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I did it (Do you think I drove too far?)May 27 '01 (Updated Mar 19 '03) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Any fanatic Dave-head can testify they're one of the best live bands out there. But unexpected set lists will generally leave more casual DMB fans out of the loop.
Dave Matthews Band with Macy Gray and Widespread Panic Date of Concert: Saturday, May 26, 2001 Location: Sam Boyd Stadium, Las Vegas, NV Price: $50.50 (Bleacher seats) Wow – out of all the DMB fans who lurk in the music section of Epinions, I can’t believe that I’m the first to write on their 2001 Everyday tour. Perhaps there have been better Dave tours in the past – the opening acts this time out were a little odd (I’ll discuss that in a minute). But being a more casual fan of the DMB, this was my first time seeing them live, and they didn’t disappoint… well, for the most part. The most die-hard Dave-heads out there have probably been to several DMB concerts, possibly many within the same tour. It’s not inconceivable to see traveling packs of Grateful Dead-style hippies with their vans outside a DMB show. This was definitely true in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend 2001. But that’s definitely not the whole of their fandom – they attract a diverse crowd. Many fans could tell you which shows over the years were the best, which bootleg version of which song has the best drum solo, sax solo, violin solo, etc., and recount the best and funniest examples of “Davespeak”. I’m not here to do that. I’m here as a consistent fan (not a die-hard, but more than just a semi-fan who likes all their radio singles and can’t get into the longer album tracks) to tell you how the show stood up against their reputation as a live band, and against the studio versions of the same songs. Oh yeah, and the opening acts. Macy Gray My friend jen and I (yes, the lowercase “j” is intentional) arrived at the stadium a little after 4, since we had heard the show was supposed to start then. jen lives in Las Vegas, and so my drive up from L.A. was a little more justified since I got to spend the weekend with an old college friend. (I’m sure some fans drove farther than I did and back all in one day). Some international warm-up band was playing to a sparse crowd in the dead heat of the desert afternoon when we got there – Macy Gray didn’t come out until at least 5:30, at which point the crowd was just barely starting to become more dense. Her set was more or less as I expected – funky, 70’s-inflected R&B with a full live band. I had to admit, the band had a knack for creating a catchy groove, but this was offset by Macy’s unintelligibly gravelly voice and her somewhat prissy attitude. Often during songs, she would suddenly shift the band into a completely different tempo and feel, which really marred some of her more well-known songs such as “Why Didn’t You Call Me”. Still, some of her set was upbeat and memorable, even the embarrassing ode to getting freaky known as “Sex-O-Matic Venus Freak”. (I was actually convinced that the band could have watched a bunch of pornos before the show and just decided to set their soundtracks to music, but hey, at least they were good at it). Still, Macy’s attitude was not all that endearing. Only a few bars into her biggest hit, “I Try”, she threw a temper tantrum, chastising the audience for being “too f---ing quiet”, and then suddenly switched to a more upbeat song, “Can’t Wait to Meetchu”. Yeah, Macy, great way to introduce your little Gospel song. She later went back and closed with “I Try”, which was more or less how it is when you hear it on the radio, except this time the crowd was a bit more excited, probably because they knew they had to be, or she’d drag the set out even longer. I don’t know – Macy tries, but her style just doesn’t fit with the style the Dave-heads are used to. Widespread Panic After a shorter intermission, another band came out without any real fanfare from anyone. After a brief hello from their lead singer (I couldn’t really see anyone’s faces because the video screens weren’t being used yet), they launched into a thick 60’s-style rock groove, and suddenly, the crowd was quite lively. All around us were hippies – wearing tie-dye shirts, funny-looking hats, dredlocks, skimpy bikini tops, and all manner of other things, getting into the groove and having a total blast. Watching the audience was a lot more fun than watching the band, I must admit. It was like a timewarp back to a day before I was born. Unfortunately, this got old rather quickly, since most of the band’s songs stretched out to the ten-minute mark or so, with very few lyrics to tie it all together. I may have counted nine songs in their set, but it could have just been one big long song. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I was familiar with the band, but being an open-ended jam-band, I doubt they get much radio exposure. I was able to respect them even if I didn’t enjoy them. The wind was definitely not our friend, though. As Widespread Panic sang, “High, high, high, how high can you go?”, the general consensus of the pot-smokers around us seemed to be, “Not high enough!” But at least there wasn’t much in the way of unruly behavior. Everybody there was loud, but honestly really friendly. Dave Matthews Band At around 8:30, after about four hours of sitting there with jen, trying to keep ourselves entertained and hydrated while we waited for the sun to go down, the lights finally dimmed, and the five men of the evening took the stage. They were all in fine form as they opened rather unexpectedly with their reasonably successful hit “Don’t Drink the Water” from their more “artsy” album Before These Crowded Streets. Thanks to a slightly faster tempo, the song was still great despite the lack of banjo and Alanis Morissette’s backup vocals found on the studio version. Dave was still as passionate as ever as he sang about the plight of the Native Americans, and in between gracious shots of the band members on the four video screens, some curious imagery was shown which I assumed must have been photos of Native American artifacts and territory and so forth. After a brief pause, the band then proceeded with a slightly mellower version of “#41”, the jazzy fan favorite from Crash. This song lagged a little at first, but it was great to hear the entire audience singing along with Dave’s perplexing lyrics, and LeRoi Moore and Boyd Tinsley delivered the expected drawn-out solos on the sax and fiddle, respectively. As the song wound down, Dave inserted a few lines from the band’s new song “Everyday”, pleasing fans that had heard the song evolve during some of the band’s shows in late 2000. Dave didn’t talk much in between songs, except to growl “VEGAS!” repeatedly. That was rather unexpected, because he can be quite funny, but apparently he just wasn’t in that mood during this show. Most transitions between songs consisted of a few quick greetings and growls from Dave, then an awkward silence and a sudden lead-in to the next tune. In this case, that lead-in was the angular acoustic intro to “Rhyme & Reason”, which got quite a response from most of the fans, who likely still hold Dave’s earlier work as his best. Personally, R&R has never been one of my favorites – it’s a bit growly and creepy, but still very catchy. It came off pretty much the way it does on Under the Table and Dreaming. The band decided to pull out another hit track from that album, “What Would You Say”, which is definitely one of my favorites, and easily recognized by even casual fans. Even though the song was a bit lacking with the absence of Blues Traveler harmonica player John Popper, it was a treat for me, since the song’s not on either of the band’s live albums even though it’s one of their best jams. LeRoi filled in amicably for the absent harmonica with some noodling on the sax. This being the Everyday tour, it was inevitable that Dave would pull a lot of material from that album. I was surprised that they took so long to get around to that album, but when Dave switched to his electric guitar and played the bluesy opening chords of the sweet ballad “Angel”, it was clear that most fans had accepted the new work. It was a wistful rendition, pretty much like the album version, and it made me miss my girlfriend (who is currently on a trip to Crete, but that’s another story). They continued with the jittery, sensuous “When the World Ends”, probably my least favorite song from the new album, but a future single and an obvious fan favorite. Once again, they pretty much stuck with the album version, right down to the sudden ending in the middle of a word, at which point the lights very suddenly blinked off. Cute effect, but I don’t think it was quite as powerful as the band intended. The new material kept on coming with the deep electric guitar intro to the band’s current single, “The Space Between”, my favorite track from Everyday. At this point, the audience could tell that Dave didn’t plan on doing as much of the free-form jam stuff with his new material, and the way in which LeRoi and Boyd were relegated more to the background on the new album was painfully obvious, as more attention was focused on auxiliary musicians – the keyboardist and the three female backup singers that Dave first introduced us to with “Stay”. “The Space Between” is a powerful song and I was glad they played it, but during many of the newer songs, it felt more like a standard concert than a DMB jamfest like I had expected. Most Dave fans know by now that the band has an entire album’s worth of unreleased material from last year when they were working on a new album with their old producer Steve Lillywhite, and very suddenly ditched those songs in order to come up with the material on Everyday with producer Glen Ballard. Dave still loves those songs from the Lillywhite Sessions, and plans to continue playing them live, and maybe he’ll release them one day. Until then, between the live versions and the leak of the studio demos to Napster, many fans have learned and come to love these songs, in many cases much more than the songs on Everyday. So it was no surprise that a few folks were very happy when Dave started strumming