Originally published in the August of 2007, this piece looks at String Cheese Incident at the moment when the band made its decision to take some time off the road. The group has since returned to the stage together and likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, however this piece examines some of the issues that led to the group’s hiatus.

There is one topic about which the members of the String Cheese Incident are in absolute accord.

When asked to pinpoint what they hope others would identify as the group’s legacy, the six musicians to a man respond, “community.”

Bassist Keith Moseley’s thoughts on this subject echo those of his band mates: “I hope people would say that String Cheese has been an instrument to bring people together in a safe, supportive, loving environment, helping ideas to connect and flourish while building community.”

Beyond that things get a bit fuzzy.

Whether the final assessment of that legacy should begin in August 2007 after the group’s four night stand at Red Rocks or whether the end will come five, ten or even twenty years later is a matter of conjecture. So too, which members of the current band will be part of that future, and possibly even the very name of the collective.

Indeed, as Moseley adds with a chuckle, “Now that you spoken to all of us, I think you probably have a good grasp of what’s going on. You’ll pass it on to your readers and then we’ll read about it and we’ll know ourselves.”

What can be said with some measure of certainty is that shortly following the String Cheese Incident’s late October performance at Vegoose, the group issued a statement explaining that after the summer of 2007, the band’s co-founder, Billy Nershi, would be leaving the group and that there were no immediate plans for String Cheese beyond that point.

While the band members uniformly take pride in the music they’ve created over the past fourteen years as well as the web of relationships they have fostered, all of this has emerged against a backdrop of intense interpersonal exchange, accommodation and compromise. The process has proven exhilarating yet also enervating and it certainly has taken its toll.

The story of the String Cheese Incident’s decision to step away from the stage for an indeterminate period of time, raises a number of issues specific to the personalities and circumstances of this particular group. Yet the forces that are tugging at it are those faced not only by this band but most every band a decade and a half into its career. Moreover, these very concerns resonate with just about anyone, artists and audience members alike, advancing in years and coming to terms with the seemingly inevitable questions regarding commitment and contentment in relation to family relations and fiscal freedom.

“It used to be we’d just play music and rehearse and put all our energy into that. Then people started feeling the responsibility of having a business and having to pay their mortgages and some of the rehearsal time turned into pow-wows about what was going on with people’s lives and what needed to happen. I was starting to feel I wasn’t necessarily doing it for the ya yas anymore more but rather to maintain the level of responsibility to all these people who were working with us, not only the band members but the crew. Sometimes going on tour felt more like a weight than the expression of joyful freedom that it used to be.”

The author of that statement, is not, as one might expect, Bill Nershi but rather Michael Kang, as he reflects on the current state of the group. Indeed while Nershi has certainly taken the initiative and without question is the architect of SCI’s current path, a number of his band mates share his sentiments on the issues that have come to the fore.

“There are many factors,” the guitarist affirms, “as to why I’m taking a different path from String Cheese. There’s probably 5 or 6 different reasons all balled up. I won’t paint a rosy picture of what’s going on, it’s real. I don’t want people to say that everything’s groovy and that we just need to find ourselves. It’s gritty stuff.”

Those who nonetheless might wish to view his proclamation as a potentially-reversible whim, should understand that this is not the first occasion in which Nershi has wrapped his shaggy head around these issues and reached a similar conclusion. As he recalls, “Three years ago I told the band I didn’t want to continue to play. I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. But my family and the band members talked me into continuing.”

This time Nershi’s inner circle was not so persuasive and to understand why, it is necessary to look back at the group’s origins.

August 2007The String Cheese Incident began with Nershi and Kang working the après ski circuit in Crested Butte, Colorado. Both musicians knew Keith Moseley, then an area guitarist, who switched over to bass to fill out a quartet they assembled along with mandolin player/guitarist Bruce Hayes ( “an instrumental wizard” in Nershi’s estimation). When Hayes was unable to make an upcoming gig, Michael Travis’ name came up as a potential replacement, which proved an interesting choice from Nershi’s perspective.

“The funny thing was when I moved to Crested Butte I drove there in a school bus I was living in and needed a place to park it. Keith set me up at a place where he was living and that happened to be Travis’ house but I had never met Travis. I think he was woodworking in the northwest. I had been living all winter outside Travis’s house in my schoolbus and I had never met him before. So we got to the point where we needed a fourth member, so we found Travis and praticed that afternoon for a gig that night.”

