Reviews
 Covers
James Taylor
This Is the Life
Amy McDonald
Live in Gdansk
No Bull (Live in Madrid, Spain 1996)
What Happened?
The Lone Sharks
Nine Lives
Steve Winwood
Moneyland
Various Artists
I'm Not There (Original Soundtrack)
Various Artists
Home Before Dark
Neil Diamond
Toby Keith's 35 BIGGEST Hits
Toby Keith
|
Dave Matthews Band
Listen to Dave Matthews Band:
The Dave Matthews Band represents a success story that amazes me, because they are so unconventional in so many ways. For starters, their instrumental makeup is unusual by anybody’s standard, but particularly for a ‘jam’ band – one guitar (Matthews) with a drum and bass rhythm section (Carter Beauford and Stefan Lessard, respectively), yes, but augmented by a violinist (Boyd Tinsley) and a reedman (LeRoi Moore). Also, their music sidesteps just about every pop music convention, concentrating on instrumental interplay while treating melody as though it were an afterthought. Bands like Blues Traveler, the Aquarium Rescue Unit and Widespread Panic have covered similar ground, with only marginal recognition, leaving Phish as the only other contemporary ‘jam’ band to claim such extraordinary popularity. Mostly, though, what makes the Dave Matthews Band such an anomaly is the fact that they are a do-it-yourself band in a mega-corporate business. While others have risen from the ranks of college-circuit unknowns to become superstars, only the Dave Matthews Band have done so while steadily increasing their fan base (can anybody still say ‘Hootie and the Blowfish’ without a grimace?).
Although the bandmembers don’t appear to be particularly serious people, these are very serious musicians, perhaps the most talented agglomeration of popular musicians we’ve seen in quite some time. For their efforts, they have been likened to Fairport Convention and Traffic, while often being explained as a jazz/worldbeat cross of the Grateful Dead with Peter Gabriel or Sting. None of these comparisons accurately captures the full sweep of this band, though, particularly when they are in full flight, and none of this explains their incredible popularity. For more than a decade, ‘Jam’ bands have generated cult audiences only, and at first, the Dave Matthews Band were no exception.
In 1969, when Matthews was two years old, his family moved from his birthplace of Johannesburg, South Africa and relocated to the suburbs outside of New York City. He also lived in London for a while, but the family returned to Johannesburg in 1979, after his father passed away. At eighteen years of age, Matthews was conscripted into military service, but opted to leave the country rather than serve South Africa’s apartheid government. The family again moved to the United States, this time settling in the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia. Eschewing college, Matthews took a job as a bartender, using his spare time to fool around with some ideas on his guitar. In two years time, he wrote only four songs, none of which he felt were good enough to play for anyone else. Some friends who eventually heard them convinced him otherwise, so Matthews rather hesitantly decided to record a demo tape and brought aboard some of the best local talent he could find. The musicians who played on that first demo became the Dave Matthews Band, and there have been no personnel changes since. From private parties to nightclubs and eventually, a grueling three-year tour of the national college circuit that consisted of over 200 shows annually, the Dave Matthews Band built a following one show at a time. In 1993, the band pressed a live CD to sell at shows (called Remember Two Things), and it became the best-selling self-distributed CD on record. The lure of a major label affiliation was now impossible to ignore, and the Dave Matthews Band signed with RCA in 1994. Their first studio album, Under the Table and Dreaming, peaked at #11 while their next release, Crash, debuted at #2 in 1996. In 1998, Before These Crowded Streets debuted at #1 and the Dave Matthews Band were the highest-grossing act in rock and roll, with a merchandising business that grossed an additional $80 million annually.
Despite such awesome recognition, the Dave Matthews Band hardly made a mark on the mainstream audience; people listening to Matchbox 20 or Mariah Carey still didn’t know anything about the band. That is, until the release of their fourth studio album, Everyday. Steve Lilywhite produced each of the band’s previous efforts and that was the plan for this album as well, until Matthews began to feel uncomfortable with his own songwriting. He felt the songs were too depressing and after six months of work, Matthews decided to abandon the sessions. Taking advice from his record label, he relocated to California and started writing with Glen Ballard, the producer behind Wilson Phillips and Alanis Morissette. As incongruous as the match might seem, the two worked extremely well together, with Ballard providing a tight focus for Matthews that his previous work lacked. The result left some longtime fans bewildered (“Where are the long jams?”), while others felt their teaming provided some of Dave Matthews’ most inspired songs yet. Musical interplay is integral to the band’s sound, but Everyday played down this aspect, making it the first Dave Matthews album to prioritize melody and feature concise arrangements. For the first time, emphasis was placed on the songs, rather than on the songs’ ingredients. In a sense, Everyday was a Dave Matthews album, with the band providing a supporting role that they (or their fans) weren’t used to. Tighter focus on the front man meant greater accessibility, and Everyday became the album that introduced the Dave Matthews Band to an even broader audience than they had already known.
Most critics expected the album’s most explosive track, “I Did It,” to be the song that would haunt us throughout the summer of 2001, but as it turns out, that honor goes to a much subtler (and more accessible) song entitled “The Space Between.” Lyrically, Matthews has never been so lucid and expressive, singing about a semi-failed relationship that has strength beyond the perception of the troubled couple. While the song’s gentility suggests some of his best earlier work, most notably “Crash Into Me”, “The Space Between” features the strongest chorus of anything he’s yet released. The lyrical thrust fits the melody like a glove, while the well-pared production only compounds the effect. Perhaps “The Space Between” is less unique than previous efforts, but any fan who can remain open-minded should find this new approach to be even more fascinating, and ultimately more captivating. Older material might remain the mainstay of the band’s concert performances, but I’m certain “The Space Between” will appear on ‘classic’ (and eventually ‘oldies’) radio for years to come.
Since the onset of the new millennium, the top 40 charts resemble an unshaken bottle of salad dressing, with urban-based tracks floating around the top, and country-based recordings hovering underneath. A typical weekly chart from June, 2001 (the month that “The Space Between” butted its way onto the top 40) features twelve of the top twenty spots occupied by urban/R&B artists (and only one country artist), while five of the ten positions between 31 and 40 are affiliated with Nashville. Most of the balance is peppered with now-maturing ‘teen pop’ acts desperately struggling to gain credibility and maintain their popularity (predictably, they are losing). Keeping with the analogy, I guess it’s fair to say that ‘urban’ and ‘country’ don’t mix, while the ex-teens provide little more than harmless spice. As usual, the most interesting songs on the pop charts are those that flaunt convention and celebrate something new or different. In the midst of this rather lackluster scenario, the Dave Matthews Band crashed into us, reaching the top 40 by embracing a style that is extraordinarily personal and willfully eclectic, and yet decidedly populist.
 
|
More Music Reviews
More Movie Reviews
More Book Reviews
More Concert Reviews
See more hits from the 2000's
Powered by Millennium Communications Inc.