The String Cheese Incident’s International _Head_ Rush
It’s high noon on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
With clear skies and temperatures nudging 85 degrees on a Saturday in mid- February, most of the guests at the Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Maya bask in the sunlight. While many vacationers opt for siestas in lounge chairs alongside the resort’s private cove, others move at a languid pace between the five pools and waterside bars. This contingent includes the family and friends of The String Cheese Incident, who are on hand for the group’s multi-day destination event. The band members themselves, however, are ensconced in a stuffy conference room with wall-to-wall industrial carpet beneath their feet rather than the white sands just a brief walk away. And so it has been for a few hours each afternoon during the group’s 2014 International Incident.
The centro de convenciones has served as a hub of activity throughout the band’s stay. The open space in the middle of the facility hosted a cocktail reception for an unrelated corporate event, displayed new model automobiles and, on this day of The String Cheese Incident’s final performance, echoes with animated exhortations in Spanish while functioning as the home base for an Amazing Race-style team- building exercise. Dozens of participants in color-coordinated T-shirts dash around the property, completing various challenges, one of which, in an odd bit of synchronicity, employs the concert accoutrement of choice for numerous SCI fans, the hula hoop. (Although in this instance, the plastic toys are designated for a ring toss challenge, to be thrown over cardboard cutouts of Mexican television personalities and the cartoon image of a Rastafarian.)
Oblivious to all of this while gathered in a climate-controlled room within the aptly named Salon Verve wing of the conference center, the six members of The String Cheese Incident are well into their daily rehearsal. Dressed for comfort in the same casual style as their vacationing fans, they begin working through some of the songs they will perform that night, both originals and covers, including their first take on The Police’s “So Lonely” since 2006 (featuring drummer Michael Travis in a rare vocal lead). Then, it’s on to the nitty-gritty of the setlist, which occupies the musicians for nearly an hour. They discuss the variance of keys from song to song and sequence to sequence, the style of each proposed tune and the identity of its singer. As they work through the set originally drafted by keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth—mandolin/ violin player Michael Kang took the initial pass the previous day—it is often a matter of two steps forward and one step back, as any single alteration typically necessitates another tweak or two elsewhere in the list. Yet they patiently putter on, as a seated, genial Bill Nershi provides the soundtrack to the process with quick runs on his acoustic guitar, while Keith Moseley stands across from him, with his bass slung across his neck, interjecting opinions and dry humor alike.
“They’re very democratic, and one of the reasons they’ve been able to last is they’re just so honorable with each other and generous with each other,” observes Talking Heads multi-instrumentalist and erstwhile Modern Lovers member Jerry Harrison, who produced Song in My Head, the group’s new album and SCI’s first studio effort since 2005. “That is unlike many, many bands where people start to bear resentment because someone is trying to be overly dominant.”
Harrison presumably speaks from experience.
Still, as Michael Kang will later offer, “It is like a true democracy in a lot of ways but what we also completely demonstrate as a band is that democracy is not efficient nor does it work all of the time. We exemplify why Congress can never get any shit done.”
A discussion regarding the evening’s opening number proceeds accordingly, as it occupies the group for nearly 20 minutes and is not resolved before the musicians are whisked off to a meet-and-greet barbeque with fans. The band will return to the room afterward to continue the discussion and also to speak with the Trey Anastasio Band tandem of Jen Hartswick and Natalie Cressman, who will join them at the beginning of the second set, adding brass and vocals to a cover of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” (which given the band’s predilection to add visual zest whenever feasible is augmented by a local Michael Jackson impersonator). Eventually, they will opt to kick off the night with a cover of Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” a song they last performed in 2007, which they’ve transformed into a call and response with Moseley mostly playing it straight and Nershi interjecting a few lines that amuse him before Moseley sets the guitarist in motion by changing the lyrics from “Sure don’t want to hurt no one” to “Sure do want to see Billy run,” whereupon Nershi initiates one of his signature moves by jogging in place while simultaneously strumming his guitar.
It is not until nearly four o’clock that the band members are finally free to reconnect with their loved ones and/or simply embrace a balmy afternoon in tropical climes (except for percussionist Jason Hann, who will conduct a drum clinic that occupies him well past five, as he remains to work with a few stragglers).
It’s fair to say that many other musicians, when plopped into a similar setting, would give in to the beckoning sun and fun much earlier, particularly on closing night. But if the affable members of The String Cheese Incident never take themselves too seriously, they do bring a focused intent to the matter at hand. This is a group that once lugged its own sound system from show to show to ensure that audiences were given optimal audio experiences during a stretch when the band averaged more than 130 dates per year, mostly in clubs. This is also why SCI, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, has moved past a few years of unrest and uncertainty to offer the promise of many more Incidents to come.
