The lyrics spoke to the cheerful irreverence of Generation X college kids for whom selling out was death and giving a shit was lame.
Dave’s voice bounced across feel-good tunes, a light tenor that could sound a little Muppety or soar into falsetto. Not that anyone really cared what they were called when they played UVA frat houses, drinking from the same keg as the audience.ĭMB’s songs were a mishmash of folk, bluegrass, jazz, and rock, and shows would relax into jam sessions with discursions on Moore’s saxophone or Tinsley’s violin. The band name arose from indifference, not narcissism, and Matthews has never quite been comfortable with being the eponymous front man. In 1991, Matthews rounded up an eclectic group-jazz saxophonist Le Roi Moore, drummer Carter Beauford, violinist Boyd Tinsley, a 15-year-old bassist named Stefan Lessard-to rehearse at Matthews’s workplace in the off hours. Matthews landed behind a bar, pouring beers for musicians. He relocated to Charlottesville, Virgina, a town where the American south meets the mid-Atlantic, home to the University of Virginia and cheap drinks at college dives. Raised as a Quaker and with naturalized American citizenship, Matthews joined anti-apartheid demonstrations but had a ticket out of the chaos-and out of mandated service in a South African military that upheld the racist status quo. Living for the moment wasn’t so much an ethos as a coping mechanism.
Since the beginning he’s danced like the 51-year-old dad he is now: dorky knee bends, mini kicks from behind his guitar, the kind of shoulder shimmy one does while manning a backyard barbecue.ĭavid John Matthews may have archetypal American white guy moves, but he was born in South Africa and mostly raised in Johannes burg when apartheid strained that country to its breaking point. In 2018, the Dave on the Gorge stage looks just like he did in the Clinton years-receding hairline, a round white face with round cheeks. The next year Rolling Stone readers voted DMB the 10th worst band of the ’90s. Dave Matthews Band came out on top, a group who “ Perrier seem vibrant and ethnic,” as columnist Jeff Weiss wrote. In 2012, LA Weekly ranked the “Top 20 Worst Bands of All Time,” roasting a murderers’ row of earnest pop rockers and superficial corporate outfits, the Spin Doctors to the Pussycat Dolls. The bus driver was hit with fines, but the metaphor of Poopgate was, well, easy pickings.
Right on an open-air boat of sightseers on an architecture tour. There was the Day Dave Matthews Band Pooped on Chicago: On August 8, 2004, one of the band’s busses-that Dave wasn’t on at the time-emptied its sewage tank through the grated roadway of the Windy City’s Kinzie Street Bridge. Mention Dave Matthews Band anywhere in Seattle and look for the knowing cringe.ĭMB made it so easy. For a whole generation of late-stage Gen Xers, the DMB posters that papered their dorm rooms have become as embarrassing as that ’90s men’s haircut with floppy side bangs. The punchlines were mockery wrapped up in derision of cargo shorts and ultimate Frisbee. Sometime in the past two decades, the group’s ubiquity seeped into the national consciousness so thoroughly that the band and the man melded into one familiar entity, “Dave.” And to most, “Dave” became unbearably irritating. Cross that I’m writing about the Dave Matthews Band, he immediately quips, “Why? Did you lose a bet with your editor?” When I tell Seattle music critic Charles R. Why do two wildly successful entities-a music man and a music city-have so little to do with each other? There’s a Dave Matthews shaped hole in the public idea of the Seattle sound, and neither Matthews nor the Emerald City seems interested in changing that. “And Dave Matthews.” This in spite of the fact that while KEXP’s airwaves might blast “Thrift Shop” or “Jeremy,” the station doesn’t even play DMB. When KEXP fundraised for their new Seattle Center studio in the mid 2010s, three big bands showed up with cash: “Macklemore and Ryan Lewis came through, Pearl Jam came through,” says longtime DJ and program director John Richards. His photos hang next to platinum records from Death Cab for Cutie, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Nirvana at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline-the Northwest’s most hallowed recording spot. For two decades Matthews has parked his jam band circus at the Gorge and he’s funded progressive causes.
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