With the Dave Matthews Band Caravan set to take place at Governors Island this weekend, we’ve decided to revisit our July 2009 cover story on the band._

“We were not in the best state.” Dave Matthews is veering close to bluntness, describing tensions that had built up in the band that bears his name over the last decade, things that weren’t really talked about and resolved until a year or two ago. “Our relationships in the band…” He is trying to come up with the gentlest possible synonym for strained. “It’s five men – at least five men – living together and trying to work together, and things can get in the way of that. We’re all different people, we all have our own opinions and our own problems, but we needed to put all that away. And we did, and were facing each other in a very different and very serious way when it came time to do this album. Our obligation to God – and whether or not I believe is not the point – is to be the best we can be at what we were made for.” He describes their mood from the outset of the sessions as “joyful and unapologetic – like, ‘This is my band; like us or don’t like us, there is no band in the world anything like us.’”

Hallelujah! The strong personalities that make up the Dave Matthews Band talked out their differences. After the longest layoff between studio albums they’d yet taken, the pride, determination and group unity were back.

Except that then, in the great tradition of if it ain’t one thing, it’s another far, far shittier thing, somebody died.

Most albums by veteran acts working out their personal or musical issues in the studio might have one dramatic arc, if that. The saga of Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, DMB’s seventh studio album, is a definite multi-parter, dramaturgically speaking. Act one had to do with how to get the band on one page; act two centered on what to do when that page had a severe rip in it, following the shocking death of sax player LeRoi Moore, the member of the quintet who arguably always carried the greatest mythos.

Chronologically, the group was midway through the creation of the album when Moore died on August 18, 2008 from complications resulting from an ATV accident on his farm weeks earlier. Although very little could’ve been considered actually in the can at that point, not moving forward never seemed like an option given the interpersonal progress that’d already been so hard fought. Anything less than full-speed-ahead might have constituted a relapse.

Moore’s passing “shook all of us: What do we do now? It’s still a little bit like that,” Matthews figures. “At least we knew we had one thing we had to do: We had to finish the tour” ¬ – at the time, the group had put recording sessions on pause for their usual summer road work – “because he would have. Not to say I know his thoughts, but what else are we gonna do? We’re musicians. And then, also, to go and finish this record that he knew was great. So all of us went back into the studio thinking: We can’t fuck around. Because this one is an ode.”

Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King pays overt homage to Moore in its title, since “Grux” is an old, nonsensical nickname some of the band members used to call each other that finally stuck to the sax player. It also plays covert tribute by being largely steeped in an awareness of mortal fragility – although you could say that just about every other collection of lyrics in the Dave Matthews oeuvre, too. (If the Old Testament writers hadn’t gotten around to coining the phrase eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die, Matthews surely would have.) The record is steeped not just in feelings about a band member’s death but also the lingering depression afflicting post-Katrina New Orleans, where the final recording sessions took place in the first quarter of this year.

“Spare a couple of tunes, lyrically, it’s a pretty dark album,” grants the band leader, “but I don’t think that’s unusual for me. But there’s also a real joy in the performance of it. There’s no real point in mourning all the sadness and suffering in the world. Whereas if you acknowledge all the things that are happening in the world and you fight them as if it’s your first priority, then you still are allowed to laugh maniacally at it all and dance like a madman. And so this is my therapy, to sing about the end of the world and dance. We don’t find solutions in despair, we’ll find solutions in the defiance of it. All we have to do is turn the TV on or open the newspaper to see how much disaster and horror there is. Everybody needs a little horn section.”

Did he just use world suffering, theodicy and the problems of evil and pain as justification for sticking a big ole brass section on the new album? That may be some fancy footwork in itself, but Big Whiskey makes good use of possibly contradictory impulses. As helmed by big-time producer Rob Cavallo (whose credits include Green Day, David Cook and My Chemical Romance), is this an attempt at doing a fairly straight-ahead, highly commercial, ridiculously catchy and accessible mainstream rock and roll album? Or is it a slightly experimental progression into unexplored territory? Or is it really a return to an organic, eclectic signature sound hasn’t been heard much on record since the 1990s? The answer to all these questions, weirdly and paradoxically, is yes. Bigness befits the band, this time; after some awkward fits and starts throughout this decade, it’s really the first time they’ve been able to meld a fuller and, yes, brassier production approach with the rough-and-tumble live feel fans crave.

Of course, this could just be the whiskey talking. (The first part of that title is a command and not just a description, right?)

Rob Cavallo was worried. He’d flown into the band’s traditional home base, Charlottesville, at the beginning of 2008, replacing another producer that they’d had a false start with. There was a meeting where the band members brought out any ideas they’d been working on, alone or together, including a handful of tunes that had already been road-tested. They decided to chuck every one of them out. All the new material would have its basis in fresh, full-band improv.

