The sun is shining, daffodils are blooming and the umbrellas are languishing in the closet. Mother Nature is surely just playing a nasty trick on Eugene’s light-deprived citizens, but one thing is certain: Winter is almost over. And so is The String Cheese Incident’s Winter Carnival Tour.
The String Cheese Incident will bring its bright-eyed jam rock to the Hult Center Monday after playing three nights of sold-out shows at The Warfield in San Francisco. The Winter Carnival Tour ends March 18 in Whistler, British Columbia — just in time to give the band a short break before it begins touring April 12 in Austin, Texas, for Spring Cheese 2001.
Busy? You bet. The String Cheese Incident has often been compared to the likes of the Grateful Dead, Phish and Dave Matthews Band for its grueling tour schedule and an insatiable enthusiasm for live performances.
“From the very beginning,” bassist Keith Moseley told Westword magazine, “we’ve looked at this as a long-term project, something we wanted to be doing 10 or 15 years down the road. And we realized that to do that, we had to push ourselves creatively.”
And like those aforementioned bands, The String Cheese Incident goes beyond the basic band setup of drums, bass, lead and rhythm guitars. Kyle Hollingsworth plays keys, Rhodes and accordion; Michael Kang plays electric guitar, acoustic mandolin and violin; Keith Mosely plays bass; Bill Nershi, acoustic guitar; and Michael Travis, percussion.
The five hail from Crested Butte, Colo., and joined their musical forces in 1993.
“There’s a lot of clubs around here,” Kang told the music magazine Pollstar “The Colorado music scene is pretty supportive of bands. So we just kind of built up a following doing that.”
Evidently, the band has acquired support outside of Colorado. The String Cheese Incident is beginning to acquire the same sort of hardcore fan base characteristic of Phish and the Grateful Dead. According to the band’s publicist at Madison House Publicity, “The fusion of music, spirit and community is at the heart of The String Cheese Incident and as their circle grows larger, it becomes more unique to them.”
Part of the band’s unique culture is its anti-technology lifestyle. (“I don’t have a computer,” Kang told Yahoo’s Internet magazine.) The band also avoids the commercialization that has become all-too familiar in modern music.
“They can’t stuff us in a package and market us in the same way as Britney Spears,” Kang said.
While nobody would confuse The String Cheese Incident with Britney Spears, the band manages to attract a diverse cross-section of the music-listening population, even without the fancy packaging.
The band’s diverse concert style is part of the reason they have acquired such a devoted following in a relatively short amount of time.
“You can go to four different shows and hear four different set lists,” said one of the band’s staff members Reis Baron. “Fans crave the participator experience of it. It’s not the band shoving this music onto the crowd. It’s musical communication and a collective recycling of the crowd’s energy and the music that spawns it.”
The energetic music atmosphere is an ideal cure for winter term blues — whether or not the sun is shining. The band won’t be stopping in Eugene for the spring tour, so this will be the last chance for Eugene residents to hear the band for at least a year. The Hult Center doors open for Monday’s show at 7 p.m. and the music begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $23.50 and are available at the Hult Center or online at www.sciticketing.com.