Some old articles I came across that I think everyone would be interested in reading.
Code: Select all
http://www.rollingstone.com/features/davematthews/default.asp
The Long, Botched Summer
The birth, death and rebirth of a DMB album
The odd saga of the Dave Matthews Band's lost album is the most compelling mini-drama of the Napster age. Recorded during the summer of 2000 in DMB's hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia with their longtime producer Steve Lillywhite, the sessions were aborted, and Matthews flew out to Los Angeles to finish the album with producer Glen Ballard. Instead of merely continuing the process Lillywhite had begun, Matthews and Ballard began writing new songs together, songs that so inspired Matthews that he decided to shelve the original tracks he had brought with him. The new songs would become DMB's blockbuster 2001 release Everyday. (Only one song -- "#36," which would be lyrically reworked into Everyday's title track -- was gleaned from the earlier sessions.)
As for the other orphaned songs that make up The Summer So Far (the name written on the eight discs burned for producer Steve Lillywhite, engineer Stephen Harris, A&R man Bruce Flohr, and each DMB member following the aborted sessions), they have not gone away quietly. Leaked over the Internet as "The Lillywhite Sessions," the tracks have captured the imagination of the DMB faithful, who have been demanding their proper release. Now comes word that the fans will get their way.
"At some point, the band has every intention to put those songs out in some form or another," says Bruce Flohr, Senior VP of A&R and Artist Development at RCA Records. "Down the line, the band will finish the record in the way it was intended to be finished. The songs will come out, and people will still want them."
Were that to happen, Lillywhite -- who has also worked with the likes of U2 and the Rolling Stones -- says there would be substantial work to do beyond just mixing and mastering. "Some songs were pretty much finished," he says. "But others need a lot of work. They were just put on there as more like a demo than a formal recording. There would be some overdubbing needing to be done. But songs like, 'Bartender' and 'Busted Stuff' and 'Diggin' a Ditch,' all sound good to me as is."
DMB has been playing most of the songs on their current tour, and, according to a band spokesperson, versions of them are likely to pop up on the next DMB live album, possibly due by year's end.
But, even supposing The Summer So Far were to get its official release, the question remains: Why was it scrapped in the first place?
"It's a myth that the big, bad record company came down and said, 'Where's the hit?'" Flohr says of the decision to shelve The Summer So Far. "That's absolutely incorrect. There are plenty of songs on that unreleased record that are going to be big commercial singles. No one -- Steve Lillywhite, Bruce Flohr, Dave Matthews -- no one knew that Glen Ballard and the band were gonna go on such a creative spurt that the songs that were originally recorded were going to be put aside."
Here's how drummer Carter Beauford explained the Lillywhite/Ballard transition to Rolling Stone earlier this year: "Bruce and I stepped outside one evening after doing some takes, and he said, 'Carter, how do you feel about this record?' I just had to come out and tell him I wasn't feeling it. The vibe wasn't there, you know? It was lacking everything the Dave Matthews Band was about. So I said, 'Look, I don't feel it, and I'm almost certain the other guys don't feel it. We need to make a move.' And Bruce said, 'That's all I needed to hear.' From that point he began working to find someone else to produce the record and working toward putting our heads into a forward and positive space."
While Lillywhite says that the band's decision to record in Charlottesville was unwise ("You make a record in your hometown and it becomes less like making a record and more like going to work. There's forever someone saying, 'Oh, I've got the plumber coming in the afternoon, so I won't be coming to the studio.'"), he maintains that the sessions weren't uncomfortably somber or listless. "Honestly, I've read a lot about how everyone [in the band] was very upset and sad," he says. "But I didn't feel anything like that. These sessions were nothing compared to a U2 album."
"I think I could put my hand on my heart and say Dave is and was very proud of the recordings that we made," Lillywhite continues. "Obviously, Bruce is on record as coming up to Dave and saying that, as a fan, he didn't feel the record. To be honest, I think Dave was as upset by it as I was. If anyone tells you your songs aren't good enough, you're gonna get hurt."
Flohr has a different take on how things were going in Charlottesville. "There was a heaviness to the sessions," he says. "And I think the process was laborious to a certain extent. What I was hearing as an outsider, someone who wasn't there every single day, was a darkness to the record that I felt -- and I think everybody around the band felt -- could be improved if they had a change of environment."
"[The Summer So Far songs] inspired pity," Matthews told Rolling Stone in January of this year. "Self pity, or pity for the sad bastard that wrote them. I felt like I was in the process of failing, in the process of letting everyone down. In the process of not supplying the band with songs, not giving the producer the music, not giving the record company tunes -- so inside that environment, I was continuing to do just that, come up with these sad bastard songs."
Moreover, Matthews admitted that the bottle had somewhat of a gloomy grip on him during the sessions, as reflected in the drunken motifs strung though "Bartender," "JTR" and "Grace is Gone." "It was not a good time for me," he said. "I usually find that when I'm in one of those slumps I do the better part of my drinking."
