Grilled Cheese

The String Cheese Incident finds beauty in bucking the system. The Colorado quintet also finds strength in traversing the road less traveled while others jump through hoops, chasing the brass rings of an outdated and bloated music industry.

“We never related to the bands that had videos on MTV or [were] getting heavy rotation on the radio,” bassist Keith Moseley explains. “We were much more in the mindset of bands like the Dead or Phish that went out and earned an audience by playing on the road. If we were going to make this happen, we were going to have to … build our following from the ground up.”

That mentality has served the band well. It also has spawned the creation of a label (SCI Fidelity), a ticket company (SCI Ticketing) and a merchandise company (SCI Gear) to handle everything String Cheese, the idea being that nobody controls SCI’s destiny better than SCI.

“It really is a philosophy that this band and this music are our own and we want to control it,” Moseley says. “We’re not going to sign to a major label and have our careers controlled by somebody who doesn’t really know about us. ”

But with a rapidly growing fanbase, the band has also found it nearly impossible to do it all themselves and keep from getting caught in the cogs of the industry machine.

Last August, SCI Ticketing sued Ticketmaster for impairing the band’s ability to offer tickets directly to Cheeseheads, claiming that the ticket behemoth was withholding seats and foisting unwelcome service charges on SCI fans. A year later, the score stands at David 1, Goliath 0.

“We’re pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement, and we are selling a good number of tickets to all of the shows,” Moseley says with an audible grin. “We’re happy to be able to provide that service again to the fans and couldn’t be happier about the way it worked out.”

But the karmic inevitability is that someone else is already lining up to return the favor. Instant Live LLC (a subdivision of none other than Clear Channel Entertainment) recently launched an offensive for the exclusive rights to offering immediate postshow digital recordings of concerts.

The instant live album was pioneered by bands such as SCI, Phish and taper-friendly granddaddy the Grateful Dead, all of which encouraged amateur concert recording long before getting in on the act themselves.

SCI delays posting live albums for download until a few days after a show instead of a few minutes (as in Instant Live’s model), so the band isn’t squarely in Clear Channel’s sights yet. But that would change if SCI decided to speed up the process.

“We’ve been recording ourselves and making the live shows available for some time now,” Moseley says. “It started with officially releasing the On The Road series, and now it’s shifting into doing the live downloads. And we plan on continuing that. As far as I’m concerned, it’s our music, not theirs.”

It’s a sentiment that echoes elsewhere in the industry. As the local impresario and appointed face man for this year’s Wakarusa Festival, Pipeline Productions’ Brett Mosiman was instrumental in bringing in instant recording outfits DiscLogic and Real Image Recording to capture the weekend for fans.

“I don’t think anybody has the right to tell you what to do with your live performances, whether it’s a record label or a venue,” Mosiman says. “It’s borderline ridiculous that they think they have a patent that precludes people from recording their own music and doing whatever the hell they want with it. I don’t know if somebody sold Clear Channel a bill of goods or if they’re just trying to be bullies, but I think it’s absolute, pure fiction.”

Fiction or not, there’s little doubt that Clear Channel has only begun to flex its muscles. In a suffering industry that has seen album and ticket sales plummet, all avenues of income will be tapped. The bottom line has become the only line — one reason this summer’s Lollapalooza (with its SCI’s headlining slot) was scrapped, reportedly because of low ticket sales.

“We were sorry to see Lollapalooza collapse, because we were excited by the idea of it and really inspired by Perry Farrell’s vision and enthusiasm,” Moseley says. “The things that got us interested in doing it in the first place were the things that were about more than just playing music.”

But perhaps the marriage of Lollapalooza’s edgy, eclectic vibe with the patchouli-scented, neohippie Cheeseheads was too shocking for folks who once found nothing shocking.

“The idea of bridging the musical gap between what they had before and our world and audience was a good one,” Moseley insists. “Music is really communication, and it’s nice to communicate with people coming from somewhere different than you and that have something different to say.”

But that altruistic ideal didn’t translate into ticket sales. And the death of Lollapalooza was perhaps a signal that the concept of large, touring festivals is foolhardy in the current economic climate.

“H.O.R.D.E. and Lilith [Fair] and a bunch of them have gone the way of Lollapalooza,” Mosiman says. “That concept might just be a little bit past its time. Bonnaroo is an absolute enigma that nobody can explain. If they could, Clear Channel would be doing [Bonnaroo] everywhere.”

But SCI had no choice but to shrug off the disappointment of Lollapalooza, switch gears as nimbly as possible and march on.

“It was a little bit of a scramble … but at this point, summer is all booked and done,” Moseley says. “We’ve rescheduled … and have a good, solid tour here connecting with our core fans in a lot of great places. It’s going to be a good summer for us anyway.”