Athens, Georgia is one of those places where music feels stitched into the air. For Sam Holt and Domingo “Sunny” Ortiz, it’s not just a backdrop—it’s where friendship, loss, and connection have been written into the legacy of Widespread Panic, a band emblematic of Athens itself. Ortiz, the band’s percussionist, will take part in Sam Holt Band‘s August 30th Remembering Mikey & Todd show in Athens, which will honor guitarist Michael “Mikey” Houser and drummer Todd Nance, both founding Widespread Panic members who have since passed.
Ahead of the show, the two musicians sat down to share stories that span nearly four decades, from their earliest memories and road recollections to reflections on how Panic continues to evolve, create, and thrive after almost 40 years. Woven through those memories is a quieter thread: the early loss of Mikey Houser, and the way his passing reshaped everything. For Widespread Panic, it meant losing a brother and navigating an unthinkable change. For Sam Holt, it carried all of that, layered with the responsibility of stepping into a space that once belonged to his mentor and dear friend. In this conversation, Sam shares his most personal memories of Mikey.
What follows is a story of old friends, heroes, and lifetimes: Mikey’s final gifts, Todd’s stubborn wisdom—a testament to friendship, connection, and the magic of Widespread Panic.
Tickets for Sam Holt Band’s Remembering Mikey & Todd show at Athens, GA’s Live Wire Athens on Saturday, August 30th are available here.
While Sam Holt didn’t enter the Widespread Panic orbit until he signed on as Mikey Houser’s guitar tech in 2000, memories from the band’s earliest days still informed his deep connection to the project.
“I’ll tell you a story [Todd Nance] told me,” Holt said during a series of phone and video calls last week. “Early on—I’m going to say it was probably like ’89 or ’90—they were obviously trying to get some kind of record deal, and back then that was a big deal. There was this guy named Rodney Mills from Atlanta, a pretty big producer, and Todd had the only car that was presentable. So he went and picked him up and took him to dinner. At dinner, the guy asked, ‘So, Todd, does Widespread Panic want to make hits and be famous, or… what?’ And Todd just said, ‘Or what! That’s not our goal. We’re not trying to make hit records. We’re trying to have a career.’ They wanted to stay true to themselves. Hearing that—telling a big-time dude that early on—you realize they had so much belief in what they were doing. They weren’t going to compromise.”
Sunny Ortiz resonated with the band’s self-assured demeanor from their very first interaction. “The first memory that I have playing with Panic was when I drove from Austin, Texas to Athens, Georgia on October 6th, 1986,” he explained. “I was invited to sit in and the Panic boys did not know who I was. But, the club owner, Kyle Pilgrim, was my very best friend that I’d known since 1969, and he said that I was legit, so I think that was good enough for the boys. I sat in with them, and the whole thing about music is the vibe on stage. If there’s a sweet connection, then I think musicians have it amongst each other—no matter where it is, or what time it is, there’s always that connection. And we connected.”
“They were fresh with the whole music scene, but they had a great time,” Ortiz continued. “Being 10 years their senior, I had already experienced some things that they wanted to experience themselves. For me, the whole vibe of being in Athens was exciting. The adrenaline was there. The whole scene was a great connection. And to this day it’s still going strong, thank God.”
I told Sunny how my own life feels shaped by connection, too, how my network seems to stretch all over the country as a result of my many years following Widespread Panic.
“Yes!” he agreed. “The perfect word there is ‘widespread.’ You can’t run or hide from that word. It’s just one of those words that they acquired by accident, and it lingered on. Panic was Mikey’s nickname. One time, JB [Widespread Panic’s John Bell] and Mikey were walking in Athens in the early ’80s and they saw a poster plastered on a telephone pole—there was a band called Widespread Orchestra! Mikey said, ‘You know what, JB, I want to become Widespread.’ And there you go. True story.”
From the very beginning, that same mix of accident and intention shaped the way the band played. Sunny reminisced about the old days when the band would get onstage with no particular plans in place: “Back then, there was no set list—we would just do songs on the fly. We did that for years until finally, you know, we had to. That was the thing that intrigued me in the early years with the boys—how they segued from song to song without actually coming to an end and then starting a new one. We used to call that…we’re gonna do a sandwich in this song into this song, and then we came up with, well, the word obviously was developed already, but melting one song into another.”
