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Robert Randolph plays the Capital Metro Stage at 5 p.m. Saturday.

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XL on ACL: Jam-packed

Once the exclusive domain of the Grateful Dead, the jam genre now teems with names like String Cheese Incident and Widespread Panic

By Michael Corcoran
Austin American-Statesman
Sept. 20, 2003

DENVER -- Ivan loves the Yonder Mountain String Band and String Cheese Incident, two Colorado groups that have added so many trippy colors to the blue in bluegrass. Jay is all about the Panic, Widespread Panic, though he says "I could do without the 20-minute drum solos." Zach was raised on rap; he's more into the "mind-blowing urban jam side," so he digs Karl Denson's Tiny Universe, Soulive, Sound Tribe Sector Nine and the like. Then there's Jeremy, who divides his favorite bands into three categories: air travel, road trip and see in town. "It's like, for Phish, I'll fly out to see a big show. For Moe., Panic and Robert Randolph, I might drive four or five hours. And then there are groups like Leftover Salmon, String Cheese and Keller (Williams), that I'll see when they play in town."

Overhearing Jeremy, Jay interjects, "Keller is sick, man." Sick is a good thing. "The last time I saw him, the first set was all Grateful Dead covers," Jay says of the one-man jam band. The others, hanging out at a pickup in a parking lot of Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheatre, near Denver, chime in on their own Keller Williams experiences. Sick, sick, sick, sick sick, the word is repeated over and over. Sick is the new awesome.

These four shirtless men in their 20s, passing a pipe full of what Jay calls "Pepe Le Pew," are not alone. The parking lot of this legendary concert venue, cut into the mountains as if with God's shovel, is filled with kids who would look like the '60s never went away if not for their pierced tongues and SUVs and lower back tribal tattoos. It's five hours before headliner String Cheese Incident (who play two sets tonight at the Austin City Limits Music Festival) hits the stage, and dozens of Squeaky Fromme look-alikes and their male counterparts are walking around with raised index fingers, half a peace sign that used to mean "Jesus Saves" and now means "spare a ticket?"

These are Jerry's kids, valiantly fighting the malady of being born too late. They were 11, 12, 13, when the Grateful Dead last roamed the Earth. Although the H.O.R.D.E. Fest, Lollapalooza's hippie brother, introduced the likes of Phish, Widespread Panic, Col. Bruce Hampton and other free-form freaks to festival crowds in the early '90s, the golden age of jam bands began, for all intents and purposes, when Jerry Garcia drew his last breath in August '95. Before that, there was no plural of "jam band"; there was only one and a sea of acolytes and wannabes.

On the other hand, the Dead and their ilk are reviled by those with cutting-edge tastes. Considered the domain of self-indulgent noodlers who give freedom of expression a bad name, "jam bands" have been tagged with a negative connotation, just a notch above "disco cover bands." You've heard the joke that started with the Dead, was passed on to Phish and is now applied to any band with bad vocals and 25-minute songs. "What do two (insert jam band name here) fans say when they run out of dope? 'This band stinks.' " Seeing these bands without the benefit of hallucinatory helpers can be, to some, like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet with your jaw wired shut. You're going to feel left out.

Through thick and thin

"Dance, Michael, dance," a woman in her late 20s/early 30s called out at Red Rocks to her son, who looked about 8. "C'mon, dance," she said as she swung her elbows and did the psychedelic hoedown. The kid looked straight ahead, no doubt running "Yu-Gi-Oh!" plots through his head. Meanwhile, his younger sister danced with mom, who kept waving for her son to join in as String Cheese Incident launched into a funky jam on "Jellyfish." Finally, the boy stood up and started tapping on a loose board with his foot. His mother smiled back as if he were dancing, but he'd just found something to explore until the excruciating boredom was over and he could get in the car and play his Gameboy.

Meanwhile, just about every other person in the place was going crazy. Guitarist Bill Nershi did his running man routine while keyboardists Kyle Hollingsworth and John Medeski, from opening act Medeski, Martin & Wood, kept driving each other further and further out until it all fell together when electric mandolinist Michael Kang played the melody of Weather Report's "Birdland." Hands were flailing, bodies were twisting with abandon and it was encouraging, in this high-tech age, to see college-age crowds so in tune with the instincts of adventurous musicians, so well-versed in tradition.

"These people really listen," Medeski said, as he wrapped a towel around his sweaty head backstage after the set. Originally embraced by the New York avant-garde jazzbo set, Medeski, Martin & Wood have become faves of the jam band crowd, for which Medeski makes no apologies. "They'll follow your sound through thick and thin. What musician doesn't want an audience that encourages you to go out on a limb?"

That connection between bands and fans will be on full display at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, with such happy jammers as SCI and Robert Randolph playing today and Yonder Mountain, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe and Soulive playing Sunday. One of Friday night's acts, Keller Williams, will also play a club set at La Zona Rosa tonight. Oct. 3-5 will find Widespread Panic coming to the Backyard for three sure sellouts.

