The 2015 Summer Camp Music Festival kicks off tomorrow. To mark the occasion, we look back to August 2010 this cover story on one of the hosts bands, moe.

Sometimes you can’t win for trying.

During the fall of 2009, nearly 20 years into its career as a band, moe. decided to alter the nature of its live performances. Rather than relying on purely improvisational segues, the group expanded each soundcheck into a full rehearsal to develop and refine interstitial ideas that could bridge songs during the evening’s show.

“What we wanted to do was take our songwriting and arranging skills – the craft that we’ve been honing for years – and bring that to what we were doing with our improvisational skills,” guitarist Al Schnier explains. “We wanted to meld these things together to create this strange brew of musical interludes, these little vignettes with thematic elements that we would revisit over the course of a show, almost like the movements of a song that would occur in a classical piece.”

As the tour wore on, this endeavor became increasingly labor intensive – with two hours soon leaking into three, which ran into dinner and saw the band effectively performing six or seven hours of music each night.

And the result?

“We got hosed for it,” Schnier’s fellow guitarist Chuck Garvey laughs with a sense of resignation, recalling the feedback that the quintet received from a fan base that preferred a higher quotient of balls-to-the-wall improvisation. “It was kind of disheartening. We were busting our asses to come up with little bits of material every night, working really hard to do something different and a number of people said, ‘That’s bullshit.’” “We thought we were refining the show,” Schnier adds. “That we would rein in some of those lost moments and have fewer train wrecks. We were rehearsing for two hours a day before we went onstage, yet the perception was we were coasting because we weren’t jamming anymore. Frankly, it’s much easier for us to coast and jam and the perception is that moe. is playing much harder and trying harder.”

This dichotomy, the drive for refinement counterbalanced by a penchant to let it all hang out in the moment, has defined the group from the start. That and songwriting, which Garvey describes in reference to bassist Rob Derhak’s compositions, and is applicable to the band music as whole: “You can sing along, they’re totally memorable without feeling like advertising jingles and then you can dress them up however you want.”

The blending of these worlds was enough to yield a record contract with Sony in the mid-‘90s but not sufficient enough to generate the million of dollars in sales that would have garnered a more aggressive push from the label. Similarly, moe. has developed a loyal base of fans hooked by the material that appears on the group’s current Smash Hits, Volume One career retrospective album – some of whom bemoan the fact that the band still plays these songs with regularity (every four to five shows or so, as the typical rotation plays out). All of this is additionally complicated as the band members are now in their early 40s, often feeling the pressure of spending time away from their wives and children, while maintaining an organization that supports the band on the road and functions as an in-house record label.

During the past two decades, the core lineup of Derhak, Garvey and Schnier has been able to navigate mildly treacherous terrain without seeming to break much of a sweat (let alone a limb, a marriage vow or a hotel mini-bar). Yet, as with the soundchecked segues, nothing has been as easy as it seems. Take for instance, the group’s new and somewhat ironically named release, Smash Hits. In conjunction with its 20 year anniversary, the group decided to issue a compilation disc that drew together many of the fan favorites from over the years. The project hit an initial snag because Sony wouldn’t allow the band to license any of the songs from its two releases, No Doy (1996) and Tin Cans & Car Tires (1998). However, moe. did retain the legal right to issue new versions of these songs, so the band prepared to enter the studio and do just that. However, upon listening to its first two albums, Fatboy (1992) and Headseed (1994), recorded in a Buffalo apartment, the band decided that any of those tracks wouldn’t hold their own from a sonic perspective when juxtaposed with the later recordings. The end result was that seven of the ten songs for Smash Hits had to be re-recorded and mixed for what – in other groups’ hands – could have been a simple collection of previously released material.

Sometimes it seems as if there’s the highway or the moe.way, and the latter is a toll road requiring additional time, effort and expense. Back in 2002, the group decided to release a studio album – what became the following year’s Wormwood – that would capture the energy of its live shows by utilizing basic tracks recorded at its shows as the foundations for recordings. The group massively underestimated the complexities of such an endeavor, spending weeks in the studio synching things up and getting them to the point where it could begin recording new music over them. Believing it had learned its lesson from Wormwood, the group began work the following year on a second album that used the same process – one that was ultimately delayed by additional refinements as well as two complete mixing sessions after moe. decided to scrap its initial pass at what became 2007’s The Conch.

