I could tell that the Dave Matthews Band had returned to its former glory after listening to its new CD, "Busted Stuff," just one time: I didn't like a single song. Every track, 11 altogether, sounded like a mess. I was ecstatic.
See, I've been a DMB devotee-apologetically at times, I admit-since 1994, when the five-man crew was a tiny jam band worshipped on kinda-Southern college campuses like the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina and, my former home, Duke. And with each new DMB album, a ritual began to take shape. The first time through, the band's sprawling compositions, bursting arrangements and wacky time signatures would absolutely confound me. I couldn't pick out the melodies. As soon as I began to guess where a song was going, the band would shift gears-drop a tune like an interrupted thought and pick up another, seemingly unrelated. By the time the final note sounded, I'd find I couldn't hum more than a few seconds of the 60 minutes of music I'd heard. Then, with each listen, the songs would slowly click into place, like tumblers in a keyhole. By the 10th time, I was hooked.
Until, that is, DMB's last album, 2001's "Everyday." I got each song immediately. The melodies was simple and clear. There was no "instrument soup" because Boyd Tinsley's sly violin and Leroi Moore's soulful sax-the guts of DMB's trademark sound-were nowhere to be found. The first single was fronted by-gasp!-an electric guitar riff. The second, a love song called "The Space Between," was even worse: it was a Journey ripoff. It should have been sold with Bic lighters. The rest of the album didn't blossom like the four DMB albums before it. It was charmless junk the first time I heard it, and charmless junk it remained.
So what happened? "Everyday" was the rare case when that overused music-snob term of disgruntlement, "sell-out," fit like the plastic shrink wrap the CD arrived in. The story of how it came to be is already the stuff of DMB infamy. By the summer of 2000, the band had recorded a batch of tracks for its fifth CD with longtime producer Steve Lillywhite. The songs were vintage DMB (see above for description), but Matthews decided he was tired of that sound-which, in principal, is understandable. Bands need to grow, right? So out went the songs. And out, also, went Lillywhite.
The problem was who came in: Glen Ballard, the superproducer best known for Alanis Morrisette's billion-trillion-selling "Jagged Little Pill." Basically, you bring in Ballard when you want to write lots of radio hits and make a big ole pile of cash. Matthews wrote a whole new album's worth of songs with Ballard-and only Ballard, not the rest of the band. In interviews after the album's release, band members Moore and Tinsley talked about being surprised when Matthews played them DMB's new sound, but claimed they quickly appreciated its greatness and jumped on board. Listening to "Everyday," it was heartbreakingly obvious that the guys were lying through their teeth. (Did they really expect us to believe that gifted and successful musicians like Moore and Tinsley would be excited about a "new sound" that could be summed up as "a lot less Moore and Tinsley"?) The new CD came out in the spring of 2001 and, naturally, was a smash hit. But longtime fans of the band like yours truly were, for the most part, mortified.
Then a funny thing happened. Those initial tracks that DMB recorded with Lillywhite and then scrapped somehow snuck out onto the Web. The collection-dark even by Matthews's gloomy standards, not at all radio-friendly-spread like an e-mail virus. It became known as "The Lillywhite Sessions." This "album" became so popular that Entertainment Weekly actually reviewed it-just a few months after "Everyday" arrived-even though it had never been officially released and couldn't be bought in any store, anywhere.
After a lengthy tour, the band quickly went back into the studio and rerecorded many of the tracks from "The Lillywhite Sessions" (several of which had already become concert staples) and added a couple new tracks. The result is the Dave Matthews Band's sixth album: "Busted Stuff." If it isn't the best DMB album thus far-it isn't, not quite-it may end up being one of the band's most beloved because it sounds like DMB did for so many years. The title track is a simple, sexy tease like 1998's syncopated ode-to-hot-girl "Rapunzel." The gorgeous "Grey Street," a poem to suicidal poet Anne Sexton, builds to a shivering climax from an off-kilter sax and violin riff. The first single, "Where Are You Going," is the kind of lovely power ballad, a la the 1996 hit "Crash Into Me," that Matthews can pretty much write in his sleep. It's quiet, simple and absolutely lovely. Then there's "Bartender," led off by Moore's rumbling alto sax, like a desperate call that sets up Matthews's pleas for salvation through self-abuse: "Bartender please/ Fill my glass for me/ With the wine you gave Jesus that set him free after three days in the ground."
Best of all is the snarling, mournful "Big Eyed Fish," featuring Tinsley's lonely violin plucking and Matthews' tired, defeated lyrics about dumping your dreams and knowing your place in the world: "See the little monkey sittin' up in his monkey tree/ One day, decided to climb down run off to the city/ Now look at him, living in the street, as good as dead/ Do what a monkey does, stay up your tree." Songs about self-doubt, about alcoholic misery, about loneliness-all set against passionate guitar-sax-violin melodies that often seem to argue with the words Matthews is singing. "Busted Stuff" is almost guaranteed to return DMB's album sales to the realm of reality. But that's OK. Buying back your soul doesn't come cheap.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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