THE SECRET OF THE DAVE MATTHEWS BAND

August 09, 2024

BURGETTSTOWN, PA. -- At 7:30 on a weeknight, the 20 miles of highway between Pittsburgh and the Star Lake Amphitheatre are crawling with rock-and-roll traffic. It's 90 minutes before the Dave Matthews Band is scheduled to hit the stage, and 25,000 people are patiently -- well, mostly patiently -- trying to make their way to this suburban venue to catch this summer's hottest tour, which pulls into Nissan Pavilion for shows next Saturday and Sunday.

Five years ago, the Dave Matthews Band was playing the Bayou in Washington, just a two-hour drive from its home base in Charlottesville. Since then it's become one of the very few, and certainly one of the youngest, rock bands capable of filling stadiums, as it did in June at Giants Stadium, where 60,000 tickets sold out in 90 minutes.

All this is somewhat astonishing for a virtually acoustic, violin- and sax-driven rock band fronted by a 31-year-old South African-born singer who in 1990 was tending bar and had yet to write a song or perform in public.

The signature Dave Matthews sound, a rhythmically compelling hybrid of rock, jazz, folk, funk, classical and South African beats, features bursts of instrumental virtuosity, sophisticated arrangements and collective improvisations that have led some critics to dismiss it as a jam band: neo-hippie, boomer-friendly rockers whose grunge-free approach is more reflective of '60s-style bonhomie than '90s-style edge. That's why they're sometimes labeled as "Children of the Dead" along with such contemporaries as Phish and Blues Traveler, a connection Matthews is quick to defend and define.

"I listen to Phish and I know what they're doing," he says. "I love their whole approach but it's very different than ours. They work. We play! And some jam bands aren't improvising at all, they're just playing too long."

The band might be top-billed today, but it was a tail-end slot at its first public performance that suggested something interesting was brewing in Charlottesville. That's where it debuted in April 1991 in front of several thousand people as part of a multi-band Earth Day concert. As newcomers, they were constantly pushed back on the schedule, until they were the last to play for an audience that had dwindled to a few hundred. Still, the crowd was big enough to suggest a future for the band's eclectic sonic brew.

"When we got up and played, right away all of us noted that by the middle of the first song, there were more people dancing than there had been during the whole day when there were thousands of people there," Matthews recalls. "And I can remember right away the feeling of trying to move the crowd and all of us getting in that mode of steering it and handing off to each other."

The Big Groove is something that the band continues to do in concert. For instance, at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in June, the RFK Stadium audience seemed to suddenly congeal on the infield grass at the first strains of "Tripping Billies," and then jumped, danced and swayed almost on cue as the band raced through a dozen of its best-known songs.

"It's intoxicating at whatever level," Matthews says. "There's a real communal feeling with the audience -- there's not a separation. Whatever level of illusion that is for me, I really do feel that there's a good time that we're all having."

Violinist Boyd Tinsley insists that while the venues may expand, and the light and sound systems may grow, the band's musical center remains unchanged. "We can still find a certain intimacy because the crowd's there for the same reason we are, to have fun and to go somewhere with the music," he says.

Backstage at the Star Lake Amphitheatre, in the sound check/dinner phase of the evening, there's an easygoing, genuine camaraderie between the band and its various road crews (who all stay in the same hotels, a rarity at this level of success). Matthews, looking puckish and sporting a short brush-cut, is dressed in black pants and a deep blue shirt. Take off the Armani Exchange logo and Matthews could easily pass for an usher at the facility he's headlining tonight.

In fact, Matthews is so normal and down-to-earth, at times he seems almost bland. That's how he comes across in the band's videos, where he often appears laid-back, passive and somewhat indifferent. But in concert, Matthews is famous for the crowd-pleasing patter known as Davespeak. Offstage, he's known for his wacky humor, skillful impersonations and character bits served up in a smorgasbord of accents. He may soon find a new forum in Hollywood, where Matthews is represented by the Ilene Feldman talent agency, which also handles musicians-turned-actors Chris Isaak and Donnie Wahlberg.

"I read a lot of scripts and I hope to do something, however minor," Matthews says. "Right now, it's fun to see all the scripts and then, a year later, see the films. Then I shoot myself because I would like to have at least tried some of these things. But I'll try and do it quietly . . . and do it well."

For now, however, he is "The King of Rock"; that's what Spin crowned him recently, even as it pointed out that Matthews is "a most unlikely superstar." He's had the same girlfriend for five years, and in the midst of a 52-concert summer tour he's yearning for his Blue Ridge Mountain hideaway, a 250-year-old converted flour mill on 65 acres near Monticello.

"Maybe in 20 years, when everything is completely in the past, I'm going to be going, I was a damn fool! I should have been freakin'!' " Matthews says with a chuckle. "But I feel it would be a really big mistake to not work at keeping myself close to the ground. I feel I would lose everything if it wasn't heartfelt and coming from a me-to-you place."

Matthews speaks with an intriguing accent, one that comes and goes much as he himself did as a youngster brought up in both his native South Africa and the United States. His father was a physicist involved in the development of superconductor circuits, work that bounced the Matthews family between Johannesburg and various cities in Europe and North America.

Share this articleShare

At 20, Matthews took a clerical job with IBM in New York before moving to Charlottesville, where his mother had settled after his father's death in 1977. A classic college town -- it's home to the University of Virginia and several other schools -- Charlottesville has always supported a small alternative arts community of musicians, dancers, artists and actors. In fact, Matthews's first good notices came as a member of the improv-oriented Offstage Theater.

Music, it seemed, was on an unlit back burner. Matthews had been playing guitar since age 9, but always privately. Even the voice was untapped. As he found work as a bartender, the gregarious Matthews began to meet local musicians, some of whom would invite him onstage to sing a song or two. Such acts of collegiality inspired him to write a few songs and, eventually, to enlist some of his customers at Miller's, a favorite hangout for musicians, on a demo project. It was less a career move than capitulation to curiosity.

"I was not really sure what I was going to do," Matthews confesses. "I didn't think of myself as much of a singer at all, but then it sort of became evident with what I was writing that there weren't a hell of a lot of people who were going to sing it. So I thought I might have to do it myself for it to go anywhere."

His initial concept was for a trio consisting of acoustic guitar, saxophone and drums. "With sort of a quiet, laid-back feel to it," Matthews recalls. "A little funky, maybe, with elements of freedom in the music that would keep it lively for the players."

Those players were drummer Carter Beauford and saxophonist LeRoi Moore, both Charlottesville natives and veterans of the city's jazz scene. They were soon joined by bassist Stefan Lessard (a 16-year-old high school student at the time) and, some months later, by violinist Tinsley, who after years of classical study was playing in several rock and folk bands. It was a idiosyncratic mix of instruments (Lessard's is the band's only electric instrument), as well as of experienced musicians and tyros.

The band's boundary-blurring sound was already in place by the time he signed on, Tinsley says. "There were only eight or nine songs, but they were strong and I'd never heard anything like them before. What struck me also at once was Dave's voice, how unusual, how beautiful it was. I never had so much fun or felt like I really connected to a group like I did there -- it was immediate. I was blown away."

"The sound is entirely the result of the five of us," says Matthews. "After we'd played together only a few weeks, it was very evident to me it was going to be our vision, not my vision anymore. It's a very inappropriately named band."

The road from Earth Day celebrations to stadium sellouts went through hundreds of small towns and college campuses. The band averaged 200 shows a year in ever-widening circles. Those shows were booked mostly by Coran Capshaw, now the band's manager. Back in 1992, however, he was the owner of two Virginia clubs, Tracks in Charlottesville and the Flood Zone in Richmond.