As work grinded on for The Conch, the band kept its cool publicly, even in the face of some unwarranted criticism.

Schnier, who by all accounts maintains the most sanguine of outlooks when it comes to moe., acknowledges, “It took us a while to get The Conch out and there was a period there where we were accused of coasting. ‘Just how long has it been since Wormwood came out?’ Little did people know we were working very hard on finishing The Conch and we finished it twice before we released it. We were working the whole time, we just weren’t making it available for them to hear. So even though we weren’t necessarily performing new material in front of an audience, that doesn’t mean that we were necessarily coasting.”

Again with the C-word, which is likely less of a reflection about work ethic than an affable personal disposition and a loose stage demeanor that often belies the group’s effort.

As Garvey explains, “I don’t think we’re an overly careerist band where we feel we have to do whatever it takes to claw our way to our top. We can be dissatisfied with the way things are going and we look at it as business, yet we don’t live in the corporate world where you have to compete and kill and slay everything in your path.”

Umphrey’s McGee guitarist Brendan Bayliss affirms, “I really can’t stress enough how instrumental moe. has been in my career. I’ve met a lot of musicians and there’s nobody like those guys when it comes to being down-to-earth people not caught up in the rock star bullshit.

“They’re content with what they’ve created and how they’ve done it, and they should be. I don’t want to name other bands by example, but moe. took a different approach where other bands would say, ‘Screw you!’ and not really pay attention to anyone they’re pushing out of the way.”

This spirit informs the music and infuses its presentation in such a way that it has become an agent of the band’s longevity, along with the group’s songwriting chops, felicitous musical voice and collective improvisational chemistry.

Starting in January, with a performance at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom, the band took the stage donning formal menswear.

“It had to do with our 20th anniversary and celebrating 20 years together,” says Derhak. “The first part of the idea came from playing with Del McCoury and the fact that he’s been [playing great and dressing nicely] for 40, 50 years and we thought, ‘Well if they can do it then we can do it. We should try to look respectable, too.’ Plus, we’ve always had this fantasy: what if the band could play and just ‘nine-to-five’ it like everybody else, Monday through Friday. And it’s sort of a little take off on that.”

Percussionist Jim Loughlin admits to “mixed feeling about the suits. They’re nice looking suits but I went to Catholic school for ten years so I thought I was done with that.” Loughlin, first joined the group in 1991 as the band’s drummer only to depart prior the Sony signing – “It was a rash decision; it felt like it could become a lifelong commitment and I just couldn’t deal with it” – and then returned in 1999 to complement the group’s new drummer Vinnie Amico, who came onboard in 1996. He adds, “[The suits] can be difficult to play in and they’re really, really hot. Plus, I’ve always been a ‘walk on the stage in what I’m wearing kind of guy.’ We all pretty much have been that way.”

This is part of the point, too. The effort to gussy up the band is so striking because one of the group’s hallmarks has long been the lack of separation between the band and audience. When the band members bust each other’s chops between songs onstage, that’s the way they behave offstage. Loughlin offers, “I think it makes us more relaxed not to think of ourselves as anything different than the other people in the room – we’re just the ones who have instruments.”

Newly dubbed moe. (the lower case “m” and period have been the bane of copy-editors and the band’s longtime publicist Jim Walsh for most of its career), the band’s performance style and songwriting melded its varied influences from Fugazi to Elvis Costello to the Grateful Dead, in a manner somewhat akin to that era’s Meat Puppets. Loughlin came on board soon afterward and as he remembers, “Like other bands in college towns, when you start out you’re really just playing to your friends. If there are 30 people there, you know 15 of them. People are buying you drinks and giving you shots and you’re just hanging out. We never rushed that.”

