When the sun sets on the Columbia River, behind the boxy stage of the Gorge Amphitheatre, the scene’s as placid and vivid as a nineteenth century landscape painting. This is nature as those Romantic artists would’ve rendered it, brutal, sublime. The rock cliffs are lined like a layer cake in browns and tans, topped with the Central Washington sky in a watercolorist’s pink and blue. But now that the August sky has almost fully turned dark, the star of the show finally strolls mid-stage before 20,000 people fanned like congregants and goes directly into the first song.
The first sound the band makes is…a hiccup.
And nearly all 20,000 break into woos and screams of appreciation, because that “Hhuunc!” from lead singer Dave Matthews is the first lyric of “Pig,” an old standby from the 28-year-old band. It gets a lot more intelligible after the first nonsense noises; a jam about enjoying the here and now. A plea to “don’t burn the day away” in case “a great wave should wash us all away.” You know, carpe diem and all that.
The audience has interpreted that edict as an embrace of all things comfortable, clad in plaid flannels or hoodies or plaid flannels layered over hoodies. One trio wears matching lime-green shirts printed with the Tommy Boy callout “Holy Schnikes!” and nonmatching baggy cargo shorts. Some raise $25 big plastic goblets of strawberry frosé. The air smells like weed. Of course it smells like weed.
Of the thousands here, about half have stepped out of RVs and those big square tents you buy at Target parked on thousands of campsites spread on the festival grounds that fan out from the amphitheater.
Here, 150 miles east of Seattle, a 51-year-old man rocking the ultimate dad bod holds court, as he’s done for decades on summer stints that have become like annual tent revivals. What most of the crowd doesn’t consider is how deep Dave Matthews’s local ties run—that he lives in Seattle, enrolls his kids in Seattle schools. That Dave Matthews is Seattle’s biggest rock star.
No, really. It just depends a little on how you define “biggest.” And “rock,” and “star.” And, now that you mention it, “Seattle’s.”
Though the band formed in a Virginia college town back in 1991, Dave Matthews has been a Seattle resident since Bush II’s first term. His eponymous band has sold more than 33 million records, right behind Bob Dylan and Queen on lists of the best-selling recording artists of all time.
In 2014, Billboard marked them the seventh most successful touring band since 1990, noting their then-$777 million gross haul—it’s probably around a billion by now—outpaced Paul McCartney and Metallica. The Recording Industry Association of America ranks the Dave Matthews Band in their top 50, with gold and platinum stats similar to U2’s.
The only Seattle band—and we’ll get to DMB’s Emerald City bona fides in a second—that comes close to that longevity or success is one that formed a year earlier than Matthews’s crew: Pearl Jam. And while no one’s going to deny that Eddie Vedder and Co. are a quintessential Seattle outfit, before this year’s Home Shows at Safeco Field they hadn’t played the city in five years.
Both are wildly successful music acts, the top 1 percent of 1 percent of dudes who sing songs for a living. But if you believe the stats on the internet—big grain of salt here—Eddie Vedder has a net worth of $100 million, but Dave Matthews is sitting on three times that.
For two decades Matthews has parked his jam band circus at the Gorge and he’s funded progressive causes. His photos hang next to platinum records from Death Cab for Cutie, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Nirvana at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline—the Northwest’s most hallowed recording spot.
When KEXP fundraised for their new Seattle Center studio in the mid 2010s, three big bands showed up with cash: “Macklemore and Ryan Lewis came through, Pearl Jam came through,” says longtime DJ and program director John Richards. “And Dave Matthews.” This in spite of the fact that while KEXP’s airwaves might blast “Thrift Shop” or “Jeremy,” the station doesn’t even play DMB.
There’s a Dave Matthews shaped hole in the public idea of the Seattle sound, and neither Matthews nor the Emerald City seems interested in changing that. Why do two wildly successful entities—a music man and a music city—have so little to do with each other?
When I tell Seattle music critic Charles R. Cross that I’m writing about the Dave Matthews Band, he immediately quips, “Why? Did you lose a bet with your editor?”
Sometime in the past two decades, the group’s ubiquity seeped into the national consciousness so thoroughly that the band and the man melded into one familiar entity, “Dave.” And to most, “Dave” became unbearably irritating.
The punchlines were mockery wrapped up in derision of cargo shorts and ultimate Frisbee. Basic, before “basic” was an insult. For a whole generation of late-stage Gen Xers, the DMB posters that papered their dorm rooms have become as embarrassing as that ’90s men’s haircut with floppy side bangs. Try it. Mention Dave Matthews Band anywhere in Seattle and look for the knowing cringe.
DMB made it so easy. There was the Day Dave Matthews Band Pooped on Chicago: On August 8, 2004, one of the band’s busses—that Dave wasn’t on at the time—emptied its sewage tank through the grated roadway of the Windy City’s Kinzie Street Bridge. Right on an open-air boat of sightseers on an architecture tour. The bus driver was hit with fines, but the metaphor of Poopgate was, well, easy pickings. (...)
He married and moved to Seattle where his wife studied holistic medicine, buying a house on an unremarkable block of Wallingford in 2001. Today the tiny blue Craftsman, even with its finished basement and artfully overgrown front garden, would barely qualify as a Seattle starter home. Dave still owns the property, valued at less than a million dollars in a city where that barely buys a dog house. Seattleites do double takes when Dave pops up at QFC or an Eastlake punk show, but he seems to crave the anonymity he found here. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but in 2012 he told critic Gene Stout, “For the most part, I feel comfortably middle class in Seattle.”
by Alison Williams, Seattle Met | Read more:
The first sound the band makes is…a hiccup.
