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"Time to clear the pipes a little," he says, stopping to cough.

It fits him, that voice. It's frayed, faded after 17 years of festival sets. It's weathered, but wiser for it.

It won't get much work after next week, when Bell and his band, Widespread Panic, finish their fall tour with a Halloween run at Madison Square Garden in New York. The band appears Wednesday at the A.J. Palumbo Center, Uptown. The band will scatter after that - except for some Myrtle Beach shows, a taping for an acoustic CD, and New Year's, of course, at home in Georgia.

The jam band will not tour in 2004.

Bell has built up to the big goodbye. The band has 22 shows in 11 states in October alone.

Then he's home, with his wife, dogs, cats and his naps. "No plans," he says. "Just making plans would all of a sudden cramp that feeling of freedom."

He's earned it. Widespread Panic is a summer-tour war horse, a boogieing six-piece built on skywriting guitar lines. The band's fans travel, turned on by audience tapes, taken in by the anything-goes live show. They have come from the Grateful Dead and Phish to this.

It could have ended in the fall of 2001, when pancreatic cancer killed the band's guitarist, Michael Houser. His solos stamped the Widespread Panic sound on every song.

The other members did consider quitting. "It came up," Bell says, "but only because it was a natural choice in the conversation. We didn't spend any more than 30 seconds on that."

They decided instead to tour even more, with old friend George McConnell on guitar.

"Looking back, I think that was the right thing to do," Bell says. "We kept our heads down, and we worked. We didn't have time to let it crush us."

With McConnell in the mix, the band kept its momentum.

"He worked his ass off, learning all the songs," Bell says. "You can become acquainted with them, or you can really know them, and have them deep in your subconscious, so you can go into Never Neverland without losing sight of where you are. And that's what he did.

"All we really did on our end was let him know he should just be himself."

It helped that he had new songs. The band recorded "Ball" in the fall of 2002. Rather than road-test the songs, as they had in the past, they scrapped what they had and came in cold. McConnell was involved in all of it.

The disc misses the studio peak the band reached with 1999's "'Til the Medicine Takes" but makes the most of some great moments: the steel drum rush of "Thin Air (Smells Like Mississippi)," the old-dog threat of "Papa Johnny Road," and the shuffling "Don't Want to Lose You," which could have come from Tom Petty's playbook.

The writing is tight. The instrumental give-and-take is saved for the stage show.

"We treat the studio and live situations as different critters," Bell says. "With a live album, you can capture what actually went down. But if you're going back to the slicker format of a studio album, you can craft it and put it into a form that seems more appropriate for your basic listening."

But the band is still, for most, foremost a live act. And that will make the next year difficult for fans.

Bell has thought that through. In 17 years, he's barely been off the road.

"A year isn't really that long," he says. "But now that we have it in the works, and it's actually happening, we are a little anxious about it. It's kind of like driving the horse back into the barn. You have to assume it will affect you."

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