On Saturday afternoon, as the band further postpones recreational activities at the all-inclusive resort, they sit for a collective discussion that begins with their decision to deny themselves prime daylight hours on the Caribbean coastline. During the previous day’s rehearsal, Nershi joked, “I didn’t become a musician to work,” yet that is precisely what had transpired. The group deflects any suggestion that this commitment marks them as particularly industrious but rather suggests that this is simply the nature of the gig. “It’s the same old thing you hear from bands that have large repertoires, that are expected to play three or four different shows and bust out old stuff that they haven’t played in a lot time,” Kang explains. “It’s a lot to keep 100 songs in the rotation.” “All bands have different ratios of how much rehearsal they have to their shows,” Nershi offers, “I’ve played in bands that get the repertoire and only learn new songs and spend time on that. But with this band, the songs are generally on the complex side and there’s a lot of stuff to go over because we do different jams and different ideas every time.” Moseley adds: “Even when we used to tour all the time, we’d still rehearse at soundcheck and we’d always get together before shows.” “I remember when I joined the band,” Hollingsworth says while looking back to 1996 when SCI expanded to a five-piece— the group became a sextet with Hann’s addition in 2004—“We’d find random spots on the road with two days off and rehearse for eight hours a day.”
“I don’t remember but that’s a great legend,” Travis laughs.
One can understand if the drummer fails to recall the band having two consecutive days off while on the road during that era, as such instances were few and far between. Friendsofcheese.com, the fan-run database, lists 167 gigs in 1996, followed by an astounding 214 show dates in 1997 and then 164 the following year. These are staggering numbers that the mainstream media overlooked or dismissed at the time, citing the road warrior ethos necessitated by a group that earned its keep through live performances rather than album sales. The band cut back slightly in 1999 to “only” 131, with 134 in 2000. The next year saw SCI book 102 dates and while the group never came close to triple digits again, the band’s work ethic was well established.
This also was the era in which String Cheese embarked on its first international travel experience, with a trip to Jamaica in May 1998, followed by a visit to Akumal, Mexico that December and a Costa Rican run in 2000.
On opening night at the Hard Rock, where the band performs outside on a stage constructed at the edge of the facility’s Woodstock Terrace with their backs to the Caribbean Sea, Nershi introduces fan-favorite “Miss Brown’s Teahouse,” with the observation that he wrote it during the group’s inaugural International Incident. He later elaborates, “Miss Brown’s Teahouse is where they make the mushroom tea. You go in, they brew you some tea and you’re off on your adventure.”
The destination event has become an increasingly popular way for artists to nurture relationships with their fan bases and pick up some additional rewarding gigs in an era when it is not economically viable to hit the road for 150 dates. In the weeks before The String Cheese Incident made their way to the Hard Rock, Furthur hosted their Paradise Waits event and My Morning Jacket headlined their One Big Holiday festival at the hotel. The night after the International Incident concludes, Boots In The Sand, a country music event, will make use of the same stage and headliner Dierks Bentley, who is on hand a day early, sits in with SCI for “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” during the first set. It’s accurate to suggest that String Cheese was at the vanguard of musical travel, although their initial forays into foreign terrain were slightly less orchestrated.
When asked to compare their original Jamaican journey with the present one, the band contemplates the question with mirth. “This whole thing is a huge departure from how we typically do things in terms of international stuff,” Kang clarifies. “When we started doing it in the late-‘90s, we took off and invited fans along. We’d hit a town and play a stage and we were all going off on this international adventure together— you kind of had to fend for yourself. We’d help a little with the travel arrangements but we never parked it at a place like this. So there was some discussion about how this might be against our nature.”
“The one thing about this that’s different than our other Incidents,” Nershi adds, “is usually where we go, there are people from the states and locals mixing and mingling. This is a killer place and everybody’s having a very special time but I like also doing these Incidents where you have people from different countries seeing us play who have never heard us before.”
Certainly some of the consideration in playing the Hard Rock is that the experience is family-friendly. So much so in fact, that the first evening finds three of the band members’ wives—Kristin Moseley, Jilian Nershi and Tania Hollingsworth—up front, riding the rail together and eliciting a few beaming smiles from Moseley, who explains that Kristin “is 10 years removed from that. It’s also rare to have them all at the same venue anymore at the same time.”