"I'd never thought about managing until Dave Matthews started playing at Tracks," Capshaw says. "But I noticed there were a lot of people there for the first time and the word was kind of getting around about the band. The second night, I looked up and saw there was something special going on and I just got drawn into it as a fan."

Eventually the band was playing so often for Capshaw that fraternities and sororities called Tracks looking for DMB. "I'd answer the phone and start negotiating," Capshaw says, insisting he "sort of fell into the managerial role."

Capshaw turned out to be a particularly savvy career strategist. As an avid Deadhead, he knew about longevity; as a club owner who saw national acts with major-label contracts working for $100 a night, he also knew about obsolescence.

Capshaw convinced the band that a record deal didn't need to be its ultimate goal -- "people get converted seeing this band live," he says, pointing out that the Grateful Dead had been the most consistent concert draw for a decade without the benefit of radio hits or album sales. The Dave Matthews Band also followed the Dead model by letting fans tape their concerts to circulate among themselves and their friends. When Matthews and his band started to stray farther afield for club and college dates, they were astonished to find a ready-made audience already familiar with their songs and clearly receptive to their crossbred jams.

Incessant touring and a gradual expansion of venues from clubs and fraternity houses to larger clubs and smaller theaters, then to larger theaters, amphitheaters and stadiums created an increasingly large constituency that inevitably caught the attention of the music industry. After a self-released album in 1993, the band signed with RCA and, unlike the Dead, proved no slouch in the sales department.

Its 1994 major-label debut, "Under the Table and Dreaming," sold more than 5 million copies, and 1996's "Crash" another 4 million. The band's current studio album, "Before These Crowded Streets," has sold more than 2 million copies in four months.

Capshaw handles the band's publishing and merchandising, which bring in millions of dollars a year through the sale of hats, T-shirts, posters and miscellaneous items. Again, it's a model of efficiency with antecedents in the Grateful Dead.

"The band is not only enjoying the control they have in their career, but the financial rewards are there for them, too," he says. "It's all in-house, and in turn we've been able to put a large group of local people to work -- our own cottage industry, so to speak."

As part of its deal with RCA, DMB gets to release live albums on its own label, Bama Rags, and it's on last year's "Live at Red Rocks" double CD that the band's populist appeal is most evident. The songs are full of rhythmic vitality and emotional urgency, with Matthews's vocals evoking the yearning of Michael Stipe, Bono and Eddie Vedder, and the elegance of Sting and Peter Gabriel. "Crash Into Me," "Stay" and "I'll Back You Up" are characterized by romantic delirium; then there's the questioning "Dancing Nancies" and "Best of What's Around" as well as the raging optimism of such anthems as "Proudest Monkey," "Ants Marching," "Pig" and "Tripping Billies," with its oddly crowd-pleasing chorus of "eat, drink and be merry/ for tomorrow we die."

Given its general buoyancy and percussive pleasures, there's a surprising somberness to much of Matthews's writing, perhaps reflecting the death of his father when he was just 10 and the 1994 murder of his sister and brother-in-law in South Africa, an incident Matthews declines to discuss (he and his sister Jane are raising the two young children left behind).

"There's always been a good handful of songs about death and loss," Matthews concedes, "but always with the idea that {death} was something that should bring us together. There are arbitrary lines between bad and good that often don't make a lot of sense to me. I don't want to die, obviously, but really, the wonder of life is amplified by the fact that it ends. If it went on forever, it would be such a tiresome thing and we'd all be so bored: " What are going to do today?' " Just live again, I suppose.' " CAPTION: Dave Matthews in concert in Pennsylvania: "There's a real communal feeling with the audience -- there's not a separation."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nnJ6zpr%2FTsqOeZ6Opxq2xjmpwcnBfZYVwfZVoq6GdXaiypL7ErWSonl2ptaZ5w5qtnmWdlsG1tMSwqmaakaOxcIOWbWucbpJpenWxlZ5kbZmSbXqifJBtZJucaWqDp4OWnZmaml8%3D