Say Cheese
An obscure bar band from the neohippie hollows of southwest Colorado that had never managed a charting single, a gold record or radio support, String Cheese Incident could’ve pulled the plug on its career years ago. Instead, it hustled to become an amazingly successful touring phenomenon. Fusing bluegrass traditionalism with urban funk, the group inspires fanatical responses from the jam-band set.
“Our shows are about everybody getting together and trying to drop boundaries between themselves and other people,” SCI guitarist Bill Nershi says. He’s phoning from the band’s hotel in the shadow of the Gateway Arch, just hours before the second gig of its recent three-night run at St. Louis’ Fox Theatre. “The best shows are always when everybody that is at the show, the band and the crowd, contributes energy at the same time. Then the whole thing gets off the ground and floats.”
Given that definition, String Cheese has been floating since 1996, the year keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth became the final piece of a puzzle that included Nershi, violinist and mandolin player Michael Kang, bassist Keith Moseley and drummer/percussionist Michael Travis. At that point, the band focused its energy full-time on musical pursuits, a commitment that explains not only its current success but also its continued growth.
“When we decided that we were actually going to make a break for it as a band and give up our day jobs and start touring, we did 230 shows one year, we did 220 the next year, probably 170 the year after that, then 150,” recounts Nershi wearily. He pauses. “Last year, for the first time since we decided to take the act on the road for real, we played less than 100 shows in a year. And that might have something to do with why we’ve gained popularity, aside from the fact that we really put a lot of effort into practicing and making sure that we don’t let fans down. We want to have a good time out there, and we want people to be happy about how they spent their night.”
The fans come back. Sometimes they never leave. Roving masses track the group from town to town and tour to tour. Trading free concert recordings (a practice the band encourages) and swapping setlists from previous points along the tour, regular concertgoers crave magical song segues and unusual cover tunes, hooked by the promise that it’ll never be the same show twice. Sometimes even the members of the band have no idea where the night might take them.
“The jumping-off-the-cliff kind of thing … we try to have at least a couple of points during the course of a night where nobody onstage knows what is going to happen,” Nershi says. “When we get to those points, we just let our ears and instruments follow wherever they’re led, you know? Not led by people necessarily on the stage but by, uh, what … I don’t know.” He laughs with a genuine sense of self-amusement. “That keeps it interesting and exciting. What fun would it be if there were a safety net?”
Another thing that keeps the Cheese fresh is the band’s dedication to exploring a multitude of musical avenues. Its most recent album, 2001’s Outside Inside, touches on everything from heavy blues to Latin-flavored offerings, acknowledging its bluegrass and folk roots only with the disc’s final track, “Up the Canyon.”
“A lot of the songs we were writing right about that time were a little more rock-oriented, and we went that direction with it,” explains Nershi, also one of the band’s main songwriters. “We still play the bluegrass and some of the folksier stuff, but the sound of the band has changed a bit. We still keep those flavors in there, but they’re not as predominant as they were. I’m hoping it’s a phase, because I like the bluegrass, and I don’t feel like we need to be a rock band to make ourselves and our fans happy.”
In the past six years, the Cheese has moved from the cramped confines of small clubs to the vast expanse of open-air festivals such as Bonnaroo, this summer’s three-day celebration of jam-band diversity in Manchester, Tennessee.
“When I go into the big places, I just focus on enjoying playing music and not the size of the venue and the crowd that’s there,” offers Nershi cautiously. “I focus on the crowd to a certain degree, check everybody out and try to develop a rapport with the audience. But I don’t think things need to change that much to pull off these shows at a bigger venue. Last night, we started the second set with just Kyle out there playing keyboards, and then one by one we walked out onto the stage. Things like that at a bigger venue are interesting because it’s a visual change along with the sonic change, and the visual is a big thing on these big stages.”
Sometimes, though, the visuals prove too overwhelming, especially for wide-eyed locals who catch a glimpse of the cavalcade of tie-dyed masses descending on their urban centers and contributing to traffic congestion around concert sites. At times, these summertime gypsy caravans populate the parking lots of local music venues with nearly as many bodies outside as inside. Couple this with the recent troubles that accompanied the end of Widespread Panic’s spring tour in Pelham, Alabama, which included a fatal drug overdose, a drug-related suicide and almost 200 arrests over three nights by an unusually aggressive local police force, and the air is ripe for possible discord between String Cheese, its fans and the communities in which it plays. Though such jam-band guilt by association is somewhat unfair to String Cheese, Nershi acknowledges that some of these concerns are legitimate.
“We realize that when we go into a town, there’s an impact on that town, and I don’t think we can just sit and blast through with a bunch of people, you know, the traveling circus, and say, ‘Hey, thanks a lot. See you later,'” Nershi says. “We need to say to the communities that we go through to play music that we appreciate you having us here and we want to do a little bit to just give something back to that community.
“What I tell people about what I think would be a helpful way to behave at shows is that when they’re doing things and they have any question in their mind whether they should do it or not, they could think to themselves, ‘What would happen if 8,000 people did what I want to do here? Would it be a good thing, or would it be a bad thing?'” Nershi hesitates for a moment, then clarifies. “I’m not just saying think about that person that’s walking by you; think about the people that are around you. I’m also saying think about the people that live in the town where we are and think about the environment where the show is, because we want to have a good thing. We don’t want it to end the next year or the year after that. We want it to continue. We’re not grabbing money from the shows and stuffing our pockets. We’re trying to do something that will have longevity.”
