Even with a name sake singer who's unassuming as a street busker, Dave
Matthews Band is putting up some of the gaudiest numbers of the concert
season.  By summer's end, the quintet will likely play to more than 1.5
million fans in thirty-four cities, concluding sold-out stadiums in Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia.  In the Chicago area alone, Matthews is expected
to sell 170,000 tickets, including two straight sellouts of Solider Field,
the latter a feat accomplished only by the Stones, U2, Pink Floyd, and the
Grateful Dead.

That sort of success is nothing new for Matthews and band mates Carter
Beauford, Stefan Lessard, LeRoi Moore, and Boyd Tinsley, who before they even
released an album had built a large and loyal fan group by constantly touring
the East Coast from their home base in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Though the
band will return to the studio in the fall to record it's fourth studio
album, Matthews and Company are road warriors: In the last two years, they've
piled up more than $88 million in tour revenue.  Matthews took a break from a
recent sound check to discuss how they've done it.

You built a reputation as a live band by stretching your songs into jams.
How do you decided when jamming becomes wanking?
We've never had a conversation about it, but I know what you mean.  If there
are two major musical ventures a night, that's enough.  If Boyd plays one
ten-minute solo, that's enough.  We don't need to do that eight times.  But
at the same time, we all come up with sections and parts, and it would be a
shame to waste such spectacular musicians on playing songs just like I wrote
them.  I love these players and I love my songs, and my hope from the start was
that the two of them would work out together.  I don't tell them how to play
and they don't tell me how to write songs.  This band consists of five people
with really strong, often very different ideas about music.  The musical
style that comes out of us, or lack of a style that comes out of us, is the
result of a coincidence.

So how does that work?  When you stretch a song like "#41" to seventeen
minutes on the current tour, how does that new longer arrangement get worked
out?
It evolves into that because there is an audience that is pushing it.  We
don't plan it out.  The song changes night to night without us noticing,
almost.  We won't work on stuff like that at sound check, because it's
pointless to try and recreate the energy of playing it live in front of an
audience.  Other bands do work these things out in advance, but we've never
done that with any song we play live.

You make the band sound very democratic.  But the band is named after you, so
people assume that you're giving the orders.  How does it really work?
We're equal partners.  Maybe I'm the voice but it's never a case of dictating
parts, because none of this would have happened if we had some kind of grand
plan.  I just found this letter some producer wrote to me seven years ago,
and he had the grand plan.  He was talking about controlling this and doing
that, and how there was no way anyone would ever hear us unless we
became more professional.  The grand plan is, there is no grand plan.  I
don't want the responsibility of being the person that decides the fate of
five people that I love.

But getting five people pulling one direction all the time over ten years
can't be easy.
We have our differences, but we talk to each other.  We discuss things that
matter to the band with each other.  We aren't guys who grew up together, who
went to the same school together.  We were very different people from
different places when we met, and there was that recognition from the start.
Five distinct people were involved, and we either respect each other or we
don't have a band.

It all sounds very reasonable and mature.  How reasonable and mature are your
fans?  Do they ever stalk you?
If they do, they meet me and they realize I'm not exciting enough to stalk.
Occasionally people take photos of my mailbox, but nobody has lobbed a
dynamite-filled rabbit through my window.  Don't I sound boring?  If I die
before my time, it will not be on the altar of rock & roll.  It will be
because I slipped on a pencil and smashed my head on a fire hydrant.  I can
safely predict I will not be found lying face down in a puddle of my
groupies' vomit.

Your groupies, Dave?  Are they lining up outside the tour bus as we speak?
It would be hard for groupies to line up outside a bus that is moving
seventy-five miles an hour down the highway.  We don't wait backstage in our
portable lounge with our incense and cocaine, wearing our sunglasses.  We're
not Aerosmith.  We leave right after the  show and read a book.  The most
exciting thing that happens on our tour is what happens onstage.

How do you maintain that excitement when the stage is in a stadium and you're
the size of an ant to someone in the back row?
I don't want people sitting in the back going, "oh man, it sucks that we
can't see or can't hear as good as we could in a club."  We play big venues
because we can't tour anymore and play small venues.  We could play a small
club in a big city for a month and still not accommodate all the people that
want to see us.  But it's not impossible to turn a big place into a bedroom.
If we try to blow the roof off, or play louder, or play harder, you just
shrivel up or look smaller in a stadium.  If you play relaxed, as you do in a
club, you can fill the place up a little more.
 

Your ticket prices have been creeping toward fifty dollars.  How much is too
much?
I think tickets are too high.  I don't like that our tickets are as high as
they are, but I know our tickets are lower than a lot of bands that are
touring.  We're not extravagant, and we're not cheap.  I don't think it's
fair to charge more than fifty dollars.  People can afford it, the economy is
good.  But so is the bands' economy.  I don't think it's necessary for any
band to charge seventy-five dollars to see any rock concert.  I don't see
any expenses that would justify that.

It's not like bands are powerless.  How active should bands be in setting
limits on ticket prices and service fees?
It was a good stand for Pearl Jam to take.  But I think their fans wanted to
see them play.  In the end, I don't think it helped their career, and
Ticketmaster probably came off better than they did by a substantial amount.
Right now we have a deal where we keep some of the tickets to our shows and
sell them directly to our fans on our website (dmband.com).  We try to give
people an opportunity to buy tickets at face value, without service charges
as extreme as Ticketmaster's.  We can sell as many as half the tickets to our
show that way. At least, so I've been told.  I've never been on a computer
in my life.

You're kidding.
Ignorance is bliss.

You still allow fans to tape your shows.  But where do you stand on Napster?
I would be upset if someone put one of our studio CDs out on Napster.  I'm
sure Limp Bizkit would be upset if their first album was available on Napster
before they got a chance to put it in stores.  But I've got a great job, and
there are a lot of bigger problems in the world than whether Napster succeeds
or fails.  I'm sure Napster is hurting our sales.  But at the same time,
there is really not a lot to be done about it.  I don't think there is a
malice coming out of Napster.  We allowed people to tape all our concerts
from the beginning, and the record company questioned us about allowing that.
But my thinking was that it only makes people want to buy more and increases
the devotion of people who are going to listen to us.

When a band's records sell in the millions and the sold-out shows just keep getting bigger, members can get distracted by lots of things.

But Dave Matthews Band - Matthews, Carter Beauford (drums), Stefan Lessard (bass), LeRoi Moore (saxophone, flute, clarinet) and Boyd Tinsley (violin) - strives to keep it real. Last year, DMB grossed about $46 million from touring ...and the guys still travel in one bus.

"If my fiance or Carter's wife or a girlfriend comes out, then we might grab our own bus for a week, as much for our own privacy - which is a thrill - as to not bug anyone else in the band."

"But when we have no romance or family involved, then it's just us on the band bus. I can't imagine not being with everyone. It's definitely one of the places where we can have conferences without needing to say, "Let's have a conference," where we can hammer out our success and our failures with each other."

From small gigs to stadiums; Six short years ago, Dave Matthews Band was just another rock group in waiting, driving a station wagon to gigs at beach clubs, fraternity parties and small venues around Virginia.  Now DMB has kicked off the biggest tour of the summer, playing 54 dates in 34 major markets..

"Although I've been able to sit and watch this beautiful thing, I can't take credit for the presentation - I can only take credit for being an excuse for the presentation," Matthews says. "I've got to give credit out to all our crew. The whole sound and light rig, the screens - they really have gone beyond my wildest dreams."

Indeed, the industry is suffering a great need for a rock superstar act able to maintain full-blown stadium tours, and Dave Matthews Band has learned to adapt its catchy, jazz-folk fusion to a stadium's expanse.

"You get more comfortable with different situations. Going from clubs to stadiums was pretty intimidating. So it just carries on," Matthews says.

"Whether it's time or the size of the venue, you have to keep a certain amount of focus, just trying to get the music out thoroughly to an audience. There's no point at which we can arrive and then say, 'Well, now we're here, so we can now play any stadium anywhere and everything will be fine.' Because you never get here - as soon as you're there, you're gone."

"Just because we played stadium's last year doesn't mean that now it doesn't matter, or now we can rest. This year we don't have a new album, so we have to face different challenges of somehow turning people on that come to watch the show. And so far we've succeeded in that.

"We've been trying to mix in a lot of much older stuff and change the shows a lot more, not repeat ourselves too much." The group generally plays for upward of two hours, exploring diverse sounds from relaxed, flexible grooves along the way. Among the new songs the band is previewing live are the jammy "Bartender," "Diggin' A Ditch," "Sweet Up & Down" and "Grey Street."

Immediately following the summer tour, Dave Matthews Band will finish up its fourth studio album, which will likely come out in November. The group is recording at a studio it built last year in its hometown of Charlottesville, Va.

"We had the better part of an album done, but now that we've given ourselves a little more time to get it out, the better part of an album could end up not being the better part of what ends up on it. So far, we feel really good about what's there. There's some strong material - I think. I'm not a real good judge.

"Until we send it to the presses, I don't think we should say, 'This is what we have, and that's it, and now we've got to work on this only.' Then the whole creative process will get stifled. You never know - if we went back in the studio and decided we were sick of one of the songs, or sick of all of them, then we should be able to change them."

Is there big pressure on Dave Matthews Band to rise to the occasion of its extraordinary success?
"There's always going to be that. It's just whether or not we take it seriously," Matthews says. "I feel we have a good relationship with people at our record company. I don't always think things go as well as they can.

"It can work in both directions. Hopefully there's not too much of either - us resting on our laurels and putting out whatever we want and not thinking about the public, and on their part saying 'They've done well, so let's just put it out and see what it does.'" Matthews and his management recently launched a label, ATO Records (According To Our Records), with a mission of seeking out artists who share DMB's commitment to nurturing their following via touring. The first signing is David Gray - ATO released his "White Ladder" album in March.

Matthews says he has admired Gray since 1993, when he happened upon a copy of Gray's first recording, "A Century Ends."

"There are very few situations like David's - he's exploding all over the world, but he's not exploding here yet. Hopefully, if we carry on working, he will," Matthews says. "The idea is to find talents that are somewhat neglected in the American industry. We're obviously not going to be able to find all of them, but what little we can do ... "