The Decline of Dave Matthews Band: a Quiet Tragedy

Dave Matthews Band seemed to be an unparalleled creative musical force from the mid 90’s through the millennium. However, in recent years, their musical energies appear to have congealed into a gelatinous mass of complacency. Their current success and fandom, mine included, may arise more from wishful thinking that the band may return to its glory days than from a genuine sharing in the enjoyment of their contemporary performance cycle. It is remarkable that a band that has not produced a memorable set of songs in seven years can still find themselves a top concert draw and find it acceptable to release a handful of that year’s sometimes-sloppy live shows as albums. As we approach the ten-year anniversary of BTCS’s release (coming up in a matter of months), I think it is time we assess DMB’s slow decline from a do-no-wrong juggernaut to a tired machine that is happy to provide the status quo while their fans humor them, pretending to be excited to the extent they used to be. I am just as guilty as anyone in this, which is why I decided to write this essay. I also feel I should draw a distinction: I am not complaining because I feel “entitled” to better product from the band (that sensibility is unfair to the band and just plain wrong); I am rather stating that it is a shame that a band with so much promise seems to have systematically thrown themselves into a pattern of perpetually falling short over the past several years.

Dave Matthews Band instantly became my favorite band the moment I heard “What Would You Say” on the radio March 12, 1995. I can remember that night like it was yesterday. I am now a professional musician and writer living in Nashville, and I can trace most of what I do musically, and much of what I do literally, back to that singular moment – I took up percussion because of Carter, guitar and songwriting because of Dave, and harmonica because of John Popper. I became interested in poetry and analysis of the written word from Dave’s layered early lyrics. Immediately I picked up UTTAD and mail-ordered Recently and R2T as soon as I could – I even ordered a DMB “Thermal” Fire-Dancer shirt and wore it nearly every day. After 12 years and dozens of wash cycles, it strangely still smells like patchouli from the old Bama Rags warehouse. [Note: I give my DMB fan credentials not for “I’ve been a fan longer than you”- type snobbery, but rather to show that I have been in this for the long haul, and DMB was of utmost importance to me in my formative years. Needless to say, I do not critique artists that were so vital to me – both developmentally and nostalgically – lightly.]

Some would argue that I’ve never been as big of a fan as some – I’ve only ever been to three (yes, only three) live DMB shows (growing up in North Dakota, it wasn’t exactly an easy task to make it out to concerts), and I’ve never been a member of the Warehouse (to this day, my lack of genuine Warehouse bonus discs as the only major holes in my DMB collection really sticks in my craw). But true fandom is not expressed in those statistics – it is what beats in your heart, and I cannot express how important DMB was to me for several years in my youth. I remember seeing the video for “Too Much” on MTV’s Buzz Bin feature on April 20, 1996, and then seeing them later that night on SNL doing “Too Much” and “So Much to Say.” I was beside myself. At 10 A.M. the next morning, I called Sam Goody to see if they had Crash. It wouldn’t be in until April 30. Those would be the longest 10 days of my life. But then the day finally came – buying that CD, listening to “#41” on repeat for over an hour, poring over every detail of the book insert and committing it to memory – it was like a dream. It couldn’t get any better.

From approximately 1995-1998, it looked like I was the only one in Bismarck who had ever heard of Dave Matthews Band, despite media buzz and even (*GASP!*) radio play. I desperately wanted to share this great music with everyone – this could be my contribution to Bismarck youth culture! Sadly, my lack of popularity and tact probably hurt the cause, and the fact that several peers whom I despised came around to liking DMB anyway, in spite of my gentle pushing, was a bitter pill for me to swallow, circa 1999-2000. But there were a small number of people with whom I could bond over DMB – several of my friends were drummers who were similarly drawn to Carter’s drum style. Some of these guys are still my best friends today.

Live at Red Rocks was a revelation. I had seen them do live songs on TV broadcasts, but hearing an entire show was a wholly different experience. I could see myself there – going back in time to 1995 and traveling to Colorado to see the show, singing the words to the Crash songs that Dave himself didn’t even know yet, screaming the loudest during Carter’s “#36” solo, and predicting the setlist to everyone around me. This was more than merely my favorite band – this was a band for history.

BTCS was more of a slow-burner for me. I liked it immediately, but too many things were different for me to love it in the way I loved Crash and UTTAD right away. Alanis Morissette? Gospel singers? Mini-song segues? Banjo? A string quartet? Dave's Vincent Price voice? It was a lot for a young fan to take in. Eventually, I came around to see how the songwriting, production, arrangements, drum sounds, song order, placement of segues, etc., were all perfectly planned out and executed. And of course, now I recognize it as their creative apex, one that may have effectively destroyed the band we know and love.

Luther College and Listener Supported were welcome additions to our collections, giving fans, pre-file sharing, a more complete picture of the band than we had previously if we weren’t good tape traders (and I wasn’t much of a trader at all). This band was nothing if not perfect – every release was different and welcome, every note pristine, every setlist seemingly handed down from the Heavens themselves.

Fast forward a few years. I remember the fever-pitch excitement in the online communities (I especially remember the old dmbml board – man, was that a fun and mean set of DMB fans) when the Lillywhite Sessions surfaced. They were scandalous (we knew we shouldn’t be listening to these unauthorized recordings) yet relief-inducing (we were so glad to hear them), and they turned every DMB fan into a music critic, comparing and contrasting the sessions with Everyday. Conclusions were nearly unanimous.

I had been torn on Everyday when it came out in February 2001. It wasn’t a bad album per se, but looking back, it certainly does mark the end of the innocence for DMB fans. The first show I had seen was the Mile High Stadium show in 2000 – “Grey Street,” “Grace Is Gone,” “Bartender” – in my mind, this set of songs had the opportunity to trump BTCS. But we all know sort-of what happened – the band was getting tense, Lillywhite was working them too hard, and the songs gave them a bad taste in their mouths. Everyday was then the manifestation of what can happen when a band has more pressure than they can handle. The Lillywhite Sessions, if finished properly, could have been a stunning achievement that maybe would have set the band on a course to be a genuinely legendary record-making and songwriting alliance for the ages. Everyday, in stark contrast, was a scared band retreating into what they know could easily make a record – shorter songs, pop production, happier themes, slick rhythms. It was marketed as the record of a band finding new inspiration and focus, but really it was a different band, tired and frightened – probably still tense that the LWS didn’t work out (for whatever reason) but unsure of the streamlined new direction.

I had a teacher who always spoke the loudest if he was unsure of what he was saying; RCA and DMB pushed Everyday harder than they’ve pushed any other DMB album. Longtime fans responded with everything from shrugs and head-scratches to outright renouncing of the band. I think that period was the great equalizer; those fans that stuck around, hoping that Everyday was not a signal of the band completely losing their energy, are the ones that are still around today, still going to the forums daily and buying every volume in the Live Trax series – I am among that group, although I am not particularly proud of it. In due time, I would be able to recognize Everyday as a perfectly solid album – “Everyday” and “What You Are” have become semi-legitimate DMB classics, “Dreams of Our Fathers” a far-more effective attempt at rap- and R&B-influenced songwriting than anything on Stand Up, “So Right” a could-have-been classic (if presented differently), and “Sleep to Dream Her” a beautiful song that combines advanced chromatic musical theory in the chord structure (whether Dave knows it or not) with a love lyric equally comforting and devastating, despite the fact that it’s never received a proper live treatment. But time has shown Everyday to be a fair entry in the DMB discography only in distant retrospect. At the time, the decision to put the kibosh on LWS and give the green light to Everyday was, in a word, perplexing.

I hesitate to call the 2001 tour bad, since I did not see a show that year. The recordings I heard were of a band stripped of its confidence, trying to fit their grassroots sensibilities into big-stadium pomp and swagger. Napster and the LWS came and went. Busted Stuff was DMB trying to save face – fans wanted Ballard out and the LWS songs back in. Rather than trying to push forward creatively, the band sheepishly retreated and did a mostly-poor job of giving some then-two-year-old songs the studio treatment. Boyd is audibly out-of-tune on “Raven” (I defy you to try to find an out-of-tune moment in a completed Lillywhite album or Ballard’s Everyday), Dave unapologetically messes up lyrics in “Bartender” (to the point where the second chorus doesn’t even make logical sense), and the “adventurous new things” they were trying in the studio amounted to be nothing – Stefan playing dobro (kind of) and keyboard (not really)? It seemed very coldly calculated, yet very lazy at the same time. “Grey Street” certainly benefited from a revisit, but “Grace Is Gone” was stripped of its dramatic balladry, and “Big Eyed Fish” came off as an awkward “Bartender” intro. There was no magic, no fire – the band had flat-out wasted a golden opportunity.

Fast forward more. The inundation of live album releases began in earnest. Dave did a mostly-OK solo album that simply made me wonder why he didn’t record the songs with DMB. Boyd did a merely-OK solo album that can best be described as amateurish. The Musictoday promotional machine went into overdrive – exclusive bonus discs packaged with new releases and a confusing hierarchy system dictating which fans are important enough to get certain bonus tracks. Perhaps the MOST exciting inclusion on these cool-fans-only discs was on the first Warehouse 8 – a 40-second tease of “Blue Water.” People were stoked. An official “Blue Water” release! But was this really something to get excited about? The song, although a minimalist DMB classic, is two chords! The band could easily play it in full without breaking a sweat, to the delight of thousands of fans. But rather than even attempting such celebrations of their talent, history, fan appreciation, and creative capability, 40 seconds is all the band gave us to be excited about.

Times got harder for the DMB completist. The 6-disc Gorge boxed set was an embarrassment – Dave’s voice was gone, the mix was awful, and the flimsy packaging was most likely dented when it arrived. Plus, the DVD didn’t come with the complete set, so fans like me had to buy both the retail version and the site exclusive to get it all. Was the DVD worth it? I can’t even remember.

The band now seems obsessed with making their own shows available. Somewhere between the every-released-show-is-an-important-document philosophy of the Dick’s Picks and Live Phish series and the only-buy-this-if-you-were-at-the-show policy of Pearl Jam’s live album series lies DMB Live Trax. Rather than using this web-exclusive series as a vehicle for truly rare stuff – uncirculating early shows, studio outtakes, Dave & Tim releases, etc., the releases seem to alternate between great but all-too-obvious choices (Volume 1) and weak, inessential, overblown boxed sets a la The Gorge (Volumes 6 and 9). Don’t even get me started on The Complete Weekend on the Rocks. I’m sure I’m missing something, but I shelled out 70 bucks for “Time of the Season,” “Butterfly,” and several dozen songs performed better on other albums.

There exists the notion that DMB needs to release as many live shows as they can. Is the live concert experience amazing? Yes. But musically, are they that different? No. DMB does not have that many songs in their repertoire. I mean, more than Matchbox Twenty, definitely, but far fewer than their number of live releases would suggest. DMB’s idea of changing a song’s arrangement usually involves giving the solo to someone else (“Jimi Thing,” “#41”) or extending a riff for ten-plus minutes (“American Baby Intro,” “The Dreaming Tree”) with the only “build” to speak of involving Carter playing more notes, louder and faster, and the band following suit. This rarely actually works. They simply do not have the ability that the Allmans or the Grateful Dead had to build a minimal musical idea into a spontaneous composition by sheer group will. It could happen in the band’s early days, when Dave wrote unconventional guitar parts that borrowed from everything from prog rock to world music, but the hypnotizing beauty of “Proudest Monkey” was the simplest and most-guilty-of-noodling they got ten years ago. Simply put, “American Baby Intro” is not a song.

Then comes the issue of Dave’s songwriting. Has he written a truly great song since 2001? “Stay or Leave” comes closest, and that gets relegated to Dave’s side project shows. There have been sparks of greatness here and there – the 2004 songs were decent but not brilliant, but they were mostly scrapped for the un-thought-out shitfest that was Stand Up. For the record, I do not blame Batson for how awful that album was. He is a great producer with a keen compositional sense, good ear, and talented ability to use sonic space in interesting ways. His only mistake was in not challenging the band (and how could he? Although he says he was intimately familiar with BTCS in interviews, it is simply not plausible that he knows the band’s catalogue like the rest of us). Dave’s lyrics on Stand Up were either laughably sloppy or beleagueredly forced. Musically, the songs rarely ventured out of two-riff territory. The band claimed they had found a new creative focus or something – a marketing attempt that sounded eerily familiar to the Everyday PR maelstrom. It seems like part of the band’s policy is now to make fans like their music by suggesting that it’s good music, rather than by actually creating good, exciting material.

The 2006 songs had flashes of brilliance too – the jam at the end of “Break Free” is nothing short of exhilarating, and “The Idea of You” could become a borderline classic. But the band has not showed a lot of confidence in these songs – they will most likely abandon them on their next studio album in favor of “Cornbread” and “#27,” both boring, interchangeable blues rockers. “Eh Hee” is at least interesting and different, but it’s not a classic song. Dave throws in “Fuck” in a way that does not enhance the song one bit – that is classic amateur songwriting.

If we contrast the band’s output now with the “classic era,” 1995-2000, we find newish things that are listenable at best and embarrassing at worst. As a professional musician and songwriter, I find myself having to qualify and apologize when I tell my peers that I like DMB. I used to be proud of the adventurous, genre-bending iconoclasts; I now am slightly ashamed of the band that throws smoke in mirrors to hide the fact that they were just not up to the challenge post-BTCS.

I sit here today listening to Live at Piedmont Park, its bonus disc, and Live Trax Vol. 10, all of which I received in the mail a week ago. With a few reasonable exceptions, my collection is complete. Have the last 13 or so live releases been essential? Intermittently, but mostly no. As a whole, I’m glad I have them. Why? I don’t know. I don’t really sit down and listen to them. The possibility that there is some piece of each live release that I need eats at me when I get those e-mail announcements, until I finally get out my credit card and pre-order. Inevitably, I will find two or three performances on each live album that I really enjoy, but that does not change the fact that this is a very different band from ten years ago. There is a great possibility that the next studio record will be great, but I do not find that to be very believable. Will I buy it? Of course. I’ll pre-order it right away so I can get the bonus disc with yet another live “Jimi Thing” on it. Oh, and the “making-of” DVD, where they insist to us how essential and exciting the new songs are. I’ll need to have that.

It breaks my heart to say it, but DMB has been dying a slow death for nearly ten years. I call this a quiet tragedy – because there’s been no sudden event to trigger the end of their great period, no one ever had the opportunity to sing a swan song or recite an elegy. It is tragic nonetheless, and I hope that the sheer brilliance of their first three albums will be enough to preserve them for the ages. They probably have a few more years in them, and then a proper goodbye. Nothing would make me happier than a great studio record and a solid set of songs. Here’s to hope. I don’t want to have to lie in my grave, dreaming of things that might have been.

December 20, 2007