Confessionals Of A Former Dave Matthews Band Super Fan
Every once in a while I’m in a Walgreens, an elevator or a dentist’s office and a Dave Matthews Band song starts playing. As soon as I hear it, I feel a deep sense of embarrassment. That’s because I know the song, whichever one it is, by heart. I also know that it sucks. But even worse, I know I spent a good 10 years of my youth worshipping the man who made it.
It still pains me to admit, all these years later, that I was once a Dave Matthews Band superfan.
It all started with the classic gateway song “Crash into Me.” In the early 2000s, I only really cared about what Carson Daly and his cute black nail polish were promoting on “Total Request Live.” But somehow DMB wriggled into my pre-pubescent purview. It touched my 12-year-old ears while I was riding in my mom’s car, via a yuppie Bay Area radio station called KFOG.
Considering I was in a hormonal phase where each journal entry I wrote was a declaration of undying love for my current crush, “Crash into Me” was perfect. It began with the trembling of drum cymbals that gave way to a few stray notes from a saxophone, setting the tone for what I imagined then to be a romantic, cushion-filled den lined with aromatic candles. Dave Matthews’ deep, breathy voice slides into the track in an acoustic guitar-led chorus and, before you know it, he’s asking his lover to “hike up your skirt a little more.” It was perfect tween bait: Unwaveringly serious. Sexual in a non-threatening way. And, above all, melodramatic.
Maybe if I’d discovered his music a few years earlier, when “Crash” was released in 1996, I would’ve listened to the one song, forgotten about it, and continued with my appalling Korn phase. But I was living in the glory days of Napster, which meant I immediately went home and downloaded DMB’s entire discography. After that, all of its live recorded jam-sessions (comparable in size to Pearl Jam’s archive). And after that, every bootleg I could find.
The songs spread into my musical rotation. They went on CDs I burned for my friends, on my playlists and — as soon as I got an iPod my sophomore year of high school — in my earbuds. (I still have it, filled with all my music from high school, including a total of 332 DMB tracks.)
I learned about all the members of the band. There was Boyd Tinsley, the violinist with super nice arms who also claimed he was a model; Carter Beauford, who everyone said was one of the best drummers in the world, but not as good as the dude from Rush; that super chill bassist, Stefan something, who was just like, Oh my god how did I get so rich doing basically nothing; and four or five other rotating crewmembers who I’ve since forgotten. I’d listen to “Two Step,” a sprawling track from “Under the Table and Dreaming” with a ONE MINUTE AND 22 SECOND instrumental intro, and marvel at the band’s mastery of music. Whatever I’d later see as self-important musical masturbation, I thought of then as poetic artistry. And my love of the band was even supported by the adults in my life. After writing that my favorite musician was Dave Matthews Band on an introductory questionnaire for my chemistry class (who even knows), I received the paper back with a note from my teacher that read: “Dave Matthews is a lyrical genius.”
Around that same time, I received a special email from the official Dave Matthews Band newsletter announcing a free concert in Golden Gate Park. Official fan club members would be guaranteed tickets, and able to reserve up to three. By then, I’d begun wearing cargo pants, Birkenstock sandals and a grey fleece North Face zip-up. (I didn’t even smoke weed!) I slept next to a framed photo of Dave playing guitar on my nightstand. But it was that day, after begging my mom to fork over a $40-a-year fee, that I officially became the stereotype of a DMB fan: sheltered, white, upper-middle class, and into the idea of the hippie lifestyle, just with more consumerism and less activism.
The concert was ridiculous. I brought my then-boyfriend and best friend, and we watched the band among thousands of other San Franciscans as they played 20-minute versions of all of their songs, at one point taking the time to welcome Carlos Santana onstage for what seemed like a 30-minute guitar solo. An incredibly stoned and muddy couple next to us had formed their own dance circle, and they were passing a pipe back and forth as they wiggled their limbs slowly but passionately to each song, never bothering to change their pace to a new melody. I was thoroughly entertained, until their son walked up with his kite, and his father hurried to hide the drugs.
After that I saw DMB three more times. Each concert hosted a certain breed of thirty to forty-somethings who’d covertly light a joint and pass it to nearby audience members, only to later be berated by their significant others for getting too high. The jam band fanbase was in a uniquely phony position, because everyone there longed to take part in some sort of Woodstockian free-love experience. But ultimately, they were willing to settle for a more tepid version of that fantasy: a stadium-regulated, $70-a-ticket, $12-a-beer, buy-our-pricey-collectors-merchandise-at-the-door type love.
For me, abandoning Dave and Co. happened almost as quickly as falling in love with them. And I turned on them for the most typical reason: I broke up with the boyfriend I went to all of their concerts with. Once that relationship ended, my ear immediately adopted a new cynical filter, one that was generally disgusted by the nonsensical ramblings and self-indulgent solos of DMB’s music. As they tried to pivot away from their Phish-like bluegrass sound and into a genre of waiting-room radio hits, it became clear that DMB was an efficient money-making machine first, and a two-hour point of escape for immature adults second. Plus, it never changed the fact that Dave Matthews’ voice sounded like a cow in heat.
And, of course, their shittiness was confirmed by the fact that the band indiscreetly dumped 800 pounds of human waste from its tour bus’ septic tank into the Chicago river and onto 100 unsuspecting tourists on a boat tour. For anyone who was paying attention, this was the Altamont of Dave Matthews Band’s reign on the socially-conscious white middle class. It gave new meaning to the band’s hit song “Don’t Drink the Water.” To this day, people who say they hate Dave Matthews Band cite this incident, almost with enthusiasm. I am no exception.
Hateful former superfans, interestingly enough, are actually pretty common. In 2013, the Dallas Observer’s Nick Rallo detailed a similar fandom to mine, only to admit “Thirteen years later, I now know something important. An inconvenient truth: Dave Matthews Band isn’t very good. In fact, they’re terrible. Dying-pets terrible. No-bacon terrible.” That same year, Salon listed them in their 15 most hated bands in the last 30 years. And a recurring Vice feature titled “Do They Actually Suck” categorized the fans as an “insufferable cult of hippies united by their common misguided belief that they have good taste in music.”
These are all true statements. But I think the real reason why I and every other former super fan of Dave Matthews Band hates them so much, is because they so succinctly represent a secret person we used to be. Each time I hear his voice over the speakers of a Wal-Mart, I remember an ignorantly privileged white yuppie version of myself, so eager to “let loose” by following a band that played the same recycled blue grass jams over and over again, so righteous in thinking their songs — which held no real significance — mattered. Only later did I realize that it was a phase devoid of meaning, as shallow and commercial as my obsession with Pogs or Beanie Babies. And I have all the T-shirts, mousepads and signed photos to prove it.