This collective camaraderie endured as the band grew. In 1992, moe. graduated from such venues as the Essex Street Pub (capacity: a generous, fire code busting 60) to the pinnacle of Buffalo bars: Broadway Joe’s. There moe. experienced its next milestone when the pool table had to be moved out of the way to accommodate more fans. The band relocated to Albany, N.Y. in 1994, sharing a house together along with manager Jon Topper, to better facilitate travel to New York City and the rest of the East Coast ( “When we all lived in the same house,” Al reminisces in the band’s latest publicity bio, “We spent all our waking hours together. If someone had something they were working on, the whole group knew about it. You had very little privacy. If you had a riff you were working on, it wasn’t long before someone joined in on it, and before long you had a full-scale rehearsal working on your song.” )

moe. soon planted its flag at New York City’s rock club Wetlands Preserve, where the group recorded its 1995 post-Thanksgiving gigs with then-drummer Mike Strazza for its Loaf live release. ( Loaf may be most notable for its CD booklet, which features the image of a plump, wavy-haired Schnier as a young teenager holding a fish, while decked out in a classic ‘70s Charlie Daniels Band T -shirt.)

From there the country beckoned.

“We followed in the footsteps of punk bands, Henry Rollins and the D.I.Y. ethic that went into making a band, getting a van and going on the road,” Garvey offers. “That was what we were doing, obviously with a little bit more of the hippie aesthetic, but that was the business model: ‘OK, we’ve got enough money to buy a shitty van and we’re going to do this.’”

Schnier recalls the band sleeping on floors and making less than a $100 per week. “It was a hard thing to come home and tell mom and dad but at the same time we were passionate about what we were doing,” he says. “Back then, there was doubt, but it wasn’t self doubt. We were more doubting about whether the rest of the world was going to come around.”

That certainly happened with their Sony deal. The group released two albums, garnered some radio airplay and upped its national recognition quotient, particularly among college students. Still, despite high expectations on both sides, moe. never quite registered a radar blip in the public pop consciousness.

As Derhak looks back at the Sony years, he acknowledges, “There’s always people in the industry who are blowing smoke up your ass, even people who are close to you, saying ‘This is it, this is going to be your thing.’ I’m a dreamer, I live in a dream world half the time, so I’m constantly buying into anything great somebody will tell me. But eventually, we recognized that we’re not really that band. It was nice to fantasize about those things, but in the end it really just isn’t us.”

So what kind of band was moe.?

The group as purposeful as ever, returned to the D.I.Y. ethos of Rollins on an increasingly larger scale. Rather than in a van, moe. traveled in a tour bus. Aided by the Internet, the group’s relaunched and revitalized Fatboy Records label put out the double live release L in 1999 and a series of studio albums when the group started work on Dither later that year. The group also launched its own music festival, moe.down – held every Labor Day weekend in Mohawk, N.Y. and now in its 11th year – which as Schnier describes, “has become an annual family gathering for 10,000 of our fans.”

On the eve of the mainstream music industry’s implosion, moe. was a 20th century band succeeding with what would become the 21st century business model.

The first decade of that 21st century saw the band continue to build its base, expand its festivals to include snoe.down in Rutland, Vt. (heading into its 6th year) and Summer Camp in Chillicothe, Ill. (it just celebrated its 10th year in May) while simultaneously issuing new records. Along with these efforts, business concerns crept in by necessity. Derhak admits, “When you have to deal with the rising cost of health insurance, then you realize you’re not just a band that you’re this entity as far as business goes.”

“It became a bit harder,” Garvey echoes, “because it is a business and you have to worry about overhead and how much you’re spending and doing everything really efficiently, when before we were just like pirates.”

These days a more descriptive term may be secret agents as the band members routinely have to reorient themselves to life in the suburbs after a month on the road. As drummer Vinnie Amico reflects, “It’s like a state of constant transition where you love being home with your family and you love being on the road playing music and they co-exist but you can’t do them together. When I’m home, and I’m getting ready to gear up and go on the road, and I’m at my daughter’s softball practice and I’m complaining to the other coach that I’m going to miss the next three games, and he looks at me and says, ‘Dude, you’re living the American dream.’ It reminds me that I get to play drums for thousands of people who love it and it’s the greatest thing ever.”

Schnier remarks, “When I’m home and meet other parents or go to school functions, what I do comes up in passing conversations. I might talk about playing Fuji Rock in Japan. ‘Really you play in a rock band in Japan? But what’s your job, though?’ Then I have to walk them through this process. What I’ve discovered, though, is that nobody knows we exist until you know about us and then as soon as you know about us, it seems like we’re everywhere. Then you start to spot the bumper stickers and then you see us in the newspaper and then you find out your friends have been going to see us or have been listening to us all along.”

