The Dave Matthews Band, Reconsidered

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/briefing/the-dave-matthews-band-reconsidered.html

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The Dave Matthews Band is on tour, as they have been every summer, except 2020, for the past 30-odd years. Like the Grateful Dead and Phish, so-called jam bands with which it’s often lumped together, Dave Matthews has a deliriously passionate fan base that follows the band from city to city, reuniting with fellow disciples at preshow tailgates, showing off devotional tattoos, trading live recordings.

In the early ’90s, when I arrived for my first year at the University of Virginia, Dave Matthews was a local celebrity. His band played for five bucks every Tuesday night at the little bar down the street from campus. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I never went to see them.

It would be years before the stereotype of Dave Matthews fans as “pot-smoking, tie-dye-touting former frat bros fawning over craft beers in parking lots between cornhole games,” as Perri Ormont Blumberg puts it, would become a widely understood social designation. But for those of us figuring out how to reconcile the rise of grunge with our carefully curated Manic Panic-dyed identities, a college bar band with a fiddle player was way too mainstream.

“You’re sort of defined as much by what you dislike as by what you like at that age,” Ben Sisario, a music reporter at The Times and one of my first college friends, said recently. Ben and I met on our first night at Virginia. He was wearing a T-shirt from the 1992 tour of the alt-rock band the Pixies; our friendship was cemented in the uncomplicated way of teenagers for whom there’s little distinction between who you listen to and who you are. We spent the next four years not going to Dave Matthews Band shows together.

When I read about the community that flourishes via shared adoration of the Dave Matthews Band, I feel — not left out, exactly — but instead like I missed an opportunity. I could have participated in the early fandom of a band that would become an American institution. I could have “been there when” rather than having “been there on the sidelines with my arms folded smugly when.”

In adulthood, in theory, we get more comfortable with our contradictions. We can emphatically like things that others — or even we — deem uncool without risking an identity crisis. Ben has seen Dave Matthews perform several times since college and has come to appreciate the complexity of their music. “I was just too clouded with the teenage factionalism of being a first year in college to see that,” he said, adding, “My persona at the time was very much ‘indie rock snob.’”

Ben and I became friends because of our indie rock snob personas, which makes it hard for me to totally dismiss my youthful disdain for popular music as useless. I’m grateful for the taste I developed as a teenager that helped me find my people, taste that’s become more complex. Now, I listen to the 1994 Dave Matthews Band album “Under the Table and Dreaming” and am overcome with nostalgic pleasure. And when Dave sings on the first track, “If you hold on tight to what you think is your thing, you may find you’re missing all the rest,” I know categorically that he’s right.

Jon Pareles on “Walk Around the Moon,” the Dave Matthews Band’s first studio album since 2018.

Bill Hader as Dave on “Saturday Night Live,” with a guest appearance from the man himself.

“Either you’re down with DMB’s amalgamation of soul-stirring ‘Joshua Tree’ anthem rock and smooth jazz and bluegrass-fiddle hoedown and hacky-sack funk or you aren’t.” A lovely profile of Dave Matthews by Alex Pappademas in GQ.

The Dave Matthews Band performing “Ants Marching” live in Central Park in 2003.

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Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa