Dave Matthews Band: An Appreciation

Last weekend, I saw my 43rd and 44th Dave Matthews Band concerts. This pair of shows happened at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), just 30 minutes north of where I live. SPAC is considered by many DMB fans to be one of the “Big Three” venues, along with Alpine Valley in Wisconsin and The Gorge in Washington state, and I’ve been lucky to have seen the band’s shows at SPAC every year since 2006, when I first saw them play live (6/16/06 to be exact). After their 2020 tour was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, fans (myself included) were extra hyped for the 2021 tour. As expected, the band did not disappoint. Both set lists were incredible, mostly featuring songs from the Leroi Moore days (their original saxophonist who died in 2008 after an ATV accident). My friends, with whom I’ve tailgated every year since 2008, snuck me into the pit with them on night 1, and we all sat next to each other in the balcony on night 2, making the experience one of communal enjoyment. (And as for the “tailgating”, that’s not really the right word. These are guys 6-10 years old than me who, every year, bring a packed U-Haul into the adjacent state park, including a full-size propane grill. Two days worth of food, drinks, lawn games, and various posters and bric-à-brac accumulated over the years, ultimately becoming part of the annual experience.) But it wasn’t the pre-show party that made this weekend more memorable than the others, nor was it the rail-hopping, nor hearing one of the rare songs that all long-time DMB fans hope for (although “Christmas Song” was pretty amazing). To understand what happened to me on Saturday night, up there in the balcony, you have to go back to 2002.

I was on the precipice of turning twelve years old when Pat, my neighbor across the street, asked my mother if I would be interested in having her son’s old guitar. He’d long since moved out on his own, and the guitar was only collecting dust in her house. At the time she proposed this question to my mother, my longtime friend, Katrina, had herself recently picked up the guitar and was taking lessons (this, after Michelle Branch’s debut album had been released, of which she was enamored). Katrina and I have been friends since birth (our mothers went to college together and subsequently opened their own preschool, which they operated together for over twenty years), and in 2002, we had the kind of friendship where, because she was a year older than me, I wanted to be like my cool older friend. So I accepted the guitar. It was around the same time that I’d begun to lose interest in my first instrument, the viola, which I’d started playing at 8 years old. My orchestra teacher wasn’t very good, and anyway I was feeling something bubbling inside of me, the urge to more seriously write songs. (I’d been writing lyrics since I was 5. My first song was called “Wave Ya Hand”, and I wrote it on printer paper with an orange marker.) The viola wasn’t going to cut it for that. (Maybe if I’d heard of Andrew Bird sooner, but that’s not what this story is about.) Something else, however, more serendipitous and more important had also just happened that year: Dave Matthews Band released their fifth studio album, Busted Stuff, on July 16.

My relationship with Dave Matthews Band pre-Busted stuff was at first tenuous, then obsessive. The first song I’d ever heard by them was “Crash Into Me” when it played on VH1. (This is not the time, but let’s imagine the conversation we could have about the era of music video television.) I was terrified of the video, actually scared to watch it, though there’s nothing inherently frightening about it. Sure, I was an anxious 6 years old, but still, nothing should have made me fearful of this band and its lead singer making weird faces. I tired to watch every time it came on, but I couldn’t. I was turned off to all their music after that. That was until Everyday, DMB’s fourth studio release in 2001. Its third single, “Everyday” was everywhere on pop radio, and its music video featured Judah Friedlander walking around Charlottesville, VA and NYC giving out hugs. You couldn’t escape the song, and I didn’t want to. I was hooked in that way you can’t describe being hooked by a kind of cheesy pop song. But the thing was…it wasn’t a cheesy pop song. Its main guitar riff was simple, but interesting, and unobscured by synths or electric guitars (unusual for the time), the chorus featured violin, the lyrics were full of imagery, and and its bridge had this sort of modulation from the main key of C to D-flat and effortlessly back and forth while a saxophone wailed in the background. And this man’s voice. This was a voice that captured my attention in a way it hadn’t on “Crash Into Me”. That was wispy and seductive. This was playful, confident, inviting...joyous. I bought the album immediately. It was exactly what 12-year-old Justin needed. Here was a voice that didn’t sound like anything else on the radio (yes, yes, I know the Eddie Vedder comparison, but do they really sound alike?) singing about so many things. It wasn’t an album of sensual mid-tempo tracks or upbeat party songs like those I’d come to expect from the popular artists of the day. The opening track is a rocking riff on having done something wrong. What did Dave do wrong? Who can say? All we know is that he did it. In typical Dave fashion, he obfuscates what he’s singing about with metaphors and deviations. The “love” songs on the album all use some lyric conceit to talk about love and sex: fucking as the apocalypse hits, fucking after arguing, fucking while driving, fucking in one’s dreams. All right, Dave’s kind of a dirty guy. But unlike so much of the popular music of 2001, Dave almost never came out and said, to quote a star lost too soon, “Stroke it for me, stroke it for me, stroke it for me, stroke it for me.” (No disrespect to Aaliyah, of course; I loved her in 2001, and “Rock The Boat” is an untouchable R&B classic.) And then there were other songs like “Dreams Of Our Fathers”, “If I Had It All”, “What You Are”, and “Mother Father” which tackled larger, more global, existential themes. (That’s not to say other artists weren’t doing the same, but I wasn’t listening to those artists in 2002.) For a boy who had been trying to write lyrics and was just starting to make music, Everyday was a revelation. It was permission to be different. But Everyday felt unattainable. Though I listened to the record nearly every day (really no pun intended), I couldn’t explore the songs musically the way I think subconsciously I wanted to. I didn’t play an instrument that allowed me to dive into the chord and rhythmic structures. But that’s exactly what happened with Busted Stuff.