Travis acknowledges the gathering of old-school fans on hand, which by his account, is the most in recent memory and expresses satisfaction that “we’re just the band for the family reunion here. We’re playing to the home-team crowd that is so loving of us and accepting of all our parameters—it’s just a very comfortable feeling. It’s like the deepest, most intrinsic version of us because all these people who have supported us and created environments for us to do our thing over the years are all here.”
He contrasts looking out from his perch behind the drum kit at an ecstatic audience at the latest International Incident with “people waiting for Bassnectar to play at Electric Forest who are just staring at us.”
Moseley follows-up on the experience of performing before arm-crossers. “We’re a complex band and I think it takes a lot to get to know the band,” he says. “Imagine someone getting to see String Cheese for the first time. You’re not going to get to see all facets of what we do if you see one show or a festival set. You might not get the humor song with Billy running around onstage, or you might not get to see Travis singing “Fearless” [as he did at the opening Riviera Maya show for the first time since 2007] or some ballad, or you might not get the Latin thing. In general, you don’t always get this band after seeing it one time and that’s what I think is harder sometimes about a giant festival set. We want to give everyone all the elements but you can’t really do that in two hours.”
“I think the festival set in the last seven, eight years has changed the scene a lot, in terms of what bands feel comfortable doing,” Kang reflects. “There was a distinct change after Bonnaroo started that had an immediate impact on everyone’s touring individual show-wise, where all of a sudden, to economically make it—and also if you want to play in front of different people—you need to go to the festivals and not totally on your terms. A lot of times, you’re being thrown out there without a soundcheck, and we’ve had enough experiences where, despite our best intentions or how good we’re playing, we felt like it was not up to the standard where we wanted to put the music out. I don’t see many bands letting loose improvisationally in that setting.”
Travis counters: “I remember seeing Furthur at Lockn’ and they did a 20-minute ‘Unbroken Chain’ and it was totally unfurled, and they didn’t give a shit and that’s why people love them.”
“A two-set show at a festival is something different,” Nershi points out. “The festivals we put on ourselves—like Horning’s Hideout and Electric Forest and now Suwannee Hulaween—we get to do our thing like we’re doing this weekend in Mexico. We can open it up and do exactly what we want to do and not feel like we have to get in our Latin tune and our bluegrass song and our rock song. It’s more like, ‘Whatever the vibe is, whatever we’re feeling.’ But when we’re at a festival and we go out there for only one set, we’re more inclined to do an infomercial of more songs and less jams.”
“We tend to have varying degrees of internal struggle about how colloquial to make our sets,” Travis explains. “Here, the visions coalesce but when we get in front of 20,000 people, certain people think we should exacerbate certain elements to predict what we think the audience is going to enjoy as opposed to trying to ride the line and being whimsical and allowing the mood to undulate as far as we would here. We have been getting better at the infomercial though. I was impressed with our set at Hardly Strictly [Bluegrass, on 10/6/13]. It was infomercial mania and delving deeply into each thing.”
This is deep praise from the drummer, who is something of the band’s improv- isational spirit keeper. (“The only thing that’s important for a jamband, to me,” he relates, “is are they creating a black hole of beauty or are they not.”) In 2007, the group began a hiatus broken by a pair of shows in 2009, followed by nine more a year later. As Travis considers the group’s initial performances, he says, “There was a whole passage after coming back where it seemed like we were going through the motions— disjointed stuff with no actual X factor.
But now, we’ve got a new modality where we’re getting really good at taking time off and then stepping out and doing the actual article.”
The String Cheese Incident first manifested that X factor with regularity during those few years when the band members were in close proximity. Travis is particularly fond of the group’s live album Carnival ‘99, which documents a formative era “where we’d turn these corners and no one knew that it could happen. From my perspective, the only way to explain it is we played from an outside source where everyone has resigned their agenda and when we reached that precipice where we’d either fall or fly, we all would fly over and over again.”
Still, it is that same era that nearly led to the dissolution of the group. At some point, the experience of being in The String Cheese Incident became almost monomaniacal. The band began on something of a lark—the product of a friendship between Michael Kang and Nershi as they busked in exchange for free ski lift passes. (A video exists on YouTube of the duo performing alongside the lift line at Crested Butte, Colo. in 1993— the baby-faced 32-year-old guitarist looks so young that when Kyle Hollingsworth first saw him perform a few months later, he assumed that Nershi was a teenager.) The pair soon added Keith Moseley, an area guitarist who moved to bass, and when an early fourth member, mandolin player Bruce Hayes, couldn’t make a gig, they enlisted hand drummer Michael Travis. By mid-1996, Nershi had left his graphic design job, Hollingsworth was on board and the game was afoot.
The sheer number of dates and the peripatetic lifestyle curtailed the band members’ creative pursuits outside of String Cheese. Scrambling to find a balance during this period, Kang became drawn to the game of golf, which he pursued on the road as a verdant contrast to the oft-gray drudgery of load-ins and motel check-outs. (He leads a golf outing in Mexico and, one afternoon during a break from rehearsal, he drains a 20-foot putt from across the room into a drinking glass on his first and only attempt.) Given the time commitment, The String Cheese Incident became Nershi’s sole musical outlet, which eventually took its toll as the sound drifted from its acoustic origins, and the group found additional worthy songwriters in Hollingsworth, Kang and Moseley. The thrill of it all waned, leading the guitarist to announce in November 2006 that he would leave SCI the following year. He encouraged the band to find a replacement but instead, they opted for a two-year intermission, eventually regrouping with Nershi in tow.
By all accounts, that time away from String Cheese has left the group in a much better place.
“It was a progression of things from the beginning of the band, to the point where we split up,” the guitarist explains. “At first, I was the main songwriter and then, every- body started contributing more tunes, and I got to the point where I was frustrated with it. But now, I have other places where I can express myself and play my music. I feel that I got through whatever it was that I had going on emotionally and it feels like we’ve settled into this level where everybody feels pretty good about their own input into the band and it’s a comfortable place.”
So comfortable, in fact, that the band decided it was time to start thinking about a common future through the recording of a new studio album.
Over the course of a 20-year career, The String Cheese Incident’s studio output has been limited and not always successful. Their early efforts were hampered somewhat by the group’s egalitarian ethos, which made it challenging to critique the players and, at times, even to reach a consensus on when the process was complete. In 2001, the band teamed with Steve Berlin for Outside Inside, the record that most effectively captures the group’s live energy within relatively concise song arrangements. For 2003’s Untying The Not, SCI worked with Youth, who deconstructed the band’s material from the lyrics on through the music, fashioning an album with his own stamp that is a unique sonic experience but lacks much of the joy that sparks the group. Malcolm Burn asserted himself in another manner on One Step Closer (2005), as co-songwriter of three compositions while lending “additional instrumentation and vocals” to a solid if somewhat stilted album, impaired, in part, by creative discord within the group.
So by early 2013, with the band in a positive mindset, they decided to make another go of the studio experience. Nershi, who revisits his old profession and shares a “design and layout” credit on Song in My Head, explains, “The main thing, for me, was that we hadn’t recorded in a really long time. There was always a reason not to record: CDs aren’t selling, blah, blah, blah. For me, it’s more of a documentation of the music that you’re making and that we had a backlog of original tunes that I thought were pretty strong.”
“We have more unrecorded original tunes than recorded original tunes, which is kind of weird,” Kang observes. “So we started with the intention that since we were multi-tracking all these shows, it would be silly not to do something with them and, at first, thought maybe we could do a hybrid album where we take tracks and do some overdubs to make it sound good. Then, we got together and were rehearsing in studio, and we decided it would be silly to rehearse in the studio and not record, and that’s when the whole thing was born—‘Let’s rehearse and take this stuff and see where it comes out.’ The third movement of that was, ‘OK, now that we have this stuff recorded, how are we going to finish this album?’ That’s when we brought on a producer, someone to push it through.”
Nershi adds: “Some producers—before you sing note one or play note one—are looking at the lyrics and looking at the arrangement of the songs and, before you’ve even started, you’re all plugged up. They might know what they’re talking about but there’s something about what we’re doing that’s working for people, and the best chance we have of making something sound good is playing something how we play it rather than picking it apart and putting it back together.”
With all this in mind, they selected Jerry Harrison, who recalls, “Before they made the record with Youth, we had a discussion about working together. We share a good friend in [Grateful Dead lyricist] John Perry Barlow, and he had introduced us to each other. I can’t remember the conflict—I think I had agreed to do another record. I remember running into them because they made the record at The Plant in Sausalito, [Calif.], which was up the road from where I was working, and once Travis and I got on a ski lift together, by sheer coincidence, and I could tell they felt that they had given up so much to become clay in someone else’s hands and that was not exactly what they had signed up for.”
Harrison reconnected with the group during the summer of 2012, sitting in for a few songs during the group’s show at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley on July 14, 2012 for covers of Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” and Modern Lovers’ “She Cracked,” as well as the SCI original “Rosie,” which appears on Song in My Head. “We had this joyous concert in Berkeley,” he remembers. “Everybody had fun playing together so we figured it would be fun working together. I thought there was a great possibility to make a great record because they had such energy and such connection to their audience, but I had never heard that on record. No one had quite captured what happens live. Not that I think that a record replicates the experience, but I think it can come closer and I think we achieved that on this record.”