Good idea in theory, but Cavallo was ready to tear his hair out after the first day. “We worked on one song for like 10 hours, and we didn’t really get anywhere. That night, I was thinking, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna get these guys to write? The next morning I very subtly said, ‘You guys are such great jammers. But why don’t we just limit [each jam] to 10 or 15 minutes?’” Rather than be insulted, band members welcomed the idea of having the producer cut things off and get them to move on any time they’d hit upon a useable musical fragment. “Sometimes we’d just be frustrated,” says Matthews, “but we’d still be bashing and smashing, and sometimes we’d fall out of chaos into something really great.”

They left Charlottesville and reconvened in Seattle in the spring of ‘08, narrowing the 100 or so song fragments from the first session down to 15 more full-bodied rough tracks. Of course, no one was thinking that this represented their last chance to capture Moore on tape.

So they came back together in the fall for a third round of writing and recording, there was a high degree of nervousness with what their departed colleague had or hadn’t left behind. “I’m not sure any of the guys knew, at the time we went back to the studio after Roi passed, if there was anything we could save that he recorded,” says violin player Boyd Tinsley. “There was this big effort to find these parts and passages that Roi recorded and incorporate them.”

Notes bassist Stefan Lessard, “LeRoi a lot of times would be coming up with parts and have his back turned toward the microphone” – which seems like cause for a big, posthumous d’oh! – “so we’d have to crank up all the levels, just to hear what he was doing. But we did it, and I’m happy that we were able to capture so much.”

Cavallo points out that Moore, “was such an amazing player that probably 90 percent of the stuff that he played at those early stages, even before a melody was written, we were able to use, because he was so on it. We were able to use the computer to place it in the songs. And he was wonderful with concepts and analyzing the song. He could bring so much more to the table than just playing the horn. He was always saying something pretty amazing or pretty astute about the music we were making at the time. The way to really honor him and to do the right thing was not to put horns everywhere, but rather to use the horns in the right way.”

Agrees Lessard: “It wasn’t as if we were trying to fill in the hole. In fact, at one point, talking to Dave I just said ‘Look, the absence of Roi is just as powerful as trying to fill it in with tons of saxophones if it’s not Roi.’ There is a certain absence of the horn on this record, but then when the horn is there, it’s so huge and powerful.”

In the end, all the solo sax parts heard on the final product are Moore – with one exception, which is an Eastern-flavored solo performed by Jeff Coffin on “Squirm,” a tune that didn’t get started until after Moore’s passing. As noted, there is a full horn section on parts of the record, but the band insists that wasn’t a late attempt to replace Moore with an entire phalanx of Moores. By Matthews’ account, “Rashawn [Ross, trumpet player sideman] and Roi had been working on this punchy horn section vibe, just the two of them, for a few years. So Rashawn brought that tight, pumping little section sound to the record with Jeff, who is a friend of ours who came in after Roi’s accident to create another space where Roi had left one.”

Matthews says Moore’s imprint on the album is deeper than just the handful of solos he left behind for it. "His musical instincts were really like no one else I’d ever met in my life. And it was already his favorite album, even though we hadn’t finished. So that’s the one great sorrow about this album, that he’s not here for it. The whole process was incredibly genuine, which was something that Roi always talked about: ‘All we need to be is honest.’

Now, that makes him sound like he’s a little saint. Roi was a really tough person – to live with, to be friends with, to love, to care about – because he was really hard, and he was a very tortured soul. He was a wonderful man, but so very difficult much of the time. But he had really clear ideas about music. Even in his darkest periods, that shone through. The year or so before he died was the happiest I’d seen him in more than a decade."

Carter Beauford may have taken the death hardest, even though, as the DMB’s most naturally effusive personality, he’s more likely to express his sorrow in word than demeanor. “If you got to know him, that was one hell of a guy,” says the drummer. “He was a horn player, but he had a rhythmical thing going on as well. Sometimes he would blow a solo that would be so percussive that, to me, it was almost like another drummer over there. When he left us, I was like, oh my God – first of all, that’s my lifetime buddy, LeRoi. We grew up two doors apart. I lost my best friend. Man, that’s something that’s gonna be weighing on me for the rest of my life. So it’s difficult, but it’s one of those things that’s part of life, and you’ve got to suck it up and keep moving.”