During the rest of the year, the Vibe on Sixth Street specializes in bands with weird names and long jams. Although the hometown of Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker was never a big town for the Grateful Dead or Phish, we're catching up. "Austin's become like our second home," said SCI's Nershi. Indeed, the band has played 28 shows here in less than seven years, going from Stubb's indoor venue in front of 20 fans in November 1996 to packing Waterloo Park for three consecutive nights in April 2002. Although the 10-year-old String Cheese routinely sells only about 150,000 copies of its studio albums, released on their own SCI-Fidelity label, the band often outdraws platinum artists on the road.

"When the Dead started getting so big that they could fill stadiums, Phish came along to give fans the whole nightclub or ballroom experience that the Dead grew out of," Incident co-manager Mike Luba says backstage at Red Rocks. "When Phish got too big to play the clubs, SCI came along to play that role." Now that the Cheese, an Internet-savvy self-contained entity that recently sued Ticketmaster in federal court for alleged anti-trust violations, has outgrown the clubs, a host of newer jam bands are ready to step in and play what seems to be endless variations of Dave Mason's "Feelin' Alright."

Fluid, sonic landscape

Two weeks before their return to Zilker Park, SCI are backstage at Red Rocks, where the sandstone formations serve as the back wall. They're doing a bit of press for their new album, "Untying the Not," which hits stores Tuesday, and Kang, the band's irreplaceable Jerry G., is looking for a pen. He likes to doodle when he does interviews. Unable to scare up a Bic, Kang sits uneasily on the couch and contemplates his answers before delivering them. What goes through his mind when he plays? "Hopefully nothing," he says. "You want to get your mind right there in the moment, right where the music from the ether gets pulled through you without hesitation. My goal is to create a fluid sonic landscape where people can travel on their holographic journeys." There's your jam band-in-a-nutshell quote. Thank you, Mr. Asian Mystic.

When Hollingsworth gets up from the floor where he's been receiving a massage, Kang slips down for his turn. Hollingsworth sits where Kang was.

Told that elements of the new album, especially "Mountain Girl," which intercuts the voice of Garcia's longtime girlfriend with other spoken word loops as a percolating rhythm gurgles under, are reminiscent of David Byrne and Brian Eno's 198 album, "My Life In the Bush of Ghosts," Hollingsworth's eyes light up. "That's it, man! That album just blew me away when I heard it for the first time."

SCI, which had recorded their previous studio album, "Outside Inside," in Austin with Steve Berlin of Los Lobos producing, set out to make a follow-up that sounded nothing like their previous work. They've succeeded.

"When we were looking for producers, we talked to this one guy, he was totally hippied out, with the hair and the beads and the clothes and we were thinking, well, we want to go the other way," Hollingsworth says. They were sent a sampler of tracks produced by Youth, the former Killing Joke bassist who has helmed projects by the Orb and other techno dance acts. "What sold us (on Youth) was when we met him. He had somewhat of a laid-back persona, but at the same time you knew he was dead serious about his job."

"Laid-back?" Nershi asks. "I don't know if you can apply that word to Youth. He was like, 'Here are the songs you're gonna record and here's how you're gonna do them.' " Nershi says there were intense discussions, but then Youth would always say (affects Brit accent) "Do you want to make a great record? Then just do what I say."

The producer managed to pull something out of the band they might not have known that they had. "Elijah," about a friend who died too young, is a gorgeous and spare piano piece that sets up the soaring reel "Valley Of the Jig." Meanwhile, "Who Am I?" sounds like the Beatles were just as big an influence as the Dead. The album's strongest track, "Time Alive," comes from the unlikeliest source, crazed drummer Michael Travis, who has dressed like Freddie Mercury and now pens epic rock numbers like the former Queen frontman. Travis and Youth almost came to blows in the studio after arguing about the drum sound, but in the end a minor masterpiece has come from that tension. It's the first song Travis has written for the band.

They're strange

Dictatorial producers are nowhere around when SCI takes the Red Rocks stage for a second set. It starts slowly, with Kang's tedious, AOR-ish "Tinder Box," but halfway through the third number, "Best Feeling," Kang flashes an electric smile, the tempo suddenly changes and the audience goes nuts as the group heaves into a sinewy jam. The quality has finally matched the quantity. Even the bored 8-year-old is dancing. His mother is so delirious, she's about to burst.

Backstage, Nershi's 12-year-old daughter, in a tight belly shirt and declining demeanor, watches the band perform on closed circuit TV. "I think they're strange," she says aloud. When the band puts their instruments down and start heading towards the wings, she springs up from the couch and says to her friend, "Let's get out of here! This room is about to be full of weird people!"

On a table in the dressing room are five glass trophies, with a facsimile of Red Rocks' 400-foot natural barriers shooting above the glass. The band members' names are individually engraved on each trophy, but underneath are the words "Widespread Panic." Sometimes even the venue reps can't tell one jam band from another.

But those who listen intently, who are lost in the moment, who follow the music even when it stumbles, who have this music from the ether pulled through them, could point out a thousand little differences.

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