Features

String Cheese Incident: Untying The Knots

August 2007

The String Cheese Incident began with Nershi and Kang working the après ski circuit in Crested Butte, Colorado. Both musicians knew Keith Moseley, then an area guitarist, who switched over to bass to fill out a quartet they assembled along with mandolin player/guitarist Bruce Hayes (“an instrumental wizard” in Nershi’s estimation). When Hayes was unable to make an upcoming gig, Michael Travis’ name came up as a potential replacement, which proved an interesting choice from Nershi’s perspective.

“The funny thing was when I moved to Crested Butte I drove there in a school bus I was living in and needed a place to park it. Keith set me up at a place where he was living and that happened to be Travis’ house but I had never met Travis. I think he was woodworking in the northwest. I had been living all winter outside Travis’s house in my schoolbus and I had never met him before. So we got to the point where we needed a fourth member, so we found Travis and praticed that afternoon for a gig that night.”

That brief performance featured Nershi on acoustic guitar, Kang on acoustic mandolin and electric violin, Moseley on electric bass and Travis on congas and bongos.

Travis recalls, “That first gig had that air of importance somehow and we already felt like a thing. It didn’t feel like a thrown-together gig. We played a talent show for 15 minutes in Crested Butte and everybody flipped out and it was ‘Wow let’s go see Billy Nershi’s new band,’ and there was this feeling already that it was going somewhere. And then about a year later Bill decided he was going to give up his graphics career and we were going to get in the van and really go for it. That was the break.”

As the drummer suggests, the early identity of the band was very much tied in to Nershi. Not only had he developed a reputation in bluegrass circles for his flatpicking but Neshi also took a leadership role by composing the bulk of the group’s original material, while singing most of the songs (although for the record, Nershi takes only indirect credit for the band’s moniker: “The whole thing with the name to me is still a tough one to swallow,” he laughs, “either the first one we started with [Blue Cheese String Band] or the one we ended up with. I would say that Mike has a lot to do with it but we all had fair chance to change it if we wanted and for some reason we didn’t. We changed it the first time but maybe not enough and for better or worse it stuck.”).

The guitarist recalls that initially there was a looseness to the whole endeavor. “When we started out, we were bunch of free and easy hippies just trying to have good time traveling around the country. Our first tour circuit was anywhere where we could ski or ride our mountain bikes.”

Increasingly though, as the band found receptive audiences for its unique amalgam of bluegrass, blues and world music, the band members stepped up their focus. Travis soon moved away from his hand drums and learned to play a drum kit, as he explains “to make the sound “bigger” (Nershi still marvels at this effort: “it’s pretty amazing he learned how to play the drum kit in String Cheese considering how much of force he’s become.”) Kang soon introduced a electric mandolin into the mix. Then in 1996, Kyle Hollingsworth joined the group on keyboards, further broadening the palette while contributing an affinity for funk and jazz.

Over time, the group’s dynamic changed as Nershi’s bandmates gained confidence and footing as songwriters. While Nershi received songwriting credits on all but two of the original compositions on the group’s 1997 debut recording, Born on the Wrong Planet, by the time String Cheese recorded One Step Closer in 2005 ,each of its members contributed at least two songs.

Nershi is quite forthright in articulating the impact that this had on his own psyche and ultimately his songcraft.

“From my perspective, I was just not able to bring in as much material anymore because there was so much stuff coming in from other members of the band. The thing is what I feel like I’m good at is delivering songs and when that became less of the role that I was doing in the band, I started to enjoy playing in the band less.”

Still, while the members of the group could appreciate this sentiment, they viewed a surfeit of original material from five fully-engaged songwriters, as a problem worth having.

“He’s one of the best songwriters in the band and if I were in that position it would be a difficult one for me for me.” Hollingsworth asserts, “but I think it’s important to have all the creative forces you can bring in. If that means everybody writes a song or one person is writing less I think it’s towards a greater good.”