“These days, the process looks different,” he added. “We don’t hang out multiple weeks [in a row] like we used to. So, when I get together with the boys now, someone always has an idea, and then we all embellish it. That’s where the creativity comes out—everybody expressing themselves in their own way, and over time, the song grows. Nothing happens overnight. Even then, it doesn’t really sound like what it’s going to sound like until you put it in front of an audience. That’s when you find out what it really is.”
I couldn’t help but notice how often Sunny referred to Panic as “the boys.” It’s a term longtime fans sometimes use with affection. When I brought it up, he just laughed.
“Well, any kind of a name is great. What’s in a name? You can call us whatever. Widespread motherf—ing Panic works. Panic works. There’s Widespread, and that works. Any kind of name that can be associated with us, I think we’re all good with it. The nicknames of what you call the band is entirely up to you—however you feel, whenever you feel it.”
Sunny then discussed his longstanding relationship with Sam Holt, as the two are preparing for their upcoming show in Athens. “We’ve shared the stage many times. Again, it’s that connection. Sam has authenticity in his pursuit of being the guitar player that he is. The creativity is always there. [He’s] a very talented individual. Sam was on the road with us. He was with us when we were with Capricorn Records and we did that first album in the Bahamas [2006’s Earth to America]. He was there. He saw it all.”
When I brought that up to Sam, he smiled and leaned in with his own recollection. “The Bahamas was cool because we were isolated. It was like nobody was around except the band, a couple of crew guys, and the producer, Terry Manning. Compass Point Studio was really cool. Back in Black was recorded there. Bob Marley recorded there. The Rolling Stones recorded there. There was even a vocal booth built especially for Mick Jagger. I wrote a couple songs there for my band at the time, Outformation, one of them being ‘Stone in My Shoe’, which my current band, Sam Holt Band, still plays. [Widespread Panic keyboardist] JoJo [Hermann] had this riff for a song called ‘Traveler’s Rest’ and I helped translate it to guitar. Sunny even programmed his little drum machine to make a demo of it. That became the title of Outformation’s second record. Wild how things circle back.”
Outformation – Traveler’s Rest (2007)
The Bahamas stories showed the joys that came of being close to the band, but some of Sam’s deepest memories come from much harder moments. When the conversation turned to Mikey Houser’s final days, his tone shifted. This wasn’t a story he often shared.
“Someone told me Mikey was in the hospital and said, ‘Man, you should go see him.’” Holt remembered. “I walked in and he was in bad shape, but still conscious and coherent. His wife was coming in and out of the room, and she pulled up a chair and sat me right down next to him. I was holding back tears, trying not to just break down crying, and he reached his hand out to me and grabbed my hand—and that was his first reaction… to try to help me cope. That gives a lot of insight into what type of person he was.”
“And we were talking about what to do with his gear,” Holt went on, “and I was like, ‘I’ve got your amps, I’ve got all this stuff, I’ve got the guitars, whatever.’ He asked me, ‘Would you use this stuff?’ And I told him, ‘Yeah, I would use it.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you keep this—and he told me the things to keep—and said to bring the rest back home to his wife.
“It was crazy. I brought everything inside [to Houser’s house] first. And [Barbette, Houser’s wife] was like, ‘Didn’t he want you to keep these things?’ And I said, ‘Yes, but I didn’t want to assume anything.’ And she said, ‘No, put these things back in your car—they’re yours.’”
That list of “things” included Houser’s Soldano SLO 100 amplifier, his Mesa Boogie 2×12 cabinet, and his coveted Telecaster Plus Deluxe, as well as his volume and delay pedals—the ones that helped create the unmistakable “Panic” sound.
What Mikey gave Sam wasn’t just gear; it was permission. Playing Mikey’s rig meant stepping into a sound that had always been Mikey’s, and it was only a matter of days before Sam had to carry it onstage.
The enormity of that experience seemed to rush back as Holt recalled, “It was a week after Mikey passed, 2002, at Fiddler’s Green in Denver,” he recalled. “If there was ever one gig I didn’t want to do, it was that one. But I couldn’t say no. JoJo and their manager, Sam Lanier, came up to me and asked if I wanted to sit in the next night. JoJo said, ‘That’s what Mike wanted. He wanted you to play with Panic.’ My heart started racing.”