“I recognize so many people out there and I love that about our fan base,” Schnier affirms. “No matter we where we play, I can look out and until the lights fade, I recognize so many of those faces and many of them I know and have had conversations with. That’s something I love about our fan base – that they are accessible, too. That may seem odd coming from somebody in the band, but I like that our fans are accessible and decent people that I can talk to.”

He is quite sincere with this sentiment, a throughline that extends back to the band’s early days in Upstate New York. The group first came together in a University of Buffalo cafeteria, where Garvey, who was in school studying illustration, was introduced to Derhak and the two bonded over a discussion of classic cartoons. Not yet a musician, Derhak began woodshedding with his roommate’s 12-string guitar and then after discovering Garvey’s proficiency with guitar, moved over to bass. They brought on drummer Ray Schwartz for an initial gig at a Halloween party the next fall in 1989, dressed in black leotards with slicked back hair as Sprockets (after the Saturday Night Live sketch), covering Jimi Hendrix, Squeeze and Joe Jackson. Guitarist, Dave Kessler and saxophonist Steve Hunter joined afterward and the group became known as Five Guys Named Moe.

The sax player soon dropped out, as did Kessler, replaced by Schnier who moved to Buffalo from Oneonta, N.Y. and was first recruited when Kessler had to miss a gig (the band briefly became a three guitar army). One early fan was latter-day drummer Amico, who was then gigging in a variety of bands and remembers, “When they lived in Buffalo I’d be go see them at shows because they were getting a pretty good buzz about them. I even played with them a few times when Jim was in the band. I’d ask, ‘Hey, do you mind if I bring my congas down?’ I can also remember being in Myrtle Beach on vacation and I put on Headseed and it sounded great and I said to my brother-in-law, ‘I would love to be in this band.’” This wish would be realized a few years later (on the same week that Amico learned that his wife was pregnant with their first child) but in the interim, the band was still finding its way as Garvey recalls, “Especially when we first started playing, I don’t think any one of us could play with another band and it would be a seamless fit. We grew up and matured together with Rob playing bass and Al and I playing guitars. So our roles and styles were defined by that.”

After two decades, Derhak explains that the band as a whole is also conscious of the need to nurture the relationships within moe. as well. “It’s like being married,” he says. “You let the stuff go that you can you can deal with and you pick your battles and speak up when you know it’s something that will irk you forever. But being friends with these guys for so long, we know we can handle any criticism from each other because we’ve learned how to make it constructive.”

To this end, when pressed, both Schnier and Derhak specify Garvey’s ill-founded musical insecurity as one of his foibles. The guitarist uses that very same word as he grants, “My worst tendency is my insecurity, in thinking that the only saving grace is brute force or going large over the top. I don’t like stepping on toes and taking away from other possibilities that are better ideas and I definitely can do that if given the opportunity.”

As for Schnier, Derhak comments, “There have been times when Al does stuff that reminds me of the Tenacious D skit where they’re coming up with a song and then they write the ice cream song because they’re influenced by their outside surroundings. Al can be that way, but at the same time, that can be one of his strong suits because it doesn’t necessarily bother him, as long as he’s happy with the song.”

Schnier similarly references The D in this vein: “In the past, as Jack Black says, ‘I could Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah you a song’ and I often did. I was very stream of consciousness when it came to my lyrics but now I’ll work on them a bit more and think about the things that I’m saying. I would rather a write song than not – so if it means going back and checking my work, I’m OK with that.”

Meanwhile, Schnier gently chides Derhak for “his skepticism, which I think it comes into play musically, too.” The bassist confirms, “We’ve been our own worst critics, so a lot of what we do never makes the light of day. If we come up with one idea, there may be 50 ideas that don’t come to fruition. A long time ago, we wanted to do a rock opera, so we created the ‘Timmy Tucker’ rock opera but we couldn’t make it work on the level we wanted it to work. We’ve had all these thematic ideas since then and it’s always, ‘Remember ‘Timmy,’ this is very dangerous ground we’re treading here.’ But sometimes being a harsh critic of yourself might get in the way of your artistic intentions.”

Cost considerations and the value of family time are two additional factors that impacted the group’s most recent collection of new material, 2008’s Sticks and Stones. The band holed up in a former cathedral in western Massachusetts for a predetermined duration of one month to write and record an album. Along the way, Schnier lost a notebook full of lyric ideas, which he claims was “a bit annoying but other than that it was fine. I would have been more annoyed if I lost a guitar or an amp.”

