"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." "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. Still, the crowd was big enough to suggest a future for the band's eclectic sonic brew. 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. That's where it debuted in April 1991 in front of several thousand people as part of a multi-band Earth Day concert. 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. We play! And some jam bands aren't improvising at all, they're just playing too long." "I love their whole approach but it's very different than ours.
"I listen to Phish and I know what they're doing," he says. 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. 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. 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.Īll 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. 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.įive years ago, the Dave Matthews Band was playing the Bayou in Washington, just a two-hour drive from its home base in Charlottesville. 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.
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