From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Processing The String Cheese Incident

This veteran jam band gets off the bus, dips into the studio and adds a little techno flavor to its recipe.

by Larry Getlen

March 9 2005

Life in a jam band is one sweet deal if you play it right, and the guys in The String Cheese Incident know how to get the most out of their time on the road. Ski buffs from Boulder, Colo., the band members recently announced the ultimate mingling of business and pleasure, a tour of Western ski towns called, cheekily enough, the Spring Ski Incidents, which will take place following the Langerado Music Festival.

"We've always been into being outdoors, and skiing is something we've been doing for a long time in Colorado," keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth says. "When we started, we played for lift tickets at the small base of the mountain. Skiing's important to us, so we wanted to go back to our roots here in Colorado, keep something close to home and once again make it fun."

This tour is a variation on the Winter Carnival, an event the band has held in past years for which their friends came out for several days of jamming. Playing along with String Cheese will be Dr. John and DJ Peretz, better-known as Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell, and for several of the shows, the group will perform at the base of a mountain. But when a band has toured as extensively as The String Cheese Incident has, it does what it can to liven things up.

After String Cheese released its latest studio album, 2003's Untying the Not, 2004 was a touring year for the band, and a relatively quiet one at that, with only about 100 dates on the road. By comparison, its early days back in the mid-'90s saw it on the road for about 280 shows a year. And to bring a piece of home along with them, the bandmates toured the country in a ski bus. "That's more touring than we really wanted," Hollingsworth admits. "Around the end of '96, '97, we really started to hit the East Coast hard. We got an old ski-town bus, one of those buses that pick you up at the bottom of the lift, and put bunks in it and just started traveling around the country forever. We had a funnel, and we wouldn't even stop to pee. We just peed in the funnel, and the funnel would go out to the highway."

Now, six albums and 11 years into their career, the band members can afford a bus with an actual toilet and no longer need to work incessantly. Plus, they can enjoy their time on the road a bit more. While so many acts recount stories of blasting through Europe and Asia and seeing nothing but concert halls and hotel rooms, Hollingsworth and his bandmates -- mandolinist Michael Kang, guitarist Bill Nershi, bassist Keith Moseley and drummer Michael Travis -- take their sweet time and enjoy the local pleasures.

Last year's tour, for example, saw them touch down in New Zealand and Australia. "We played with our friends in Spearhead at a blues festival," Hollingsworth recalls, "and went to Great Barrier Reef to snorkel and see sharks and manta rays." The members of String Cheese see touring as an experience, not just a series of shows. "It's great to go somewhere and perform but also to have an experience outside the U.S.," he adds. "We all live in Colorado, so we're big into the outdoors. Anytime we can get out and be adventurous, we will be."

Adventurous is a key word for most jam bands, especially in their music, and songs often begin with no ending in sight. So the band's most recent CD, Untying the Not, was a departure, as it was the group's first fully studio-oriented album. For the recording, String Cheese used the studio as a tool and created unique versions of songs, as opposed to just replicating their live vibe on tape.

To facilitate this, the band made an odd choice for producer, former Killing Joke bassist Youth. A veteran behind the boards, Youth had worked with pop-oriented acts such as Crowded House, The Verve and the ambient house masters of The Orb. The String Cheese Incident was a departure for him. Hollingsworth seems to have mixed feelings about the result.

On the plus side, working in a pure studio environment forced the band members to listen to one another in a different way. "What I liked about that studio experience is that we learned how to do more listening to each other as a band," Hollingsworth explains. "As an improv band, we always listen to each other, but the producer made us listen to each other in a different way, like, 'That's a cool transition; we hadn't thought about that before.' It put us in a new direction as well, sent us a little more techno, which made it much more challenging to play the songs live."

When all is said and done, though, Hollingsworth notes that whether due to the studio environment or the choice of Youth as producer, the album wound up sounding less like his idea of the band than any of their previous work. "I got my wife an iPod for her birthday, and I hadn't listened to Untying the Not in a really long time," he says. "I put it on and thought, 'This is a really good album.' I think it's one of the best albums we've ever done, actually, but it's less String Cheese, which for me is intriguing. It's kind of out of the box from a lot of what the jam bands were doing. It was something new. The last album, … there were layers of guitars, very European-type rock anthems. This next one will be less pretentious, I'd say."

Malcolm Burn, a Daniel Lanois protégé who has also worked with Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop and Emmylou Harris, will produce the next album, due out in June. Tentatively titled Lee Hill, it will come out, as all String Cheese releases do, on SCI Fidelity, the band's own label. SCI Fidelity began about six years ago and now releases records by not only String Cheese but acts such as Keller Williams, Umphrey's McGee, Yonder Mountain String Band, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe and Steve Winwood.

"SCI Fidelity has been great for all of us as musicians," Hollingsworth says. "I just put out my solo album last month on it with Joshua Redman and Robert Randolph. It's a good, creative release for all the members of the band, as well as bringing in our friends."

The label allows the quintet to keep its creative freedom, but not surprisingly with all the touring and skiing, the guys in The String Cheese Incident leave much of the business to others. They spend their time more on the music and their families. (Hollingsworth is a newlywed, and two of the band members have young children.) "The best thing I've learned about the business is that sometimes, with five band members, it's OK not to say your opinion out loud," Hollingsworth avers. "Because there's a five-headed monster in every aspect of String Cheese, whether it's in recording or that your business partners are also your music buddies. So we try to stay out of the business as much as we can."

The String Cheese Incident will headline the Langerado Music Festival 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday on the Sawgrass Stage.