Features

String Cheese Incident: Untying The Knots

August 2007

Over the past half-dozen years, no musical group has gone to further ends in order to carve out a zone for itself and its fans to freak freely. Even as relations among band members grew increasingly tense, its members remained unified in their larger aims, to create a vibrant, supportive community that could elevate its participants. In String Cheese world this has manifested itself in numerous forms including the sizzle and spectacle of its elaborate New Year’s Eve shows, Halloween performances and Horning’s Hideout events.

“To generalize,” Travis interjects, “there’s this East Coast wave of opinion that we’re a bunch of pansies making soft, silly West Coast daisy dancing music, instead of serious actual music. And that’s fine because we don’t want to be the dark and evil band that says everything is so serious, we want to be the band that says, ‘shine your light.’ We consciously try to emanate a vibration that brings people together and lifts people out of their lives to create a place where they can feel whole and feel other layers of existence that aren’t readily available in their normal lives.”

As a result, through the assistance of management, the band created a series of enterprises, including a record label, a ticketing company and a merchandising arm, effectively crafting an independent cocoon for creativity. In order to maintain the integrity and viability of these ventures, the band has felt the need to take some hand in their operations (even though the day-to-day been has been ceded to others), which somewhat ironically, has taken time and energy away from the behavior that these endeavors were supposed to facilitate.

“I like the fact we have creative control over a lot of these companies, the record company in particular and the fact that we’re able to give fans a cheaper ticketing option,” Hollingsworth opines, “To me it’s all about helping the fans. It does get heavy at times and it can be a lot on your shoulders but I don’t feel it necessarily takes away from me creatively. I’m able to separate that but different people have different things on their brains.”

“We started a record company at a time when it was not smart to start a record company,” Kang laughs, then adds a bit more somberly, “So we’ve spent millions of dollars forming a company and we have not seen a lot from it in terms of financial gain, although we still have the satisfaction of saying we started a company and put our albums out and supported other artists. So not only is String Cheese a band but it’s a part owner in a bunch of different companies and that level of responsibility is not always easy to maintain given the dynamic complexity of our lives It can be hard to keep up, you come up against a wall of what’s possible with the amount of time you have and the amount of creative juice you still have for it..”

Creative inspiration is paramount to Nershi, who also started to feel that the pressures and responsibilities attendant to the “whole String Cheese Machine” were compounded by other considerations.

“I felt like some people in the band were playing music because they needed money to get by. I guess that’s not a terrible thing but if the main reason that we’re playing music together is because we’ve got expenses then I’m not up for it.”

He explains that such concerns never lured the group towards pursuing a more transparently commercial sound but nonetheless, “It’s a different kind of expression when you’re expressing your art to make money than when you’re expressing your art because you need to as an artist.”

At the same time, everyone acknowledges that intra-band communication was at an all-time low.

So Bill Nershi arrived at a crossroads not unlike that faced by numerous individuals in many walks of life. How does one strike the balance between oneself, one’s family and one’s colleagues. How do these priorities relate to personal ego and identity? When is it appropriate to take one for the home team? And just who’s on that team anyhow?

“For me, a lot of the reason of that I need to get away from it, is just to spend some time with my family and spend some time away from the whole rock scene. I feel like I’ve spent years of my life focusing on my musical family of String Cheese fans and the band and management and everybody and now I need to spend some time with my wife and my children.”

So Nershi gave his notice, this past fall, encouraging the group to continue without him if they wished. Band members admit to feeling some measure of hurt, anger and confusion at his announcement. The result was a tabling of any formal tour talk for the immediate future and will happen in the wake of Nershi’s decision is unclear.

Kang explains, “I’ve made a commitment to myself that I don’t even want to talk about String Cheese or anything that has to do it with in terms of performances for at least a year, just to take a breather.”

Moseley is a bit more upbeat and forceful.

“We’ll walk away for a while, give it time to shake down and then it’s going to be time to play music again and he’s going to decide if he’s in or out. Hopefully he’ll want to do it but I am not ready to say the band is over. I don’t believe it’s over and I’m not going to let it die. I am fully planning on continuing to play with String Cheese in some kind of capacity and hopefully that will be with all six of the members we’ve got right now.”