The effect the death had on Beauford wasn’t lost on Matthews: “So much of this is all about the loss of our friend – including Carter’s performance,” says the band leader. “I swear to God that Carter played like he was trying to fight his way alone in the Alamo, he was so explosive.”
Matthews wanted to instrumentally challenged himself on Big Whiskey, which in this case meant plugging in. It’s not often considered eyebrow-raising when a rock band’s frontman picks up an electric guitar, but not every group is DMB. Some fans may assume all the non-acoustic stuff here is Tim Reynolds, the on-again, off-again sideman who participates on this album in a big way after being absent from DMB studio sessions since the ‘90s. But it’s Matthews playing lead on two tracks, including the first single, “Funny the Way It Is.” “It even had me fooled,” says Beauford. “We were down in New Orleans in the studio, listening back, and I was like ‘Man, Tim Reynolds is kicking ass on this one’ – and it was Dave.”

Matthews first tried playing electric at the behest of Glen Ballard on 2001’s Everyday, but even after continuing it on tour, never got too comfortable with it. Says Cavallo, “Dave and I had a conversation where I was like, ‘Did you ever play electric guitar?’ And he said, not often – ‘but I’d like to, I’m not averse to it. It doesn’t usually work for me.’ And I said, ‘Let me think if I can get something to change that.’ I have this one very sturdy guitar, that I actually had made, and I asked for very heavy strings to be put on it, similar to an acoustic’s. Dave has a particular style that’s very unique. He doesn’t do traditional guitar playing – it’s not his thing. That’s why he has such interesting rhythms. We were calling it the spider walk, because his fingers were almost like spider legs going across the fretboard. And this guitar opened the door.”

Matthews was also up for a thematic challenge. “Lyrically, I think this is my strongest album,” he says. “I’ve written some lyrically strong stuff in the past, but I think I’ve been sort of inconsistent at times, and sometimes it’s just been a bunch of dribble. But whether it’s a lighthearted topic or about addiction or passion or friendship or loss, I think I had a standard for myself that I would not go below, and I think I managed to deliver like I haven’t in the past.”

The final recording in New Orleans this year had a big effect on Matthews’ late-inning writing, with three of the songs implicitly or explicitly set in the city. “I don’t want to paint it too pretty. There’s a lot of frightening violence and the poverty related crime down there that’s just terrifyingly sad. Hopefully more songs will start bubbling up that will help tell the story of how criminally negligent we were about that city. But it’s also got this resilience and hospitality and warmth and celebration. Anybody who doesn’t know where to go, they should go to that fuckin’ place. Because there is no city in America like that.”

So how does Big Whiskey connect to the band’s big legacy? Will it be more universally embraced than the group’s previous studio albums of the ‘00s, each of which came with some sort of attendant controversy for fans? Is it the proverbial “return to form” ? Three of the band’s four members seem to be of one accord on this. See if you can guess who the exception might be.

Boyd Tinsley: “To me it’s in the vein of Under the Table and Dreaming and Crash, of just music that sounds undeniably like the Dave Matthews Band. I’m not saying that the last four albums didn’t, but I’m just saying that this album more so does.”

Carter Beauford: “We were all thinking of the same thing – getting it to have that raw feeling again, like we did the first five years. It’s definitely about getting back to that old way of doing things, which was the cool way. I mean, all of the ways are cool…There’s only been one record, and I don’t want to say which one that was, because I don’t want to stir any pots, that I didn’t feel free at all. Well, I guess I can say it: Everyday is the only record that I didn’t feel I can do what Carter Beauford does. There was a reason for that, though. We had our backs to the wall, because we had a whole record the Internet swallowed up [the bootlegged Lillywhite Sessions, so we decided to have emergency time with Glen Ballard. So him and Dave put some cool stuff together, and had us pretty much play note for note what they had done. We kind of had to do that, because we needed to get that record out. This particular record, probably more than any other, I was able to really get in and knock some heads.” He chuckles. “No pun intended.”

Stefan Lessard: “Not that there’s anything wrong with the way we experimented with Stand Up or Everyday, but there was a disconnect that you’re only so proud of it because you weren’t there for the whole process. But there’s a richness to this record I feel like we haven’t had in 10 years. When you fall in love with a band’s records, it’s really hard to necessarily keep that love growing, because you’ve always had a record that’s been your favorite. You know, I’m that way with The Joshua Tree and U2. I know a lot of people feel that way about Before These Crowded Streets. But our fan base is such a wide variety from young to old, that those fans who are younger, whose parents are fans of ours, need a record like that, something that they can really kind of be like, ‘This is for us.’”

When I pass along this last comment to Matthews, to see if he agrees, I’m surprised to sense him getting his hackles up. “For me, I can’t even begin to think like that,” Matthews says. “He must have planned that without me! That sounds pompous to me. I’m making the music now – I can’t plan ahead for who likes it. I don’t give a fuck who listens to it. If you don’t want to, that’s your loss. I just made a thing that I really love.” He softens his tone a little: “It’s all a different language, all a different way of thinking about things. But all I was thinking was, ‘Get it right.’”