Now that the String Cheese Incident has announced that it will return to the road this fall, we’ve decided to revisit this Relix feature from a year ago that explores the decision to regroup.

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

While driving into the hills northwest of Portland, Ore. Small, wooden signs greet travelers with apropos String Cheese Incident sayings like “You’ve just stepped thru the looking glass” and “Slow… nice & cheesy.” At the entrance to Horning’s Hideout in North Plains, a giant purple banner depicting one of the venue’s famed peacocks, reads “Welcome home!” – perhaps the perfect greeting for fans who’ve journeyed to see the band’s second weekend of reunion shows this summer. A pair of peacocks struts across the dusty dirt road that leads to the campgrounds. The male ceremoniously squawks and spreads its feathers to reveal a plume of eye patterns cast in bold indigo and emerald hues. The four-day festival of ritual, art, nature, dance and – most important – community, is officially underway.

Fans, vendors, artists, musicians and production crews are camped side-by-side in the woods – including each member of The String Cheese Incident. Percussionist Jason Hann pops out of a tent near Everyone Orchestra conductor Matt Butler’s campsite and mandolin player/fiddler Michael Kang cruises by on a golf cart – off to help with art and production needs. Bassist Keith Moseley walks by with his two young children, one of whom is dressed as a fairy and will accompany the band onstage later that night to dance during “Emma’s Song.” Guitarist Bill Nershi is backstage regaling a group of people with tales and pickin’ with a few friends.

Though the Horning’s Hideout festival is the second of the band’s “reunion” weekend events this summer – the group played three shows a week earlier at Morrison, Colo.‘s Red Rocks Amphitheatre – the four-day festival offers a summation of what String Cheese and its creative partners have been up to during the band’s three-year hiatus.

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On Thursday, the band members perform with their other projects: Michael Travis (drums) and Hann in the electronic duo EOTO, Nershi with guest Moseley in the jamgrass outfit Emmitt-Nershi Band, Kang with the African-music influenced CB3 and Kyle Hollingsworth (keyboards) in his own Kyle Hollingsworth Band, which offers a String Cheese-like amalgamation of funk, rock and world music. “You can really see where everyone’s stretching in their own direction,” says Moseley.

Friday is filled with performances by various acts associated with String Cheese and the band’s longtime management company Madison House, including the Liza Oxnard Family Show, a drum workshop led by Toubab Krewe, an afternoon set by The Pimps of Joytime and late night performances by Beats Antique and DJ Aaron of The Brazilian Girls. During the evening’s headlining set by String Cheese, Nershi exclaims how happy the band is to be “in the woods and camping” and cites the venue as “at the top of our list” when they decided to return to playing. Venue owner Bob Horning’s mother Jane follows with a few welcoming remarks and, later, New Orleans’ Soul Rebels Brass Band joins the group.

The band’s Saturday performance is the weekend’s centerpiece featuring a “rant” by longtime SCI muse Lester “Boom Boom” Babbitt, a sit in from legendary jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and one of the band’s famed “ritual sets,” which Nershi refers to as “the big shebang.” After the band’s first set, the members clear the pit area in front of the stage, send fans onto the surrounding hills and open the second set with a nearly 30-minute version of “Rivertrance.” The experimental trance jam is accompanied by a slew of Cirque du Soleil¬-like theatrics ranging from fire-dancers to daredevil acrobatics to psychedelic flying saucers and professional hula hoop troop The Spinsterz. Kang first encountered many of the performance artists through his longstanding association with the Burning Man festival, while others are fans who took their love of String Cheese to the next level.

As if to emphasize the band’s diversity, their Sunday show is heavy on roots and jam music, including some traditional bluegrass with Travelin’ McCourys, a cameo by Col. Bruce Hampton and an “Eyes of the World” tribute to Jerry Garcia on his birthday featuring regular collaborator Scott Law. At times, all of this seems like a distraction from the festival’s yoga workshops, performances by tribal jewelers/masked fire dancers Liquid Fire Mantra, greening discussions and lectures like “Being Honest with Your Kids” presented by John Perry Barlow and Mountain Girl.

“A lot of energy went into all that stuff, and to see it get pulled off is really satisfying,” Kang says. “We’ve been talking about this shit for months, having conference calls every week. I think we’ve always had an open mind to wanting to create that kind of experience and make the music in a greater theatrical presentation.”

Though String Cheese is six shows into one of the most successful comebacks in jamband history – each of the band’s summer shows swiftly sold out – now, more than ever, the band’s performances feel like just part of the community event, a lynchpin supporting art, creativity, social responsibility, learning and music. And, after an extended period of internal struggle and a three-year hiatus, that community might just be what holds String Cheese together.

