Even though the String Cheese Incident gets top billing on this Internet writey page of mine, I started it up at a time when they had just recently wrapped up a tour, so there wasn't a whole lot of current Cheesy stuff to talk about, and for the most part I'm not terribly interested in the fart-sniffing of past glories. Today, however, we get to do both!
String Cheese kicked off their typical summer festival circuit on Friday night with the first of three performances at Electric Forest in Rothbury, Michigan. Since its inception, the festival has gradually given itself over to an increased presence of DJs and EDM acts, but SCI has always served as its anchor, headlining each night since 2009 (when it was still just "Rothbury") with multiple sets each night.
Once one of the elements that threatened to tear the band asunder, SCI are now no strangers to synths and knobs and laptops and wubs, though it's typically only a small part of a largely organic whole. In its current manifestation, it's less a means of brand growth than an occasional toy or tool, but last night it seemed the band actually maybe could have been viewed as extending an olive branch or two to the molly-gobblers, first in the form of a second set loosely themed around assorted candy connotations, then a Doors encore with none other than the mainstream face of dubstep himself, Mr. Sonny John Moore, a.k.a. Skrillex.
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| This took me literally two mnutes to make. Memes are a disease. |
Ooh laws, and you thought the old-timers flipped their stuff when "Desert Dawn" got wompy.
I only listened on a Mixlr stream—big ups to Phishfiend for giving us couch folk crystal-clear Cheese straight from the soundboard—and later caught some 144p video on YouTube courtesy of the indispensable Martin Singer, and a couple of things seemed apparent to me. 1: Billy was flying first-class, which generally is his preferred method for convincing himself that this too shall pass, that this is sometimes the price of being part of a democracy rather than a dictatorship, and maybe if I put on some big goggles and a wizard hat and do a good enough job of pretending like I don't know where I am then maybe they'll let me bookend a set with "Colorado Bluebird Sky" tomorrow or the next day. 2: They were having fun (especially Travis), which in a live organic mode that usually requires the listener to endure and forgive occasional-to-semi-frequent musical and lyrical burps, warts, and/or flubs is in my opinion a slightly more useful rubric for determining the value of a performance than something strictly technical.
I'm the kind of person who derives nourishment from the schadenfreude of large-scale butthurt even when I kind of agree with it, so this sort of event rolls right off my back. But it's hard for me to see how this is anything other for a win for SCI. For one thing, how many bands could have the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Skrillex play with them in the same night? If you put together a list of some of the most high-profile acts that have sat in with SCI (which I'm not going to do right now because this has already taken me several hours to write), you'd get a résumé even the man from Moab would get Tex Avery eyes looking at.
Jam band fans pride themselves on being open-minded and accepting folks, but events like this reveal what a wet-paper facade that often is. It takes a lot of guts to cast aside your long-codified musical preferences and prejudices, even more so when you're doing it on stage in front of thousands of people who know very well what they like and what they don't like and don't mind telling you either way, and yet still String Cheese manages to frequently lead by example. It's an incredibly hard thing to do. It would be easy to keep inviting the same Keller Williamses and Warren Hayneses to sit in and stay snug in that comfort zone, and not many people would complain if they did. But they stretch out, they expand, and they, and ultimately we, are better for it. They play with the likes of Dierks Bentley and Lauryn Hill. Does it really matter, in a macro sense, if the performance is bad? Does it matter more that it happened at all? Who cares if Skrillex can't hold a candle to Kang or Billy on the guitar? He's much more theatrical with his body than they are, but he had fun with them and he hyped them up to the crowd and he repped them to people who normally would never have had the pleasure of having them in their lives. He's a friend of Cheese, like it or lump it.
The more puritan fans do have some options for consoling themselves. First of all, it was night one of three, and if you want to tell yourself that maybe they're just getting the Madison House promotional stunt out of the way early and gearing up for something a little more traditionally heady, then by all means, vaya con Dios. You can consider that they spent 13 minutes jamming with freakin' Skrillex and only one of those minutes comprised predominantly EDM elements, therefore it could have been much worse. But if nothing will salve your wounds except some aged gouda, you're still in luck, because yesterday marked the 13th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite incidents: the band's performance at erstwhile concert venue Barton Coliseum in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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2002 was the year I discovered SCI by downloading "Texas" at four kilobytes a second on good old spyware-infested Kazaa Lite, so right away that puts it somewhere among at least the top three years of my life to date. The On the Road archival series was just beginning to take off, and even with the existence of the Live Music Archive and the file-sharing flavor of the month, $20 for 3+ hours of unimpeachable live music was a steal even then. This was the second OTR package I bought, and it took me straight from appreciative neophyte to devoted disciple.
Despite being straitened by a curfew and the package containing only two discs as opposed to the normal three, the band packed more energy into any given song of this show than they do into some shows' entire running times. Usually the first song or two or three can be written off as a warmup, but here "Cedar Laurels", so often accused of overplay in those days if I recall correctly (along with "It Is What It Is" and "Joyful Sound") comes roaring spotless out of the gate; it's still my definitive version of the song. Speak of the allegedly overplayed devil, "Joyful Sound" is next, and segues into "Orange Blossom Special", forming a sly setlist reference to none other than the vaunted "Incident in Atlanta"—of which of course there have been many, but you know, the Incident in Atlanta—though there's a sinister bite to the playing here, especially in the jam leading into OBS and the first few minutes thereof, that makes me give it the edge over the November 2000 versions.
"Ten Miles to Tulsa" will have you longing for more appearances of the sort of material Billy pumped out when he was collaborating with Liza Oxnard, and a shorty in the middle of some extended jams is always a nice treat, especially when it ends up serving as an amuse-bouche to the 1-2-3 punch of "This Must Be the Place", "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", and a set-closing "Shine" with just the right amount of ramshackle.
What's going to catch most people's eyes here on paper is the second set, one of those beautiful unicorns that appears maybe once a year, if even then: the all-segue set. In this case we get back-to-back rarities mixed in with indisputable classics: "Johnny Cash" kicks things off, followed by a cover of Yes's "Roundabout" that starts off in recital mode but finds that essential String Cheese ownership during the jam. The next 30 minutes of the set find the band alternating between "Sand Dollar" and "Texas". Neither gets its traditional ending, but the interweaving of the jams more than makes up for that. "Texas" crashes into the end of "Johnny Cash" to bring everything full-circle, bringing one of the tightest (in many ways) sets the band has ever played to an exhausted close.
If you think an all-segue set is rare, then prepare for the breach of an even bigger white whale: an audience request! Unfortunately, they weren't able to fulfill the original request of "Pirates" (an idea that was completely alien to me at the time—how do you forget a song you've performed hundreds of times?), but they encore with "Howard" instead, a more-than-acceptable substitute and a perfect capper to a crazy night.
The show is available as a digital download on Live Cheese; if you've never listened to it and you dare to call yourself a fan of String Cheese, you owe it to yourself to add this notch to your belt. Here's the "Roundabout" cover from that show, to give you a small taste of what went down that night.
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