Between the New Years Eve extravaganzas, the Halloween hoopla, and those annual festivals that revolve around mythical themes, no band wears as many hats or colorful costumes, as The String Cheese Incident. Their excessive rock ‘n roll flamboyancy may keep things interesting, and certainly entertaining for those adorning the festive glitter and hippie party attire, though along the way, it also pushed their traditional mountain town, apre’ ski fanbase into an isolated corner. But when the band announced they would follow up their 2003 Youth produced album, Untying The Knot, by headlining this year’s Lollapalooza festival – alongside Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Broken Social Scene, the Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse – it was tie-dye nation that was thrown for a serious hula-hoop.
The seemingly out-of-character move may have appeared to be a major stretch, but this latest shocker was really nothing new. Lets not forget, only five years ago, they were basically performing jamgrass sets to small 500 capacity clubs across the country, while still managing to play the fiasco that will forever be known as Woodstock ‘99, and even book The Oregon Convention Center for the millennium New Years Eve. The five-piece and their growing organization weren’t necessarily following a natural, meandering course with those choices either. Throw in their own ticket agency, record label, PR firm, travel company, and two years worth of live soundboards for sale at the merchandise table, and you’ve pretty much got the most unconventional band in the entire music industry.
Then of course, just months after Lollapalooza was announced, the festival was canceled, and jam behemoths Phish called it a career. So how will SCI answer the extremely generous jam gods? They head back to the East coast, a part of the country that’s seen less Cheese than Europe and Japan lately. But they didn’t just book New York’s Irving Plaza or Hammerstein Ballroom on a random fall evening. They booked the legendary Radio City Music Hall for New Years Eve, just a few blocks away from the world-renowned festivities at Times Square.
Are they ready to hold that illustrious place in rock history? Well, the live music scene is part of a far different music world than it was back in 2002 when they last played that room. And only time will tell where this band of ski-bums turned touring machine fit into it all.
With the String Cheese whirlwind hitting yet another stride, we sat down with guitarist Bill Nershi to discuss the emotionally charged year.
So how did the Lollapalooza connection originally happen?
Perry [Farrell] hooked up with us. He did a show with Sound Tribe Sector 9, where he was doing his DJ thing as an opener. And then he played with them – sat in DJing with them. And he got off on it so much that he kind of had his eyes opened up to the whole “jamband” thing – god help us for saying that word again. So he got really turned on to Sector 9 and the crowd that was coming out to see the band, and he started doing more research about bands that were doing that kind of thing – a lot of improv in their shows and fans that were really getting involved with what was going on – being part of the show. And then he found out about us. Then Mike [Kang] ran into him someplace and they kind of hit it off and started talking.
How much did you know about the festival before that?
I just knew it was some kind of like, punk rocker festival, which I used to be a lot more into – the punk scene – but lately I haven’t really been into that.
That’s a good example of how far things have come. The entire festival circuit as a whole just continues to grow far more diverse every year – certainly with Bonnaroo pushing at the forefront. Do you think we’re finally at a point where the water is flowing over the edge of the pool and everything is becoming mixed?
Its an evolutionary thing that’s going on. The evolution of music. Right now, with the way communication is around the world, and with computers, and the internet, its much easier to hear many different kinds of music. If you want to, all you have to do is look it up, find it and listen. And I think that’s one of the byproducts of the modern age of technology – the ability to have all these different styles of music available to you at any moment. And also, yeah, another thing that is promoting this evolution of music are the festivals that throw all these different kinds of bands together. And I think that’s really great that its happening in music. This real melting pot of musical styles. And musicians are being exposed to many other bands and many other kinds of music. And its great, cause I know for our band…we’ll hear different styles of music that we’ll choose to incorporate into our pool of styles that we have.
That’s rather indicative of your last record, which is obviously far different from your live sets. By being primarily known for that live experience, is making a solid record becoming more and more critical for bands in the jam realm – in order to truly establish yourself as an artist?
We feel like its important to come up with some really good albums because – not that we necessarily feel that being labeled a “jamband” is a negative, but in some ways, it has this connotation that seems limiting. That’s why we feel its important to make good albums – with good songs and good vocals – that show we can do other things than get up and do a live show that people are psyched about. And another thing is, due to the technology of the day, it seems like the album is somewhat of a dying art, a lost art maybe. Because it’s a time where a lot of music being listened to is merely downloaded singles – and people listen to a lot of collections. And one of the things that really turned me on to music when I was growing up was listening to a whole album, and hearing how it was put together, and how it flowed from one song to another, or [tied itself together]. Albums are a beautiful thing ‘cause they take you on a journey. Since that was such an important part of my early experience listening to music, its become an important thing for me to be involved with as a musician now.
