Features

The String Cheese Incident: Inside and Out (Relix Revisited)

Today we look back to December 2001 and the String Cheese Incident’s first cover feature. To hear the SCI of 2012, today’s installment of our Relix Live Fridays series presents portions of the band’s performance at Electric Forest 2012

On New Year’s Eve, 2001, the close of a truly screwed-up year, if you happen to be one of the most fortunate beings on planet earth you’re in San Francisco, peeking out with String Cheese Incident. This night marks the end of SCI’s 19-city year-end schedule, which started in Toronto on October 23 and culminates here with three nights on stage and the final extravagant Superheroes Costume Ball. The season is a triumph for String Cheese, as they fill America’s best stadiums, arenas and theaters, packing them with fervent devotees—from student Meccas Syracuse and Amherst, to their much-anticipated Halloween performance at Madison Square Garden, to Chapel Hill and Athens, GA where they sell out weeks in advance. Asheville, Gainesville, Philadelphia—String Cheese charms the deep south and melts the rust belt. Fans arrive early, set up residence in the parking lots and hawk T-shirts and veggie burritos to get by. The overflow makes its temporary home wherever the band sets down. Traveling thousands of miles to be there is not uncommon. For this is more than entertainment. This is collective energy verging on the supernatural, or maybe it’s love.

Superheroes

SCI’s autumn conquest comes on the heels of a summer ripe with heady successes—growing legions of fans and the band’s most successful album release to date, Outside Inside, acclaimed for its improved vocals and sound quality. True, the disk was denigrated by some hardcores for slipping toward the mainstream and retail sales may have fallen short of aggressive management goals. But 50,000 copies is no small feat for a jamband that emerged from the grassroots of Colorado nine years ago and has rejected commercial management in favor of the homegrown variety.

In December, SCI goes multimedia with its DVD debut, Evolution, produced by award-winning filmmakers Rick Ringbakk and Joe Coleman. SCI’s self-celebratory Evolution features concert footage, parade shots and interviews from last year’s over-the-top New Year’s celebration in Portland Oregon. There are also band and crew interviews and film from Horning’s Hideout 2000. The DVD is a Cheesehead’s dream, and fits nicely alongside SciGear shirts, posters, patches, videos and jigsaw puzzles. Cheese, cheese, cheese—it’s better on everything.

And practically everyone can get a slice of the Cheese. The band actively invites fans to join them as grassroots representatives whose job is to spread the buzz—pasting up posters, handing out flyers, calling local radio stations and asking them to play String Cheese tunes. In return, the band provides encouragement and free concert tickets when they can. Nationwide, over 10,000 “Pirates,” as they call them, have joined the cause. “With grand vision and the support of their fans,” the band’s website proclaims, “The String Cheese Incident continues to achieve the inconceivable.”

So yeah, it’s more than just the music, which like the Grateful Dead, to whom they are often compared, has its roots firmly planted in American folk with a preference for improvisational live jamming over studio versions. There is something super-charged in the air when the band is around.

“The strongest thing they do is create that holy space,” says John Barlow, who as a lyrical contributor to the Grateful Dead, witnessed much of that band’s rise and demise, and is now collaborating with String Cheese. “It is a group endeavor that involves everybody—whether they are playing guitar or hula-hooping in the audience, it is collective. They and their fans provide another zone where that mysterious creature that I am so attached to can dwell . . . I haven’t seen that creature since the Grateful Dead dropped dead. It is like being in a religion where all the places to worship have been destroyed. Here is a new cathedral being erected, and I want to help build it.”

Whatever the band throws out, the crowd gives back even stronger. A String Cheese Incident “is more than just listening to good musicians,” explains Audrey Wintory, a Fort Collins, Colorado fan who has experienced over 70 incidents. “It’s being around family, feeling more positive energy than anywhere else, experiencing magic and hearing things done musically I never dreamed possible. There is no other feeling like being a part of several thousand fans all going crazy with energy and excitement. Sometimes the energy is so thick you can hardly breathe.”

All this from five down-home guys who are still marveling at how it all happened. True to the String Cheese vibe, in a recent interview with Relix they come across as humbled by the experience, appreciative of where they are and where they are heading, thankful for their small-town roots and the fans that have propelled them on the path.

A ski bums’ tale

Crested Butte, Colorado is a hard place to find on the map. The name in small red letters points out the nearby ski area, rather than the town itself. Green shading designates the expanse of national forest and wilderness immediately outside this 150-plus year old mining town nestled in the Elk Mountains. Colorado’s famous ski resort Aspen is a mere 45 miles away, but that is via a rugged jeep ride over 13,000-foot Pearl Pass—often only in summer. One road leads in and out of the “butte” in the winter.

Elk Avenue, the eight-block main drag, is lined with restaurants, bars and gift shops. Most residents opt to get around on old cruiser bikes that usually stay unlocked. Deep powder skiing in the winter and miles of Aspen-laced mountain bike trails in the summer have made Crested Butte a haven for a few thousands outdoor buffs seeking refuge from “the real world.” It seems an unlikely place from which a band would make the jump to national prominence, but this laidback atmosphere has everything to do with the original genesis of the String Cheese Incident.