Busted Stuff was released just a few months before I first wrapped by arms around my 1982 Carlos Model 207K guitar. A cheap, but relatively high quality acoustic guitar from Korea, this instrument quickly became my entire world. My days fell into a pretty simple routine: wake up, go to school, come home, play guitar until my fingers hurt, dinner, homework, guitar again, sleep. As soon as I could play a few chords, I started writing songs. “Lynn, the cracksmoking bus driver” was the first song I ever wrote on guitar after waiting in front of Mont Pleasant Middle School with my friend, Cameron, complaining in the bitter cold of winter that our bus driver must be on crack to make us wait this long for her. Other comedic songs soon followed, along with more serious ones about things like being not-yet-a-teenager, being alone, imagining what being in a relationship feels like, being more alone, and even a song that just lists objects in my bedroom before soaring into a bridge about not having any autonomy in my life. But when I wasn’t working on my own material, I was learning how to play Busted Stuff; more specifically, “Grey Street”.

When I think about all the things I want a DMB song to be, “Grey Street” checks all the boxes. Cool guitar: ✓ (12-string). Weirdly fingered guitar riff: ✓. Abstract storyline: ✓. Absolute monster of a chorus: ✓. Saxophone solo: ✓. As great as the album version is, any live version is infinitely better. (And I got to hear it at that first live show in 2006.) It was, by far, my favorite song on the album. Busted Stuff, in my opinion, is far more complex musically than Everyday. That’s not ranking of the albums, just an observation. My tiny hands (remember, I was 12; my hands are huge now) couldn’t even imagine playing “Captain” or “You Never Know”, and forget “Grace Is Gone” (fingerpicking? gtfo). “Grey Street” seemed like just enough of a stretch, though, physically and talent-wise. And I worked at that song every freaking day. YouTube wasn’t a thing, so I had no idea how he was strumming only two of six strings without hitting any of the others. And how were those chord changes so smooth? They’re not even chords, they’re…something else. (They’re called dyads; I know that now. Not the point. (One more parenthetical: I have a bachelor’s degree in music theory and still have a hard time giving names to half the shit Dave does on guitar. They’re just Dave’s riffs.)) Watch this clip, and you’ll see what I’m talking about; really watch his fingers. I couldn’t do any of it. I had to resort to plucking the low-E and G strings with my thumb and middle finger. And when it came time for the chorus, I would use my index finger to strum and hard as I could until I could feel the skin just about to burst open. It was all I could do. But I felt compelled to play this song, and that’s how I did it until nearly four years later when I was able to use a pick to play it correctly, and even still it wasn’t until another 3 or 4 years later when I got his left hand fingering exactly right. This is the “obsessive” part of my relationship with DMB I mentioned earlier. I tried taking guitar lessons in 2002/2003, but I hated them. I quit after a few months. In their place, I studied the Dave Matthews Band; Dave was my teacher now. Between 2002 and 2009, I learned nearly every song from every album going back to 1993. Then I learned their unreleased material. I learned Dave’s solo songs too. I turned myself into the protégé Dave didn’t know he had. I started singing like Dave too. Okay, maybe not as twangy, but you could hear it. My high school bandmates could hear it too and they told me to stop. To this day, there are still some vowels where you can clearly hear the influence. Old habits die hard.