Is rock radio and modern rock moving forward? When you began, SCI and other jambands were a great backlash and an alternative to 90s mainstream rock…but now – the intended lollapalooza lineup being a perfect example – do you feel radio rock and more mainstream audiences are something less fearful?
The thing about jambands…its not all about what they do on stage. A lot if it is about what they do on stage, but all the jambands are different styles, and some of them don’t [even] jam. What its [often] about is doing a lot of things in-house, running a business a little differently. Its not a sign on a major label kind of thing, and it doesn’t have to be. You can start a band and sell records and sell tickets and do all that without having to sign up with some major corporate music entity. And you can enjoy a pretty strong degree of success without having a radio hit. And I think that’s the current state of the jambands.
Well you’re in a very unique position in the music industry, maintaining a total in-house operation. But there are certainly pros and cons to going that direction.
Well the pros are complete artistic control. And the cons are…it’s a hell of a lot more work to oversee all these aspects of the music business that you become involved with.
And those larger labels may be corporate entities, but they can absorb a large portion of the financial burdens…so that price of compromise, that’s got to way on your mind.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why its difficult for us to get a major radio song. I think that in a lot of cases, that takes capital. So there are certainly limitations to it…it’s a tricky thing. We’re trying to work through it too. We’ve gotten to a certain level as a band that we’re pretty happy with, but we’re trying to figure out whether we can continue to grow through our own means.
Releasing your own albums is one thing, but taking on Ticketmaster is on a completely different level. When the battle was all said and done, did you feel you were perhaps a little naïve, or ill-equipped to fight such a corporate giant?
I don’t think we were naïve. We set up our ticketing company – and it was difficult at first to get a good system going. So we worked and worked the system so it could handle – when we announced our summer tour, and everybody went online at once to buy tickets, we got a system together that worked, that could handle that. Then we ran into the whole Ticketmaster thing. And we feel like we should be able to sell tickets to our shows if the clubs and the promoters are alright with that. And that is what we went to fight about…to make sure we have that right, and other bands have that right, to sell tickets to their own shows. We always knew that Ticketmaster was there and there could be problems, and we worked it out. We worked it out with Ticketmaster and we’re able to sell tickets to our shows now.
What about the perception of String Cheese being all about hippie love and fairy wings? That may have positively differentiated you in the 90s, and gave the band a sense of identity, but post-9/11, does that still have relevance?
Well, you can call it fairy wings or flowers, or you know, San Francisco hippie stuff, whatever, but I think that what its all about for us is just keeping a positive message in our music, and keeping a positive outlook on life. And if more people did that, what could that hurt? Putting an image in your head of what you’d like your life to be like, what you would like the world to be like, trying to form an image of that, and make that image into a reality. So we try to keep positive in our music, and I think when people come to our shows, they can get out of their headspace of, “oh, the world is a disaster, and it’s going to hell in a bucket,” as someone once said.
But the evolution of the band has certainly gone through its share of distinct stages, with the mid-90s bar shows, to the surge in the late-90s when people really began to latch onto String Cheese as “their band,” bringing the spirituality connection back to the music. And then in 2000, the techno-Cheese came about, and then, since 9/11, the world as a whole has changed, but so have the audiences, and perhaps the music itself. String Cheese certainly isn’t the carefree ski bum, bluegrass band it once was. So has the state of the world played a role in the evolution of the band, or are you just developing as musicians into a far different rock band than you once were?
It don’t know if it’s necessarily what made our album come out the way it did. Well, the album was somewhat, yeah, I would say the state of world affairs had to do with the way the album came out. But that album is not necessarily the ultimate statement of where the direction String Cheese is going. That album is something where we got into the studio and said, “hey, lets do something different than what we do live.” It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re gonna turn into a techno band…I personally wouldn’t let that happen (laughs). Although its great, and I enjoy it, but its not the band that I would choose to be in.
Was there ever a thought of the risk factor involved with following up an album like that with a billing on a Lollapalooza tour the following summer? Were you concerned at all about alienating fans, or is this just a natural progression of the band?
I don’t know, it’s just kind of the things that have fallen into our lap. It’s not a contrived direction that we’ve decided to go at. The Lollapalooza thing [would have incorporated] a lot of great causes – the HeadCount thing, the voter registration, and another concentration of the festival is “alternative power.” It’s music, but it’s more than music. It’s something where people can come, and they’re learning and getting involved with things that are happening in the current times…and that’s what appeals to me.