Looking back, Derhak suggests, “I think the album might have benefited from another month.” Then again, given the band’s past history, that month likely would have become two and then perhaps another two. So the group held firm to the initial time limit and still produced a strong effort.

Still, for most fans, it is the live setting where the band will always define itself. As a result, these performances come with a more stringent scrutiny than is applied to most other rock bands, but akin to most other jambands (an identity that moe. unabashedly embraces). Here, Umphrey’s McGee guitarist Brendan Bayliss gives moe. high marks. “I remember being really blown away when I heard No Doy and then saw them at the Double Door [in Chicago, Ill.], my freshman year of college,” he recalls. “When they’re on it and they’re clicking, you can’t really touch them. I feel like they definitely deserve more credit than they get, but I don’t think they care. I think they’re content with where they’ve gotten and can support their families and it’s admirable that they’re not chasing money for money’s sake or success for success’s sake.”

Bayliss points to another area where the band has earned his deep esteem. In the early days of Umphrey’s McGee, the group covered moe.‘s “Rebubula.” Bayliss remembers, “My senior year at Notre Dame I sent Al an e-mail that said, ‘Yo, I saw this band covering “Rebubula,” ’ even though it was my band. I just wanted to plant a seed.’”

The next time moe. came to Indianapolis where Bayliss was in school, he made his way backstage along with Umphrey’s keyboard player Joel Cummins and they played a tape of their arrangement for the group. Fast-forward a couple of years later to 2001 and the first year of Bonnaroo during moe.’s late night set.

“I was just standing on the side of the stage, they were playing “Rebubula” and Al looked at me and pulled me up,” Bayliss remembers. “And I was really in no position to be out in public, let alone play guitar, but that’s just the kind of guy he is. It was a big show for him, so for him to take time out of his show to give me some spotlight, I was really blown away. It’s what moe. does with what it calls the ‘hostile takeovers.’ [In the middle of a set, moe. will gradually move offstage yielding the spotlight to another group for a song before returning]. They’ll say, ‘Here’s the tempo and key that you’re coming out at and let us know the tempo and key that you’re going to end at.’ Again, just giving up your entire stage, I don’t know who else does that. It’s very selfless. It’s not like they want to take a piss break; they’re just willing to share the spotlight. That’s a quality you won’t find in 95 percent of the other bands out there.”

It is also here where the band’s selflessness and comfort level occasionally is viewed as complacency. Garvey concedes that over the ebbs and flows of the group’s 20-year career, such critiques have been warranted, but only to a degree. “I don’t feel this way right now but there definitely have been periods of time when it doesn’t seem like anything new or exciting is happening and we can’t make it happen, and that gets frustrating. We try to make every show different and it’ll take three to five shows for some songs to come around, but after awhile you’re playing the same songs and you might feel like you have nothing new to say about them. It gets frustrating but it’s not for lack of trying. When we recognize it, we’ve attempted a number of ways to change our outlook on how we present a show or how we present certain songs.”

Such efforts have included covering a new tune almost every night as the group did in early 2003, repeating the effort three years later with songs by The Who in anticipation of four shows opening for that group, honing new material onstage as the band is currently doing and, perhaps, even pushing themselves out of their physical comfort zone by performing in suits.

All in all, it has been an impressive if somewhat unheralded 20-year run for moe. How many musicians first come together in a college dorm room and fancy themselves a musical group? How many of these are even able to secure a gig let alone local headlining performances? How many of these then ramp things up on a national scale? What percentage of these acts not only sign to a major label but later part ways and thrive after the fact? How many rock bands survive more than two decades with their core musicians pushing beyond the age of 40? If one stops to crunch the numbers, it’s a rather remarkable achievement.

Still, for moe., it all comes down to the music. With new original tunes in the current mix, even the group’s resident pessimist is feeling good these days. As Derhak explains, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I love playing. I love playing in this band and I don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks because we’re doing what we want to do and I think we do a killer job of it. We’re going to play our asses off every time we go out there and that’s what we’re about.”

Garvey feels much the same. “Our job is to hold onto the good things that allow us to enjoy what we do and hopefully what we do is something that other people are going to enjoy,” he says. “We never played those music industry games. We built our own little tree fort in the back and we’re not leaving.”