and Boyd started plucking at his fiddle, creating the soundscape to the odd ballad “Big Eyed Fish”. LeRoi added his usual smoothness to this tune, switching from his sax midway through the song to what appeared to be a pennywhistle, which allowed the song to fade out in a soothing duet between him and Boyd, which very nicely translated into another unreleased tune, “Bartender”. This slow, percussion driven ballad is becoming known as a watershed jam track for the band, and it’s based around a curious pair of religious references, as Dave asks a bartender for “The wine you gave Jesus that set him free after three days in the ground.” It takes guts to pen lyrics like that when many of your fans would sooner assume you have a firmer belief in pot than you do in God. And I don’t know what Dave or his band profess to believe, and I really don’t even want to go there. In any case, “Bartender” is an excellent song that slowly builds upon Carter Beauford’s military-style drumming to a lovely cascade of fiddle and sax licks. I was quite surprised that they picked it to play for the folks of “Sin City” that night. Up next was a definite live favorite, “Warehouse”, which went pretty much the way it goes on both Live at Red Rocks and Listener Supported (in fact, it always seems positioned to mark the halfway point of the show). I love the stop-start intro that builds upon Dave’s frantic strum, Boyd’s quick fiddle work, and Carter’s rat-a-tat-tat on the drums. It was even more enjoyable with the audience giving out a big “Whoo!” at each pause before the song finally got underway. Must be a recent Dave-head tradition I didn’t know about. In any case, this schizophrenic song about superstition, which jumps back and forth from the tense verses to an almost cartoonish chorus driven by Carter tapping his cowbell, is always great live, and I’m glad I got to see them do it. The second half of the show didn’t exactly go where I hoped it would in terms of song selection. Since Crash and Before These Crowded Streets are my two favorite Dave albums, I was really hoping that they would be better represented. In fact, “#41” turned out to be the only song played from Crash that night, and there was only one more song up from BTCS. The band opted for a few more non-album tracks, starting with “True Reflection”, which debuted on Listener Supported (I think) and marks Boyd Tinsley’s first turn at bat on lead vocals. Frankly, it just doesn’t sound like a Dave Matthews Band song to me. Sure, Boyd has a great deep singing voice, Dave and the female singers back him up nicely, and he gets some more great licks in on his fiddle, but the lyrics are complete cheese ripped straight from a self-help book: “Find some inspiration/It’s down deep inside of you/Familiar situation, yeah/Your whole life is ahead of you.” Next up was “Recently”, which debuted as a live track on the band’s independent album Remember Two Things, and later came out on an EP of the same name, but hasn’t been included on any of Dave’s full-length studio albums. I’ve had a hard time making up my mind about this song – it’s cute and it seems to have a nice message of tolerance, but it just doesn’t stand out to me like it does to some fans. The band isn’t as aggressive as a whole, with little notes leaking in from the sax and fiddle and Dave’s assertion that “Some people do, and some people don’t”. It got a great response from the crowd when he made some sort of a reference to how some people like smoking pot and some people don’t. Apparently most of the crowd did. But that doesn’t affect my view of the concert or the band. It’s just not something I choose to partake in. The band slowed things down for another unreleased track, “Diggin’ a Ditch”. Listening to this mellow song can give you a hint as to why Dave ditched this material for happier songs like “I Did It”. The whole message of this seems to be working until you can’t remember your problems any more. From there, however, they interestingly shifted into “What You Are”, one of the more dramatic tracks from Everyday, as if to remind the fans that they stood behind both Everyday and the Lillywhite Sessions and didn’t plan on ignoring either. This is truly a great, upbeat song about how the fans put Dave on a pedestal, and he’s really just a person like the rest of them. Here, LeRoi’s and Boyd’s contribution to the song stood out a little more than they did on the album. Unfortunately, no one seemed to be listening. I was honestly surprised to see people walking around and getting up fro a bathroom break and whatever else, as if shrugging off Everyday like it didn’t exist. That had to have been a little disconcerting for Dave and the guys, but they kept the pace up with another new song, Fool to Think. This one basically retained the rhythmic awkwardness that it does on the album, and I don’t really think it was a great pick for a live show. I listened carefully to Carter’s drumming pattern during the chorus, and it makes a little more sense to me now, but it’s still not one of my favorites. I was impressed that they were able to teach the backup singers how to follow