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887

This is a category that the Dave Matthews Band Twitter account has trotted out a couple of times over the summer: Total number of song performances. They’ve done it twice, with the first coming in early August after a rather uninspired Florida run and the next tweet coming today as their summer tour is officially in the books, with the final tally standing at 887. 

While it’s a neat strategy to throw a big number out there and let people marvel at how large it is, there is zero substance to how many songs a band has performed over the course of the summer. It’s akin to a basketball player touting his shot attempts over the course of a season. Almost belittling to a fan base like DMB’s, who recruits diehards in the same way contemporaries like Phish and Pearl Jam do.

 The truth is that Dave Matthews Band played 46 shows this year, averaging just under 20 songs a show. Their longest show this summer was just short of three hours and their shortest was just a minute over two hours, or half a Bruce Springsteen show. It’s what happened inside of those shows that reveals the true essence of this tour.

If you really want to inject some substance into this 887, let’s break it down. Out of those 887 “total song performances,” 355 were comprised of just fourteen songs. Doing some rounding on the decimal points, that’s about 40% of their total output this summer.

On a 25th anniversary tour, and one before a hiatus, you’d almost understand if the group leaned on some of their biggest hits but no. Three were the new songs (“Samurai Cop,” “Bob Law” and “Bismarck”), one was a Prince cover tacked onto the end of “Jimi Thing” and the remaining ten (including the aforementioned “Jimi”) were simply regurgitations of summer’s past. Over the last four summer tours, any random combination of seven out of the ten (“Crash Into Me,” “Warehouse,” “Grey Street,” “Why I Am,” “Seven,” “Don’t Drink the Water,” “You Might Die Trying,” “Jimi Thing,” “Crush” and “#41”) appeared more than fifteen times a piece. A sweltering lack of variety, for sure. Which brings us to our next number. 

88

Different songs played, of course. Here is a number that tells the true story of what happened over the last few months in DMBLand. To put it bluntly, 88 is simply not reflective of what a band like DMB is capable of on a 46-show tour. It took all of seven shows for the streak of tour debuts to come to an end, and we’re not talking about something like what Widespread Panic just accomplished.

You don’t need to go diving to the depths to realize this number is abnormally low. For a group that has around 100 recorded originals just on their officially released records and a list of covers/unreleased tunes that triples that number, to pull out just 88 over 46 shows is disappointing. Especially compared to summer’s past, where they’ve played (excluding “Improv Jam”) 115 (2015), 106 (2014) and 109 (2013) different songs. One could argue that the two-set format they implemented in 2014 led to even more variety, as shows averaged between 23-25 songs during those two years compared to the 20 in ’13 and 19.23 in ’16. But even compared to 2013, those 21 extra songs would have gone a long way to adding variety. 

25

One of DMB’s achilles heels over the years. Songs appear, stay for about a week and then vanish forever. This summer, 25 out of the 88 songs were played less than five times. An already slim tour