Comes with the territory.) But that’s the thing: As the years went on, you’d also find a lot of clean-cut college bros. (Which, in more extreme cases, means you will also find white people with dreadlocks. The live show has always been a crucial part of experiencing DMB, and go to any gig and you will indeed find those jam band aficionados. ![]() The funny thing is, I remember jam band listeners partially rejecting Dave because of his hits, but there’s no question that DMB has also touched that culture, too, and when recent pop history is being solidified there’s little more damning than being associated with this particular subculture. But the jam band scene really formulated then, with bands like Phish taking up the mantle of the Dead - constantly shape-shifting, epic shows that fostered a community of fans that would follow groups on the road and trade tapes of gigs, a community that became a thing unto itself regardless of what the outside world cared about their chosen band. If you look at the ’90s and see grunge and scraggly indie and electronica and the arc of rap from insurgent artistic force to burgeoning mainstream monolith, there are certain strains that just don’t register as being as important, as big. This, it would seem, is the primary descriptor keeping DMB down. ![]() (Early John Mayer, for example, sounds a whole lot like Matthews in his poppier mode, just with the edges sanded off.) Then of course, there was the most odious characterization, the one that kept them off to the side and reviled the same it garnered them so many devotees: jam band. Later on, as those peers faded and DMB’s pop clout grew, songs like “The Space Between” and “Where Are You Going” seemed to fit in with but also lay the groundwork for turn-of-this-century singer-songwriter pop. At first, maybe their sweet and sometimes-goofy acoustic rock placed them alongside other ’90s hitmakers like Counting Crows and Hootie & The Blowfish relative to the down-tuned, flannel-clad distortion that had become the more critically approved zeitgeist at the dawn of the ’90s. This is part of what makes their story strange: Along the way, you might’ve been able to group DMB in with various mini-moments in recent pop history, but they don’t really feel of an exact piece with any of them exactly. (The band has grown and shifted over the years Moore tragically died in 2008, and Tinsley recently departed before sexual assault allegations against him were made public last month.) All dexterous players, they formed a unique, specific sound, acoustic rock with jazz inflections and improvisations that could incorporate funk or veer into full-on pop balladry. Working with songs written by Matthews, the original core band came together in the early ’90s - drummer Carter Beauford, saxophonist LeRoi Moore, then-teenaged bassist Stefan Lessard, and violinist Boyd Tinsley. It was only recently that you could start to see the tide potentially beginning to turn, that you could start to see … people defending Dave Matthews Band. They are wildly popular, but with the staying power that comes with accruing countless true diehards in their fanbase in some ways, they are an institution.Īnd yet along the way they have been perceived as one of the least cool, most critically maligned (or at least dismissed) artists of their generation. ![]() Since the 1993 arrival of Remember Two Things, their independently released debut preceding the blockbuster Under The Table And Dreaming in 1994, Matthews and the band that bears his name have been building up one of those classic, strange paradoxes in music history. Twenty-five years in, it’s still hard to know how to talk about the Dave Matthews Band.
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