhere in the middle ground between Living Coloür ax man Vernon Reid’s explosiveness and the quiet genius of Ornette Coleman sideman Bern Nix.

That changed after the drug-related death of charter bassist Allen Woody in 2000. Musicians’ admiration for Haynes was confirmed by The Deep End Volume 1 (ATO) and its sequel, two single discs that teamed the surviving Mules with some of the best low-end string thumpers around including Jack Bruce, Bootsy Collins, John Entwistle, Phil Lesh, Les Claypool, and, well, just about everyone but current bassist Hess. Haynes wrote a wealth of new material for those discs, but plenty of jamming that didn’t go down on CD took place. And since covers are the bridge through which musicians can most easily access their universal language, they were the coal that fired these sessions.

That experience seems to have transformed the Gov’t Mule who played the Palladium and who appear on the recent two-CD-plus-DVD set The Deepest End (ATO) — which features those bassists and a host of other guests including saxman Karl Denson and New Orleans’s Dirty Dozen Brass Band — into something of a bar band who play nearly as many covers as homemade numbers. Sure, Haynes and company can deliver the goods every time, whether stretching their chops over their own "Blind Man in the Dark" or Hendrix’s "Voodoo Chile," but after a while their classic-rock-radio repertoire of tunes by the Beatles, Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin, and even Rufus with Chaka Khan becomes wearying. There can be such a thing as too much melody, especially when the turns of each tune are textbook. Give me Haynes’s nasty "Bad Little Doggie" over the Beatles’ "She Said, She Said" any day — at least on Gov’t Mule’s stage.

Even the exploratory playing in Worcester rarely tore away from rote melodic forms. Maybe Haynes’s time with the Allmans, who still build charming cloud castles of melody from twined guitar, has also smoothed his edgy instincts. Still, Haynes and Gov’t Mule have learned something that keeps even their predictable efforts appealing. It’s a sonic secret they share, improbably, with the late Mark Sandman, founder of Morphine, that Sandman dubbed "low rock." Haynes rarely takes his guitar out of the deep end, and the band stay right there with him, creating a sound that somehow crawls right into the human pleasure zone. It’s tough, yet warm and soothing enough to land on receptive listeners like summer rain. That sound’s Pied Piper effect makes it easy to forgive the band’s new-found lack of excess and get behind the Mule.