“Later, during Drums,” Holt continued, “JB sat with me and asked what I wanted to play. I joked, ‘Werewolves of London’, which broke the ice. We settled on ‘Driving Song’ and ‘Sleepy Monkey’. Going out there was surreal. I can remember parts of it, but it was surreal. I don’t even know what was going on. But, if they wanted me to do it, I’d do it. I was going to do whatever they asked me to do. That was such a f—ed-up time that no one knew what was going on, no one knew what the right thing to do was. But I contributed in any way I could, anything they asked. And I was completely nervous, like shaking. I was sitting there just playing ‘Driving Song’ over and over again on a practice guitar all day.”
Widespread Panic w/ Sam Holt – “Driving Song” > “Sleepy Monkey” > Driving Song 8/18/02
[Video: Tim D’Aquino]
Holt continued on with the Widespread Panic crew for several years after that night, working as a tech for Bell, then original Houser stand-in George McConnell, then current guitarist Jimmy Herring on his first tour with the band. In 2006, when McConnell parted ways with the group mid-tour, Holt and longtime Widespread Panic collaborator and producer John Keane stepped in the share guitar duties for the remainder of the run.
In the years since he parted with Panic and set out on his own music career—an endeavor Houser had always supported—Sam Holt has encountered many moments that still feel inexplicable while playing through his old mentor’s rig. “I’ve had a couple of experiences on August 10th, the day he passed,” Holt explained. “During the encore at my Atlanta show this year, I swear I felt like I could hear the guitar swirling around the room. I could see my fingers move, but I wasn’t sure if I was even playing. It almost sounded delayed, like the note would circle the room. I’ve only felt that a couple of times, both on August 10th.”
There’s loss in their stories, yes, but also gut-busting laughter, long drives, good food, and the small moments that defined their friendships. Sunny laughed as he recounted how he and Todd Nance would scour each new town on tour for barbecue, no matter how far they had to drive. Sam recalled quieter hours with Todd, like a long ride back from a gig in South Carolina: “It was just him and me, listening to [a] podcast about George Jones. We were transfixed,” he recalled. “That was Todd—always curious, always tuned in. He took care of people. Even little things, like checking us into hotels so I didn’t have to put my card down for incidentals. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
From those memories of brothers gone too soon, the conversation naturally circled back to the town that shaped them all: Athens. For Sunny, it boiled down to one word: “When I think of Athens, I think ‘music.’” Sam added, “Artists are drawn here. People support each other. It’s not competitive the way some scenes are. It’s encouraging.”
He cited Nuçi’s Space—the Athens-based, musician-oriented nonprofit focused on suicide prevention and destigmatization of mental illness—as proof: “They literally have a building where you can rent a practice room with drums, mics, PA, everything set up. Ten bucks an hour there, versus like $150 in Atlanta. It’s geared toward broke musicians who just need a place to play. And it’s more than that—they support musicians with mental health resources and help people get doctor’s appointments. They even have a new program called The Mikey Houser Pre-Amped Music Program that helps local children learn music. If you can say you’ve played in Athens, they’ll try to work with you. That’s incredible.”
In late-night practice rooms and community spaces like Nuçi’s the Athens music scene keeps regenerating itself, fostering the same spirit that shaped Widespread Panic and still sustains the music decades later.
As the conversation moved back to Athens, I couldn’t help but wonder if Widespread Panic had anything planned back where it all began for the band’s 40th anniversary in 2026. Sunny confirmed the band is “trying to work out some situations for this [recently opened] Akins [Ford] Arena [in Athens], but we’ll end [this] year at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta,” a historic venue which has become a second home for Panic by way of a series of memorable New Year’s runs.
For Sunny and Sam, the spirit of Athens is the thread between past and present, between brothers lost and the ones still carrying the music forward. As Sunny put it, “It’s participation. It’s connection. That’s the only way the music lives—by everybody being part of it.”
Their memories remind us that the music was never only about the songs. It’s always been about the people—the ones still here, and the ones whose presence still lingers in every chord.
See below for more details on the Sam Hold Band’s Remembering Mikey & Todd show at Athens, GA’s Live Wire Athens this Saturday, August 30th. Grab tickets here.
***Show Details***
Aubrey Entertainment & Live Wire Athens present:
REMEMBERING MIKEY & TODD with the SAM HOLT BAND
Saturday, August 30, 2025 @ Live Wire Athens
Doors open @ 7pm, Show @ 8pm
Under 18 admitted with parent or guardian
Tickets (on sale here): $20 adv (+tax/fees), $25 at the door ($20 at door with college ID)