And nearly all 20,000 break into woos and screams of appreciation, because that “Hhuunc!” from lead singer Dave Matthews is the first lyric of “Pig,” an old standby from the 28-year-old band. It gets a lot more intelligible after the first nonsense noises; a jam about enjoying the here and now. A plea to “don’t burn the day away” in case “a great wave should wash us all away.” You know, carpe diem and all that.
The audience has interpreted that edict as an embrace of all things comfortable, clad in plaid flannels or hoodies or plaid flannels layered over hoodies. One trio wears matching lime-green shirts printed with the Tommy Boy callout “Holy Schnikes!” and nonmatching baggy cargo shorts. Some raise $25 big plastic goblets of strawberry frosé. The air smells like weed. Of course it smells like weed.Of the thousands here, about half have stepped out of RVs and those big square tents you buy at Target parked on thousands of campsites spread on the festival grounds that fan out from the amphitheater.
Here, 150 miles east of Seattle, a 51-year-old man rocking the ultimate dad bod holds court, as he’s done for decades on summer stints that have become like annual tent revivals. What most of the crowd doesn’t consider is how deep Dave Matthews’s local ties run—that he lives in Seattle, enrolls his kids in Seattle schools. That Dave Matthews is Seattle’s biggest rock star.
No, really. It just depends a little on how you define “biggest.” And “rock,” and “star.” And, now that you mention it, “Seattle’s.”
Though the band formed in a Virginia college town back in 1991, Dave Matthews has been a Seattle resident since Bush II’s first term. His eponymous band has sold more than 33 million records, right behind Bob Dylan and Queen on lists of the best-selling recording artists of all time.
In 2014, Billboard marked them the seventh most successful touring band since 1990, noting their then-$777 million gross haul—it’s probably around a billion by now—outpaced Paul McCartney and Metallica. The Recording Industry Association of America ranks the Dave Matthews Band in their top 50, with gold and platinum stats similar to U2’s.
The only Seattle band—and we’ll get to DMB’s Emerald City bona fides in a second—that comes close to that longevity or success is one that formed a year earlier than Matthews’s crew: Pearl Jam. And while no one’s going to deny that Eddie Vedder and Co. are a quintessential Seattle outfit, before this year’s Home Shows at Safeco Field they hadn’t played the city in five years.
Both are wildly successful music acts, the top 1 percent of 1 percent of dudes who sing songs for a living. But if you believe the stats on the internet—big grain of salt here—Eddie Vedder has a net worth of $100 million, but Dave Matthews is sitting on three times that.
For two decades Matthews has parked his jam band circus at the Gorge and he’s funded progressive causes. His photos hang next to platinum records from Death Cab for Cutie, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Nirvana at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline—the Northwest’s most hallowed recording spot.
When KEXP fundraised for their new Seattle Center studio in the mid 2010s, three big bands showed up with cash: “Macklemore and Ryan Lewis came through, Pearl Jam came through,” says longtime DJ and program director John Richards. “And Dave Matthews.” This in spite of the fact that while KEXP’s airwaves might blast “Thrift Shop” or “Jeremy,” the station doesn’t even play DMB.
There’s a Dave Matthews shaped hole in the public idea of the Seattle sound, and neither Matthews nor the Emerald City seems interested in changing that. Why do two wildly successful entities—a music man and a music city—have so little to do with each other?
When I tell Seattle music critic Charles R. Cross that I’m writing about the Dave Matthews Band, he immediately quips, “Why? Did you lose a bet with your editor?”
Sometime in the past two decades, the group’s ubiquity seeped into the national consciousness so thoroughly that the band and the man melded into one familiar entity, “Dave.” And to most, “Dave” became unbearably irritating.
The punchlines were mockery wrapped up in derision of cargo shorts and ultimate Frisbee. Basic, before “basic” was an insult. For a whole generation of late-stage Gen Xers, the DMB posters that papered their dorm rooms have become as embarrassing as that ’90s men’s haircut with floppy side bangs. Try it. Mention Dave Matthews Band anywhere in Seattle and look for the knowing cringe.
DMB made it so easy. There was the Day Dave Matthews Band Pooped on Chicago: On August 8, 2004, one of the band’s busses—that Dave wasn’t on at the time—emptied its sewage tank through the grated roadway of the Windy City’s Kinzie Street Bridge. Right on an open-air boat of sightseers on an architecture tour. The bus driver was hit with fines, but the metaphor of Poopgate was, well, easy pickings. (...)
He married and moved to Seattle where his wife studied holistic medicine, buying a house on an unremarkable block of Wallingford in 2001. Today the tiny blue Craftsman, even with its finished basement and artfully overgrown front garden, would barely qualify as a Seattle starter home. Dave still owns the property, valued at less than a million dollars in a city where that barely buys a dog house. Seattleites do double takes when Dave pops up at QFC or an Eastlake punk show, but he seems to crave the anonymity he found here. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but in 2012 he told critic Gene Stout, “For the most part, I feel comfortably middle class in Seattle.”
by Alison Williams, Seattle Met | Read more:
Image: Taylor Hill/Getty via Longreads
