DMB: A New Beginning, a Return to the Past

By: Mike Bookey - Jambase

It's cutting late into the afternoon in a town just outside of Pittsburgh and, like he's been doing for most of the summer afternoons in his adult life, Stefan Lessard is getting ready to play a show. Well, he actually calls it a "gig," rather than the massive multi-tour-bus-and-semi-truck production that is required for a performance by the Dave Matthews Band. This night at the Post Gazette Pavilion, some 23,000 fans will be adoring every note Lessard pumps out of his bass as he sways rhythmically back and forth, his instrument snug up to his chest... just like he's been doing, again, his entire adult life.

This "adult life" of Lessard's is one of the more intriguing in the annals of rock & roll. A boy, still of high school age, gets snagged up by a promising singer-songwriter to play in a band of equally promising musicians. In only a few years, that band makes it big – really big – and becomes for some concertgoers the only show they care to see for the entire summer.

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GQ.com interview with Dave Matthews

When I told friends and fellow editors here at GQ that I was interviewing Dave Matthews, they chortled and snorted. Two guys broke into damning imitations of Matthews’ raspy singing voice. Another pantomimed Matthews’ bizarre, spastic, onstage version of the Charleston. A friend called the music “soft prog.” One coworker just put his head down on his desk. Okay, dudes! I get it. Dave Matthews is not cool.

But you know who doesn’t care about cool? The 31 million Americans (and counting) who have bought Dave Matthews Band albums. My many friends in high school who got to first, second, and third base for the first time on the lawn of Lakewood Amphitheater in Atlanta while DMB ran down “Tripping Billies” onstage. And people in towns across the U.S. who got hand-me-down Allman Brothers, Genesis, and Steely Dan albums from older brothers instead of records that put you on the shortcut to cool like Fugazi, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.

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Dave Matthews Band returns and finds its strength within

By Jerry Shriver, USA TODAY

BOSTON — The band leader wanders into a hotel lounge for an afternoon appointment sounding groggy and hoarse, sporting a thick dark stubble, craving coffee and seeming to validate all of those clichés about a musician's life on the road.

But Dave Matthews' condition can't be blamed on cruising the city's underbelly until the wee hours. On the eve of the first of two sold-out shows at Fenway Park last weekend, the famously normal singer/songwriter and father of three was in bed, where he would "roll and read, roll and read," fretting over the reception that awaited the retooled and re-energized Dave Matthews Band and the material from Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King, the group's first studio album in four years, out today.

'BIG WHISKEY': Read the review

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Chicago Tribune: Big Whiskey Album Review

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

On the Dave Matthews Band’s latest album, “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” (RCA), the band’s late saxophonist LeRoi Moore gets the first word, and the last.

Though Moore died last August at age 46 from injuries suffered in an all-terrain vehicle accident, his shadow hovers over the band’s seventh --- and best --- studio album, most of which was recorded last winter in New Orleans with producer Rob Cavallo, who has previously worked with Green Day and My Chemical Romance.

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Dave Matthews Band Opens Up - CBS News

The Dave Matthews Band has been at the top of the charts with Grammy-winning hits like "So Much To Say," but the group has been press shy ... at least until our Anthony Mason talked with them about their new album, and the tragedy that inspired it:

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It's a strange and improbable fusion of folk, jazz, funk & rock that has made the Dave Matthews Band one of the most popular groups of the past two decades.

"We're still pretty strange in the whole picture," Matthews said. "Not a lot of people sound like us."

But it can be good to be strange. Forty-two-year-old Dave Matthews is frontman, lead singer and songwriter of the group that bears his name, a bar band born in a college town that's become one of the icons of arena rock.

But after 30 million records sold and four number one albums, Matthews admitted to us, the band was in trouble.

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Matthews in top form as season kicks off

By Jeff Miers NEWS POP MUSIC CRITIC

The Dave Matthews Band performed double duty on Wednesday evening before what appeared to be a full house at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center. Not only did Matthews and his cohorts kick off their 2009 “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” tour, but the band did so while simultaneously ringing the bell for the summer concert season in the Buffalo area.

The evening was electric from the get-go. Following an opening set from Robert Randolph and the Family Band — that group plays the

Thursday at the Square series in June — Matthews walked onto the stage just as the lights dimmed, to a mighty roar of applause. Just as he made it to the microphone, a torrential downpour commenced.

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Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King Rolling Stone Review

by David Fricke

Saxophonist LeRoi Moore of the Dave Matthews Band was a famously taciturn man. Moore, who died last August at 46 of complications from injuries suffered in an off-road-vehicle accident on his farm in Virginia, never spoke onstage — not at any DMB show I saw, anyway — and declined to be interviewed for stories about the group. When I wrote about the Dave Matthews Band for a Rolling Stone cover story in 2002, Moore avoided even saying hello. A founding member of one of America's best-selling bands, he was also spectacularly successful at minding his own business.

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Dave Matthews on the new DMB album and why they almost broke up

by Clark Collis

The Dave Matthews Band’s new album Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King (out June 2) is a tribute, in large part, to saxophonist LeRoi Moore, who passed away last August at the age of 46 following injuries incurred in an ATV accident. Just a couple of years ago, however, relations between the group's members became badly strained. "As far as our friendships, we’d not been in top form," admits frontman Dave Matthews. "And in the last few years we have taken the time to rediscover each other, so to speak." After the break, Matthews talks about Big Whiskey..., how the band dragged themselves back from the brink, and his fond memories of Moore’s foul-mouthed

Entertainment Weekly: "Grux" was LeRoi’s nickname. But where does the "Big Whiskey" part of the CD's title come from?
Dave Matthews: LeRoi certainly liked “big whiskey.” But that came from a drunken harmonica player walking down the streets of New Orleans when we were recording the album who would play harmonica and then announce that he needed a “big whiskey." That was his way of courting cash. We thought Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King had a sort of a grownup fairly tale-sound to it.

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Dave Matthews talks about recording in New Orleans and his Jazz Fest show

by Keith Spera, Music writer, The Times-Picayune

Dave Matthews nearly became a New Orleanian this year.

The Dave Matthews Band spent February at Piety Street Recording in Bywater finishing "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King," a new album due June 2.

And on April 26, the DMB headlined the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell. It was the band's first local performance since the August death of saxophonist LeRoi Moore after an all-terrain vehicle accident. Saxophonist Jeff Coffin and trumpeter Rashawn Ross, along with electric guitarist and longtime Matthews collaborator Tim Reynolds, helped fill the void.

Matthews called from his tour bus recently to reflect on his Big Easy adventures.

How does Jazz Fest compare with other festivals you've played?

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Dave Matthews Band, finally their new album, Big Whiskey

BLENDER REVIEW

Dave Matthews Band is back with their brand new album Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King. They talk about the loss of their band mate LeRoi Moore, and how it has influenced their album... Check out the first single Funny The Way It Is

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