Features

Yonder Mountain String Band: This Is (Almost) 40

Photo by Dave Vann

It’s a hot afternoon in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Yonder Mountain String Band’s Jeff Austin is just finishing his sixth pork taco of the day. He gets up and comes over to a cardboard photo cutout in the back terrace of a Mexican taqueria in downtown Tulum, where he poses for a tourist picture with me before conferring briefly with his manager about his schedule for the following day. “I’ve been going nonstop since I got here,” he says, lighting a cigarette and pausing as if on cue for irony. “I haven’t been able to spend any alone time with my girlfriend.”

As soon as he’s done with the smoke, he goes back inside the taco shack—the third one he’s hit this afternoon—and meets couples from Boston, San Francisco and Baltimore. These are fans who, instead of going to Hawaii or The Bahamas or Thailand for their vacation, have trekked down to Mexico where they are spending four nights at an intensive hands-on festival called Strings & Sol, headlined by Yonder Mountain String Band.

It’s a first-year, high-level destination event, held at an all-inclusive beach resort, and it also features Leftover Salmon, Railroad Earth and The Infamous Stringdusters. Most of the fans eating at the banquet tables in the taqueria came to the fest primarily for Yonder, and many of them even sport the band’s merchandise (along with a significant number of Steal Your Face logos). The lunch is part of an optional excursion, a three-hour taco crawl across Tulum, which Austin dreamed up and which he is hosting with the same level of animation and enthusiasm that he brings to the concert stage. At the start of the crawl, Austin stood at the front of the chartered bus and declared, “When you eat with people, you bond with people. So today, we’re going to bond.”

The first taco crawl sold out so fast that Austin asked the promoter, Cloud 9 Adventures, to add another. So, for the second day in a row, he’s stuffed himself at taquerias and taco carts across Tulum as he mingles with fans, signing autographs, posing for pictures, recording video messages for people’s kids, and discussing everything from the obvious (food, music) to the specific (mandolins, marriages). Austin’s bandmate, banjo player Dave Johnston, says that Austin is a natural ringleader and a gracious host. Though he’s talking within the context of Yonder Mountain’s live shows, the description also works for a taco crawl.

“You can’t throw an event and then go stand in the corner,” Austin tells me on the beach the following evening. “Especially with food.” Some of the stops on the first day weren’t up to snuff and he took it personally. He insisted on better tacos for the second round. “If my name is on something, I’ve learned that’s not something I can take lightly anymore,” he says. “When I was 25 years old, stoned out of my mind, I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever—it doesn’t matter what happens.’ If somebody photographs me at six in the morning and I’m high on acid—whatever.”

But that was during his roaring 20s. A decade later, Austin’s a little more attuned to quality control. “I’ve become more conscious of it,” he says. “It’s trying to stand on my own two feet instead of trying to lean on anything. That’s a consciousness I’ve come to.”

It’s a position that’s indicative of his shifting perception of the band as well. As Austin, now 38 years old, moves into Yonder’s 15th year, the group is more mature than ever before. They’re taking their career—as well as their music and their concerts—more seriously. During the next week, all three of Austin’s bandmates will echo this sentiment.

Yonder Mountain String Band is coming of age.