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

Three years ago, The String Cheese Incident’s future seemed uncertain. After almost 15 years on the road together, personal conflicts and differing opinions about its musical direction had strained the band’s “group think” dynamic. “After String Cheese was really pushing the electronic music button, it kind of wigged me out a little bit,” says Nershi. “I wanted to get more into acoustic, country/folk and bluegrass.”

In 2006, Nershi announced that he would be leaving String Cheese after a final run of shows the following year. Though he told his bandmates to continue without him, the group never found a replacement. “I encouraged the band to find somebody else and threw out a few names because I didn’t want to be responsible for the band stopping,” Nershi says from his home in Nederland, Colo.

“I felt like it was going in a direction that was not what I imagined for the band and also, a lot of it was just needing to have a break,” he adds. “You can’t convince people to play less shows or things like that. Everything is a group process and group agreement. And the group mindset wasn’t where my mindset was, so I said that’s what I was gonna do: play some music with some other bands – and I did that.”

Other band members breathed a sigh of relief when the band went on hiatus, too, and all comment positively about how “refreshing” this time period was. “I feel like I am a 20 year old again with EOTO,” Travis says. “It’s a younger fan base, and a lot of these people don’t even like String Cheese. Jason and I feel like our personalities are really being put out there and we are attracting our core family.”

Kang agrees that varying musical interests took a toll on the band. “I think toward the end of our time together, some of us expressed an interest in exploring electronic music more and that would press up against other peoples’ desires to play acoustic music,” he says. “When String Cheese took up the majority of our time, people felt like they were not getting to do what they wanted.” He also notes that the musicians had different ideas of how much time the band should spend on the road: “People like Travis or Jason are hitting it harder [with EOTO’s heavy touring] than I have in years. I’m personally not in that space myself. I’ve always maintained interest in different things.”

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During the group’s hiatus, the six members of String Cheese drifted further apart stylistically. Travis and Hann performed over 150 shows per year as EOTO, while Moseley played in the WMD’s with Keller Williams, Nailhouse with Scott Law and the jam-roots supergroup The Contribution (along with Hann, Railroad Earth’s Tim Carbone and members of New Monsoon). True to his word, Nershi focused almost exclusively on Americana/bluegrass music with longtime friends such as Law and Drew Emmitt. He also continued to develop his Honkytonk Homeslice project, though the group slowed its pace after his wife/musical partner Jillian suffered a concussion in an accident making it difficult for her to travel.

Meanwhile, Hollingsworth formed a solo band, brewed and sold his own Hoppingsworth IPA beer and collaborated with such varied acts as indie rockers the Fiery Furnaces, rhythmic jamband The Motet and hip-hop pioneer Speech of Arrested Development. And though he occasionally worked with Particle, Everyone Orchestra, EOTO and Chris Berry, Kang focused most of his creative energy offstage. “I just had other stuff going on,” admits Kang, who launched the environmental activist group Our Future Now in 2007. “It took a lot of energy to start a non-profit, and I was very involved in organizing Rothbury [a Michigan festival focusing on music, art and environmentalism presented by Madison House and AEG] – putting together the crews and getting all the components together. It was a full-time job. I was really glad to take a break from [performing] because I’m not necessarily one of those people who want to be on the road all the time, and I really enjoy reconnecting with the outdoors.”

Personal commitments also took up an increasing amount of energy: Nershi and Moseley spent time with their families while Hollingsworth became a new father and, as of press time, Kang’s girlfriend is pregnant with his first child. “A musician’s life can get kind of one-dimensional when you’re really busy with music all the time,” Nershi says. “It’s a great dimension, but it’s also great to have more than one dimension.”

While the six musicians collaborated in almost every configuration possible during the break, the band didn’t consider a formal reunion until receiving an offer to play Rothbury in the summer of 2009. “After being away from it for a while, I started to miss playing with those guys and those levels of shows,” Nershi admits. “It seemed like the perfect place for us to do a show.” In addition to an extended three-hour performance at the festival, the group did a public sound check and a stealth club show in Denver. The events were an overwhelming success.

“Once we were hanging out, rehearsing, going for hikes and just really reconnecting as a family, it seemed obvious that we needed to keep moving forward with it,” Hollingsworth says.
“We sat down with the calendar and cherry-picked some of our favorite places to play – Red Rocks and Horning’s were at the top of the list,” Moseley says of the band’s 2010 summer events. “Then, prior to the shows, we did six or seven weeks of rehearsals. We were doing seven-hour days Monday through Thursday with Friday through Sunday off so some of us could play with other projects. It is familiar and comfortable without all the baggage.”

In total, the band rehearsed approximately 90 songs, including a new one by Hollingsworth ( “The Way that It Goes” ) and another by Nershi and Law ( “Song in My Head” ) as well as covers by artists ranging from MGMT to The Police to Kansas. “That feeling of growing, trying new things, but keeping in touch with our roots has been at the forefront of our practices,” Hann says. “It’s part of what lends itself to the diversity of the music in String Cheese Incident and what leads to some tension. Even though people are growing individually with their outside projects, it’s important to bring those influences to practice and grow as a group with everyone’s experience helping that process.”