That brief performance featured Nershi on acoustic guitar, Kang on acoustic mandolin and electric violin, Moseley on electric bass and Travis on congas and bongos.

Travis recalls, “That first gig had that air of importance somehow and we already felt like a thing. It didn’t feel like a thrown-together gig. We played a talent show for 15 minutes in Crested Butte and everybody flipped out and it was ‘Wow let’s go see Billy Nershi’s new band,’ and there was this feeling already that it was going somewhere. And then about a year later Bill decided he was going to give up his graphics career and we were going to get in the van and really go for it. That was the break.”

As the drummer suggests, the early identity of the band was very much tied in to Nershi. Not only had he developed a reputation in bluegrass circles for his flatpicking but Neshi also took a leadership role by composing the bulk of the group’s original material, while singing most of the songs (although for the record, Nershi takes only indirect credit for the band’s moniker: “The whole thing with the name to me is still a tough one to swallow,” he laughs, “either the first one we started with [Blue Cheese String Band] or the one we ended up with. I would say that Mike has a lot to do with it but we all had fair chance to change it if we wanted and for some reason we didn’t. We changed it the first time but maybe not enough and for better or worse it stuck.” ).

The guitarist recalls that initially there was a looseness to the whole endeavor. “When we started out, we were bunch of free and easy hippies just trying to have good time traveling around the country. Our first tour circuit was anywhere where we could ski or ride our mountain bikes.”

Increasingly though, as the band found receptive audiences for its unique amalgam of bluegrass, blues and world music, the band members stepped up their focus. Travis soon moved away from his hand drums and learned to play a drum kit, as he explains "to make the sound “bigger” (Nershi still marvels at this effort: “it’s pretty amazing he learned how to play the drum kit in String Cheese considering how much of force he’s become.” ) Kang soon introduced a electric mandolin into the mix. Then in 1996, Kyle Hollingsworth joined the group on keyboards, further broadening the palette while contributing an affinity for funk and jazz.

Over time, the group’s dynamic changed as Nershi’s bandmates gained confidence and footing as songwriters. While Nershi received songwriting credits on all but two of the original compositions on the group’s 1997 debut recording, Born on the Wrong Planet, by the time String Cheese recorded One Step Closer in 2005 ,each of its members contributed at least two songs.

Nershi is quite forthright in articulating the impact that this had on his own psyche and ultimately his songcraft.

“From my perspective, I was just not able to bring in as much material anymore because there was so much stuff coming in from other members of the band. The thing is what I feel like I’m good at is delivering songs and when that became less of the role that I was doing in the band, I started to enjoy playing in the band less.”

Still, while the members of the group could appreciate this sentiment, they viewed a surfeit of original material from five fully-engaged songwriters, as a problem worth having.

“He’s one of the best songwriters in the band and if I were in that position it would be a difficult one for me for me.” Hollingsworth asserts, “but I think it’s important to have all the creative forces you can bring in. If that means everybody writes a song or one person is writing less I think it’s towards a greater good.”

August 2007Meanwhile, the String Cheese Incident musical landscape began to morph as well. One person is with an interesting handle on this development is percussionist Jason Hann, who initially encountered the group at the High Sierra Music Festival in 1996 when he was gigging with his band Zoo People. Hann entered into a friendship with Travis and later saw SCI intermittently over the ensuing years before he began touring with String Cheese in 2004 (balancing this out with L.A. studio work as well as gigs with Isaac Hayes and Loreena McKennitt).

“When I first saw them I remember they did quite a bit of the world music thing which especially in the mid-90’s really impressed me. But by the time of the Wiltern show [7/23/04, the onset of Hann’s current era with the group] they had started branching out into electronic music. It was refreshing to hear that a band is constantly evolving its sound and wiling to take chances and grow because that’s not always the case. A lot of bands really do stay in the same zone and one way to stay inspired and keep things fresh is to shake things up and take some chances.”
By 2003, Travis and Kang had sought to push SCI’s music in this new direction ( “Burning man has a tendency to change your influences that way,” Travis laughs). In certain respects the former hand drummer’s gravitation towards electronica realms was surprising, considering that in terms of cultural orientation, “my whole disposition is Santa Cruz, West Coast, Grateful Dead, hippie everything.” However, as Travis explains it, the two realms are complementary. “The main beacon in hippiedom musically for a long time was the Grateful Dead, and Jerry, every note he played was the selfless expression of the flow. That’s why it’s so addictive because he was not playing any notes for himself and everything be played took you to that ethereal place, right to the brink because there was no filter of one person’s weird energy to get through. You could feel the source. And I think electronica is the new egoless front .”