I say all this not to give you a history of my development as a musician, but rather to tell you about my development as a person. Growing up was hard. My home life sucked a lot of the time. My relationships with my father and step-father were incredibly traumatic. I’ve had depression and anxiety since I can remember. There are other traumas I don’t need to get into here. I felt completely isolated for the majority of middle and high school, despite outwardly portraying someone who had his shit together. Playing music was (and this is true, despite it sounding like an adolescent exaggeration) my only relief. Dave became my musical father figure. I taught myself to play the guitar really really well by learning Dave Matthews Band songs, and in the process, I gave myself an out. Toward the end of high school, it became clear that I could do this for a living. When I was 16, I started playing at the Union Inn, a local bar, on Tuesday nights (wing night; can you believe back then it was 10¢/wing?). I had the college kids and grown adults eating out of the palm of my hand. And what songs were killing the most? DMB. Screaming. These people were screeeeeaming in the bar when I would sing “Grey Street”. Then they would start yelling out requests: “Jimi Thing”, “Crash Into Me”, “Two Step”, “Ants Marching”, “Satellite”. And I could play all of them. There were never too many deep dives, but you better believe I was ready just in case. Of all the songs, though, “Grey Street” was the one that got everyone the most wound up. Sometimes I couldn’t even hear myself sing (I didn’t have a monitor back then) over the “YEEAAAAAHHHHH!”s and “WOOOOOOOOO!”s of the drunken patrons. I didn’t feel as alone on those nights. I felt, in a strange way, loved by those people, loved for reasons that I manifested. Not a familial kind of love where your parents love you because you’re their kid, or even in a friendship way where you’re all just stuck together for 13 years so you better make some friends. No, I taught myself to play guitar, I taught myself to sing, and I taught myself not to be scared anymore of what people thought of me because now I knew what they thought, and it was that they loved me, even if it was only for a few hours on a weeknight.

The thing you have to know about the history of “Grey Street” is that after December 16, 2002, they stopped playing the third verse live. It’s unclear why. When I heard the song live for the first time in ’06, I didn’t even notice he didn’t sing it because I was so excited just to be hearing the song at all. In fact, I don’t think it was until several years later that I noticed. And it’s not just me who was disappointed about that. It turns out that their entire fanbase missed, no, longed for this verse. Every year I’ve seen them perform (and it has been every year since ’06), I’ve held my breath during the second chorus, hoping they won’t go into the final jam, and instead break out that third verse. Well, choruses have come and choruses have gone, and every year I’d been let down, but nonetheless grateful to be fortunate enough to be in the presence of the band yet again. But on April 14, 2020, during a pandemic livestream benefit for José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, Dave did sing the third verse. It was unceremonious. Speculation is that because Dave was looking just offscreen at the lyrics, his paper must have included the third verse, and so he sang it. Whether or not it was intentional, I didn’t care, and neither did anyone else. The internet was a-buzzing: AntsMarching, DMBAlmanac, DMBnews, all the major DMB sites made note of the verse’s inclusion. (That’s how I found out about it; I hadn’t watched the broadcast live, but immediately raced to YouTube to see it for myself.) Suddenly, I had hope. At the 2021 tour opener, they played “Grey Street” and sang all 3 verses. And they kept doing it show after show. Then, just last weekend, on September 18, 2021, as I sat in the balcony of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, holding my breath through the end of the second chorus, I heard it: “There’s a stranger sleeps outside her door…”

And I started to cry.

Right through the verse.

Weeping into the final chorus.
There’s an emptiness inside her
The last two decades of my life washed over me:
And she’d do anything to fill it in
Twelve years old, in the computer room of our house, plucking the strings until my fingers bled, strumming along to “Grey Street” the best I could;
And though it's red blood bleeding from her now
diving deeper into my own world full of music; escaping the arguments, the verbal outbursts several rooms away, the shuffling back and forth between parents’ houses;
Felt like cold blue ice in her heart
not having the autonomy I wanted in my life until I started playing my own shows, not ever needing a full-time job because I could support myself with the talents that emanated from my own body;
She feels like kicking out all the windows
belting out song after song for three, four, five, six hours at a time to make enough money to be able to say with confidence, “No, Dad, I can’t see you this weekend, I have a gig”;
And setting fire to this life
first apartment, second apartment, third apartment;
She would change everything about her
girlfriend and girlfriend and girlfriend gone, writing to cope;
Using colors bold and bright
making sure not to harm myself too much because I was convinced that there was always more work to do: another song to write, another chance given for people to love me;
But all the colors mix together
always knowing that no matter what happens, I have my guitar, my voice, my songs,
To grey
and this band.