along, though – that can’t be easy. What happened next was very interesting, Dave switched back to electric, and Boyd began playing around with a wah-wah pedal underfoot, coaxing some cool distorted sounds out of his violin as the band gently began to go over a familiar chord pattern. Wait, I thought, didn’t they already play the song “Everyday”? They’re doing it again? Nope. Instead, Dave and the girls began singing “Honey, honey, come and dance with me,” and I recognized it as “#36”, another live-album-only track. To be quite honest, I’ve always hated “#36”. It’s repetitive and generally goes on forever, and the other fans seem to like it, but it’s never been fully developed into a song. Until now. What I hadn’t realized in my ignorance was that “#36” was the origin of “Everyday”, and I wasn’t smoking crack for thinking the chord progressions in the two songs were exactly alike. The band did an awesome job of weaving together two songs that were near the bottom of my list of preferred DMB songs and make them into something truly sweet. Quite a few times, they jumped back and forth, with the verses to “Everyday” fitting much better here than at the end of “#41”. It was almost like a happier reflection of “Diggin’ a Ditch” – “Jump in the mud, love/Get your hands filthy, love” and so forth. It was a great thought on which to “end” their set. But as always, we knew there would be an encore. The band took their sweet time coming back out, I must say. But they took the stage again, and once again got some surprised responses from the crowd when they chose yet another unreleased track, “Grace Is Gone”, to encore with. It’s another sad, slower song, basically about drinking to forget the pain of a lover who took off. Perhaps there’s a double entendre to the name “Grace” and they’re just downplaying it, but Dave does seem to have been struggling with a lot of spiritual issues in recent songs. In any case, once this ended, the crowd was primed for something big, and I was struggling to guess what it would be. I fully expected “I Did It”, and then their ubiquitous cover of “All Along the Watchtower” (which I expected folks to be begging for at this point). The girl in front of me, who was obviously drunk, turned around and asked me if I thought they’d play “Crash into Me” or “Satellite”. Those would have been great picks as well, the former likely being the band’s biggest hit to date. But this is the DMB, and they often go through a concert fully ignoring the songs that gave them radio exposure in favor of more out-of-the-way fan favorites. Still, they did choose a radio hit to end with, the aforementioned other track from Before These Crowded Streets - “Stay (Wasting Time)”. I was cool with that – it’s an upbeat acoustic love song and a happy note to end on, even though I really didn’t think that would be the end. The band gelled quite well on this one, Carter hammering out his playful patterns against Dave’s strums while the female backup singers wailed away and LeRoi blew his heart out on the sax. Okay, I was a little disappointed at the many great Dave songs I didn’t get to hear as jen and I left the stadium, but hey, it’s only one concert. They were set to play again in Vegas the next night (actually, they’re probably about to go on as I finish writing this), and I’ll bet they planned to give fans a completely different set, likely including “I Did It”, “Crash into Me”, etc. That’s the interesting thing about the DMB – they don’t seem to retire old songs. They still play some of the obscure tracks from their independent album. I like that, because many of my favorites are buried between more popular songs on Crash or BTCS. It’s unlike Jars of Clay, who are my favorite band, but will likely never again play some of the best songs on my favorite album of theirs, Much Afraid. In conclusion (yes, my concert reviews are even longer than my album reviews!), I would recommend seeing DMB live to anyone who enjoys a good percentage of their songs and is open to hearing some new ones, or who just likes jazzy jam sessions and doesn’t mind pot smoke. But if you thought of going because you heard “I Did It” on the radio and thought it was catchy and non-threatening, I’d think again. As for me, the show was worth the fifty bucks I paid for it, as well as the drive, the Vegas heat, and the indulgence of the opening acts. Set List: Don't Drink the Water #41/Everyday Outro Rhyme & Reason What Would You Say Angel When the World Ends The Space Between Big Eyed Fish Bartender Warehouse True Reflection Recently Diggin' a Ditch What You Are Fool to Think #36/Everyday medley Encore: Grace Is Gone Stay (Wasting Time) My Ratings: Concert overall: 3 stars Macy Gray: 2 stars Widespread Panic: 2 stars Dave Matthews Band: 4 stars The Dave Matthews Band is: Dave Matthews: Lead vocals, acoustic & electric guitar Boyd Tinsley: Fiddle, additional vocals LeRoi Moore: Saxophone, flute, pennywhistle (?) Carter Beauford: Drums Stefan Lessard: Bass Website: http://www.davematthewsband.com Great Music to Listen to While: Being a hippy, apparently.  |
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