String Cheese was interested in exploring this direction, to add yet another wrinkle to its sound. Moseley observes, “Diversity has always been a strong asset of the band and something that’s been real important to the band’s success. We have no singular focus, so thereby we are a bit conflicted internally but the result is we have six guys who get to run with their musical vision.”

While this certainly rings true, there is also an element of having another’s musical vision crammed down one’s gullet by dint of a majority vote. Such a scenario seems to be at the heart of Nershi’s composition “Big Compromise” which also served as the title of the documentary that accompanied One Step Closer. That film relates the pure democratic process (with its attendant speechifying) by which the band members now reach most any decision, a process that Travis describes as “100% draining and infuriating and 100% essential to String Cheese being String Cheese.”

“In our band you have four, five different alpha personalities,” Kang explains, “and in that there’s a lot of tension and sometimes people have to step back and sometimes people just don’t like to step back. That’s not to say it’s good or bad, that just what it is. I think compromise is part of the engine of creativity.”

Still, as Travis affirms, “Our music tastes have moved further and further apart over the years. When we started String Cheese, I listened to Grisman Quartet and I loved Strength In Numbers and I would check out Telluride bluegrass and Billy was the core of that whole thing. And now I listen to nothing but electronic music and that’s all I want to play and all I want to hear and Billy’s got more into hardcore bluegrass and everyone’s kind of drifting part musically and it’s been harder to hold together a middle point..”

There is certainly a danger of stretching it all too thin with each band member occupying a discrete musical cosmos. However, most fans would agree that the integration and overlay of seemingly disparate musical ideas has made for an exhilarating musical experience (and one embraced by increasing numbers of listeners as the band has carried its sound into amphitheatres over the past few summers).

In this spirit Nershi made his own “big compromise” by supplementing his acoustic guitar, which had long been one of the band’s defining elements, with an electric guitar on stage in 2003.

“On [2003’s] Untying the Not I did a series of overdubs that were slide guitar on a Les Paul through a cranking vintage Fender amp and it was really fun. It was exciting doing that, so I brought that into String Cheese world and I think for some of the members of the band it was, ‘Oh cool, now we can really take off with Billy on the electric guitar.’ The acoustic guitar has become more and more swallowed up by the sound of the String Cheese Incident over the last several years and it has been frustrating. So I brought in the electric guitar because I know I could get that over the top. Unfortunately I’m not as good of an electric guitar player as I am an acoustic guitar player because I put in years and years on the acoustic guitar more than the electric.”

Meanwhile, as the band continued to survey new sonic realms, Nershi found himself increasingly flustered and frustrated in the role that he took most to heart, that of the songwriter.

“It got to the point where the sound of the band had changed so much over the last couple of years, I felt like a lot of things I was writing weren’t fitting in anymore and the band was more reluctant to play some of the material. I found myself getting kind of jammed up creatively. When I saw the stuff that I was writing was not quite making it out there to the performance, I didn’t write as much. From a musical standpoint that’s the main reason I started thinking about doing other things.”

August 2007Over the past half-dozen years, no musical group has gone to further ends in order to carve out a zone for itself and its fans to freak freely. Even as relations among band members grew increasingly tense, its members remained unified in their larger aims, to create a vibrant, supportive community that could elevate its participants. In String Cheese world this has manifested itself in numerous forms including the sizzle and spectacle of its elaborate New Year’s Eve shows, Halloween performances and Horning’s Hideout events.

“To generalize,” Travis interjects, “there’s this East Coast wave of opinion that we’re a bunch of pansies making soft, silly West Coast daisy dancing music, instead of serious actual music. And that’s fine because we don’t want to be the dark and evil band that says everything is so serious, we want to be the band that says, ‘shine your light.’ We consciously try to emanate a vibration that brings people together and lifts people out of their lives to create a place where they can feel whole and feel other layers of existence that aren’t readily available in their normal lives.”

As a result, through the assistance of management, the band created a series of enterprises, including a record label, a ticketing company and a merchandising arm, effectively crafting an independent cocoon for creativity. In order to maintain the integrity and viability of these ventures, the band has felt the need to take some hand in their operations (even though the day-to-day been has been ceded to others), which somewhat ironically, has taken time and energy away from the behavior that these endeavors were supposed to facilitate.