“The first thing I noticed he did,” Hollingsworth relates, “was he pushed the vocalists into ranges they weren’t used to— ‘Keith, why don’t you sing that up a minor third,’ or ‘Billy, let’s move the entire song up to a different key.’ He felt like the vocals would pop out more and have good presence. He was right.”
“Given the respectful way they treat each other, I think it helps having an outside producer saying, ‘No, you can do this much better,’ or ‘You’re not the best person to sing that harmony part—your voice is not in that range—there’s someone else in the band who’ll be a lot more natural.’ Making choices for tonality and range and quality of voice rather than maybe [because] they said they wanted to do it,” Harrison laughs. “I think one of the challenges in making a coherent record is they each write in totally different genres. Going from a bluegrass song to a song that’s sort of Afro-punk to a song that sounds like The Band is something they pull off live, so I’d count on the fact that the consistency with which they play their instruments would provide the glue to hold these things together. It worked out.”
Hollingsworth concurs: “Outside Inside was the most typical String Cheese-sounding record that we’ve made, and I think this one was close.”
Outside Inside features a number of songs that remain concert staples and one imagines that Song in My Head will offer more of the same, as it delivers vibrant performances of fan-favorites such as Nershi’s title track, Hollingsworth’s “Rosie” and another reading of Kang’s “Betray The Dark,” which first appeared in another form on One Step Closer.
Song in My Head opens with “Colorado Bluebird Sky,” which includes guest appearances by most of the Zac Brown Band, the product of a collaboration with String Cheese at the 2013 Lockn’ festival. The group visited Brown’s home/work compound in preparation for the fest and not only came away impressed with ZBB’s musical chops but also Brown’s personal drive and DIY commitment. (Travis praises the bandleader as “the single most activated, realized-potential person I’ve ever met. Keith turned to me one time when we were there and said, ‘I feel like I’ve been sleeping my whole life.’”)
Harrison identifies a personal highlight as the lone Keith Moseley composition, “Struggling Angel,” written for Moseley’s friend and SCI community member Sarah Gewald, who passed away in March 2012. “Keith has a beautiful voice and a voice that is distinctive from the others. We kind of started over with ‘Struggling Angel,’ which was in some ways a sketch of a song and is now one of my favorites on the album. I hope that he’s more prolific and the next time we work together, there are more than one of those songs.”
The band remains flushed with enthusiasm, so one can imagine that a second pairing is in the offing at some point. Next up in the studio realm, however, Kang explains, will likely be some “individual electronica stuff, produced as individual electronica tracks and released that way.”
Meanwhile, Nershi emphasizes the positive impact of Song in My Head on the vitality of the group’s live show. “You get all these original songs backlogged and then, it’s like, ‘Why am I writing these songs?’ So it’s nice to blow out the pipes by getting some of these original songs recorded. Then I feel, ‘OK, now we can move on a little bit and come out with new stuff and continue.’”
In 2013, The String Cheese Incident took the stage together for 26 shows, the most since the group returned in 2009. When asked how many gigs they’d ideally like to play in 2014, they all advocate stepping things up a bit, with numbers in the 35-45 range.
What’s more, Hann pledges: “When we do a show, it’s going to count. The circus is in town. We’re going to bring our honest passion and it’s going to be unlike anything any else you saw.”
And so it goes on the Yucatan coast as The String Cheese Incident wraps up their destination event with fire dancers, bust- outs, quips, a celebrity impersonator, guest stars, a synchronized audience dance routine and at its core, six musicians delivering joyful sounds that, at their peak, are poignant and profound, all within the moment.
The 2014 International Incident concludes with a rarity in live performance: a second encore truly earned on both sides of the stage. After the lights have come up and the house music begins playing, the crowd’s fervid cries lead the group to blow off curfew for one final tune. Actually, make that two—when Bill Nershi steps out, he quietly delivers the first few notes of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” What feels at first like a bit of tuning, soon picks up volume and momentum. Nershi had muffed the song earlier that day while diddling around at rehearsal but, emboldened by audience enthusiasm and feeling the moment, he pushes this one all the way through to the end for the band’s live debut before an incredulous Kang. Then it’s off to “Texas” for 15 minutes before the final notes give way to high fives all around. The exaltation and exhaustion that follow beneath the Mexican moonlight, twenty years after a few Colorado ski bums decided to throw their lots together, underscores the resonant, abiding nature of Incidental contact.