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

Now that the reunion shows are over, the members of String Cheese are decompressing and returning to their daily lives. “We’re taking a break because we’ve been together for the past three months straight, and [after] the new year, there’s talk of doing something, easy and simple,” Hollingsworth says.

“We’re taking some baby steps getting back into it,” Nershi says, stressing how pleased he is with the way that the Rothbury show and this past summer’s two weekend gigs turned out. “We wanted to make sure that we didn’t go out there and just sound flat,” Moseley adds. “Even though the public’s seeing less of this, make no mistake about it, there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes. We want to make sure we can set the bar high and keep it there.”

Moseley reflects that String Cheese wants to continue to have creative input with what’s going on around them and keep things special: “Our goals were two-fold. We wanted to sound really tight, and we wanted to bring some new things out. We want to make sure that we really hit it hard when we do play.”

The band has always been an amalgamation of different people’s tastes, Kang notes. “We’ve never really been one of those bands that wanted to define the direction that we were going [in], but it was always open to whoever wanted to bring whatever they wanted to bring to the table. And in a lot of ways it’s almost like that now more than ever.” According to Hann, String Cheese has even added a new style – Mbalx from Senegal – to the band’s repertoire.

Nershi mentions a conversation that he had with Travis about how different their respective solo projects are. “We were talking about how cool it is that I don’t have to go, ‘We’re not playing enough bluegrass,’ ‘cause I can play that in Emmitt-Nershi Band,” he says. “And Travis doesn’t have to get mad ‘cause we’re not playing enough electronica. We’re also trying to figure out how to incorporate the sounds together – the electronic and the bluegrass.”

Moseley says that the band has been revisiting old material in rehearsals and is excited about playing some of the new songs too, though he has been “enjoying the moments when there was less structure like when we could jam more [and] get in some creative spaces. We also practiced some cool, tight transitions and stuff and that went over pretty well, but I was more interested in the space between.”

Yet Travis – who almost completely stopped playing drums during the break – notes, “We are all so engaged in our other lives that when we get together we are like, ‘How do we play that song again?’”

“I think we did the majority of re-learning,” Moseley says, "and actually spent days just on certain songs, remembering all of them – people had to do homework and now that that’s behind us. We’re going to spend at least a month on the upcoming shows in October [for the planned “Hulaween” shows at Virginia’s Hampton Coliseum on Oct. 29 and 30], but a lot of the major work has been done."

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After playing between 100 and 200 shows per year for more than a decade, the members of The String Cheese Incident have figured out how to balance the band and their other projects along with their families and personal lives. In the immediate future, the group plans to focus on a few, large-scale performances each year.

“We could just go out and play club shows and theater shows, and there will probably be some of that, but more than anything we’re excited to try and throw special events and bring together the various performers that we know outside of the music scene – and make it an exciting, outside the box concert experience,” Moseley says. “We’ve all been real happy with getting back together – one step at a time – and feeling [like] the band has still got some vitality to it.”

The group also hopes to record a new studio album. “The place we’re in is really good, everybody’s really positive – Kyle brought a bunch of tunes to the table, Billy’s as prolific as ever,” says Kang, who is also in the final stages of building an eco-friendly house in Santa Cruz out of materials he bought off of Craigslist as part of his ongoing focus on greening. “I have been so busy with all this other stuff that I haven’t been writing that much. When the house is built, I’m gonna be able to just chill out and get back into the creative mind space.”

“I’m not interested in going out and being a novelty act,” Hollingsworth adds. “I’m not just going to go out there and play [the song] ‘Texas’ ten times, over and over again.” I’ve been writing a lot for String Cheese specifically. I have these songs that I don’t want to play with Kyle Hollingsworth Band because I think they’d be so much better with the flushed out sound, percussion and two guitars.
“I would love to go to Billy’s house [and] just record ten songs and do it like The Beatles style where you go and record for four days – the basics. You do vocals and then you do some solos, and it’s less about all the over production.”

Nershi is careful to note that String Cheese’s various other bands currently feel more like “main projects” than “side projects,” but concedes that he definitely wants to make another String Cheese album. “I think that if we’re gonna continue to play music, we need to keep it fresh,” he offers. “A new album is the ultimate way to have a lot of fresh material.”

“If you’re playing in this band, you always have to learn a bunch of styles of music and be OK with it, and at times, that would be stressful,” Kang concludes. “The break has been really refreshing because everyone got to do exactly whatever it is that they wanted to do. And now, coming back, everybody just enjoys being able to delve into the mélange that String Cheese is musically – without the tension.”