“I like the fact we have creative control over a lot of these companies, the record company in particular and the fact that we’re able to give fans a cheaper ticketing option,” Hollingsworth opines, “To me it’s all about helping the fans. It does get heavy at times and it can be a lot on your shoulders but I don’t feel it necessarily takes away from me creatively. I’m able to separate that but different people have different things on their brains.”
“We started a record company at a time when it was not smart to start a record company,” Kang laughs, then adds a bit more somberly, “So we’ve spent millions of dollars forming a company and we have not seen a lot from it in terms of financial gain, although we still have the satisfaction of saying we started a company and put our albums out and supported other artists. So not only is String Cheese a band but it’s a part owner in a bunch of different companies and that level of responsibility is not always easy to maintain given the dynamic complexity of our lives It can be hard to keep up, you come up against a wall of what’s possible with the amount of time you have and the amount of creative juice you still have for it..”

Creative inspiration is paramount to Nershi, who also started to feel that the pressures and responsibilities attendant to the “whole String Cheese Machine” were compounded by other considerations.

“I felt like some people in the band were playing music because they needed money to get by. I guess that’s not a terrible thing but if the main reason that we’re playing music together is because we’ve got expenses then I’m not up for it.”

He explains that such concerns never lured the group towards pursuing a more transparently commercial sound but nonetheless, “It’s a different kind of expression when you’re expressing your art to make money than when you’re expressing your art because you need to as an artist.”

At the same time, everyone acknowledges that intra-band communication was at an all-time low.

So Bill Nershi arrived at a crossroads not unlike that faced by numerous individuals in many walks of life. How does one strike the balance between oneself, one’s family and one’s colleagues. How do these priorities relate to personal ego and identity? When is it appropriate to take one for the home team? And just who’s on that team anyhow?

“For me, a lot of the reason of that I need to get away from it, is just to spend some time with my family and spend some time away from the whole rock scene. I feel like I’ve spent years of my life focusing on my musical family of String Cheese fans and the band and management and everybody and now I need to spend some time with my wife and my children.”

So Nershi gave his notice, this past fall, encouraging the group to continue without him if they wished. Band members admit to feeling some measure of hurt, anger and confusion at his announcement. The result was a tabling of any formal tour talk for the immediate future and will happen in the wake of Nershi’s decision is unclear.

Kang explains, “I’ve made a commitment to myself that I don’t even want to talk about String Cheese or anything that has to do it with in terms of performances for at least a year, just to take a breather.”

“The only way I’m going to tour with a band called the String Cheese Incident is if Billy’s in it,” Travis offers, “The door is open for us to do some shows without him under a different name. Maybe I’d play some bass, Jason plays drums and Keith plays guitar. We’d do more Keith songs and change the dynamic a lot, play less bluegrass and get all new material. But if it’s going to be the String Cheese Incident, it’s going to be with Billy.”

Moseley is a bit more upbeat and forceful.

“We’ll walk away for a while, give it time to shake down and then it’s going to be time to play music again and he’s going to decide if he’s in or out. Hopefully he’ll want to do it but I am not ready to say the band is over. I don’t believe it’s over and I’m not going to let it die. I am fully planning on continuing to play with String Cheese in some kind of capacity and hopefully that will be with all six of the members we’ve got right now.”

August 2007The week and a half before Bonnaroo found all of those members together once more, starting rehearsals for what might well be its final summer run. One can imagine how other groups in a similar situation might not devote such energy to the process.

“I want to make clear to everybody that were taking this tour seriously,” Hollingsworth asserts, “just like any summer tour, we’ll find some great tasty covers and potentially bring in brand new original material. I’m really excited about it.”

That excitement translates, just after midnight on June 16, when the group huddles briefly before stepping onto the Which Stage for two late night sets at Bonnaroo. The audience stretches well past the horizon, and some of the 30,000 in attendance have staked out their territories for well over two hours.

Nershi certainly is animated, at one point running furious laps around the stage with a grin dominating his visage.

Travis’ snapshot of the night is “one moment in which Billy threw his body around and his head all the way down to his guitar and back up, giving himself whiplash with his hair flying around.”

As for Nershi, he offers, “I’m having fun now. A lot of things are resolving and changing now that we’re going to stop playing music for whatever period time that is. A lot of baggage got aired out and a lot of things that haven’t been said for years were said between people in the band and people in the band and management and it’s all making being together playing music better. My picture of Bonnaroo is a sea of people going as far as the eye could see really digging it and for me just hoping that in the future I’ll have a chance to play for that many people again.”