Despite Everyday's mammoth sales -- the album moved over 700,000 its first week in stores and over 2 million to date -- it received a lukewarm critical reception and even alienated some hardcore fans who found it inorganic, unrevealing and generally non-Daveish.
"I'm just worried that I didn't hear the band," Lillywhite says of Everyday. "I don't know, it's all very alien sounds. I'm a fan of the Dave Matthews Band and always was from the word go. Part of the uniqueness of the band is what the four other members bring to it. That wasn't accented enough."
Beauford seemed to agree with Lillywhite. Asked if Ballard's heavy-handed authoring approach was threatening -- the producer wrote essentially non-negotiable parts for the band -- he said, "To be straight up, to a degree, yes, because it almost divided the five members. [Everyday], in a way, is Dave and Glen's record, really."
Before Summer was leaked, DMB fans who were unsatisfied with the streamlined Everyday griped en masse in chat rooms. Gaggles of interviews, in which Matthews was forced to address the lost album, served to fuel curiosity and demand, the logical limit of which is the "Release Lillywhite Recordings Campaign." The brainchild of Pankaj Arora, the RLRC (www.paware.com/lillywhite), was founded "by a fan for the fans with the goal of ensuring the band realizes the enormous demand and desire for the studio versions of the songs produced with Lillywhite, and with the hopes that they will at the very least simply consider possibly releasing the works after realizing the immense demand and desire for it."
Arora's crusade was somewhat mooted when, roughly one month after Everyday's release, The Summer So Far illicitly strayed onto the Internet. Drooling traders queued up to download the twelve-song set -- at least 70,000 in week one -- while the band members themselves publicly expressed regret and anger regarding the unauthorized distribution of a project they'd deemed unworthy. Many fans quickly embraced the markedly darker effort as a rare microscope on Matthews' psyche. That assessment is understandably bittersweet for Lillywhite.
"I'm a big boy," he says, "but it affects your self-confidence. I've got to say, if nothing else, I do feel vindicated that my faith in these recordings is shared by so many other people."
GREG HELLER
(July 9, 2001)
==================================================================================
Write a Happy Song
Dave Matthews relives the pain of "The Summer So Far" sessions
I met with Dave Matthews to do these interviews on January 10, 2001 -- which happened to be the day after his thirty-fourth birthday. It was an auspicious time to talk. He had been going through a lot of changes lately, and was still going through them. Given the candor of our talks, I have to wonder if doing these interviews wasn't a part of his changing process. Anyway, the locale was Charlottesville, Virginia, the preposterously pleasant, funky, historic college town where the DMB got its start. Matthews and I actually flew down there early that morning from New York City, where the band had posed for the Rolling Stone cover shoot. The rest of the band flew back the night before on their private jet, but Matthews stayed overnight in New York to celebrate his birthday with his former road manager, before rising at 7 a.m. to make the flight.
We talked a lot on the plane, but I didn't start running my tape recorder until we got onto Charlottesville's cobblestoned main drag, a pedestrian mall of coffee shops, restaurants and bars, including Miller's, the tiny place where Matthews once worked as a bartender and first performed live -- eleven years earlier. We strolled and chatted, paused at a coffee place, stopped at another place and ate bagels -- and in addition to speaking about the joy of recording the band's newest album, Everyday, he addressed the pain of abandoning one last summer.
Talk about the songs you recorded with Steve Lillywhite.
I think they were really good songs, but the difference between them and the [Everyday] songs is that they were so introspective, and these songs are in your face. They're just not so personal. At least, they are personal, but they're going forward. They're coming out, as opposed to going in.
Just to dwell on those earlier songs for a minute, why was that happening? Why were they coming out that way?
They inspired pity, self-pity -- or pity for the sad bastard that wrote them.
Why?
I felt like I was in the process of failing, in the process of letting everyone down. In the process of not supplying the band with songs, not giving the producer the music, not giving the record company tunes; so inside that environment, I was continuing to do just that -- you know, come up with these sad bastard songs. And I love the songs, but they were very much how I was feeling. I've used analogies: I was trying to shit a watermelon, or a bowling ball, or, like, there was someone standing on my head telling me to dance. I was feeling burdened and unhappy and being told to write happy music. Maybe there are those gifted people who can do that, who can be told, "Write a happy, happy song," and they can just whip it out. But I don't have that capacity necessarily. But that's where I was. And it just perpetuated itself. I came into the project thinking that what we didn't have we'd write, and we'd make this album. But that didn't happen. And I realized I was responsible for coming in with music.
So it wasn't going to come out of a jam?
It wasn't going to come out of a jam. We say things like that. It's fun, and we're very good at that, but that happens in moments where there is no pressure, moments of spontaneity. Like that could happen if we go up to our studio here in town tomorrow when we had no pressure. If we all felt like playing and we got together, it would definitely happen then, you know? That's because there's no reason for it to happen. Whereas in that environment, it just was not happening. And I was meant to produce, and basically everyone was waiting for me to produce some songs. Because without some words and a melody and basic chord structure, you can't do anything. I mean, we had some fun jams and some fun times, but it wasn't coming across in any real clear way.
So you weren't disagreeing with the forces that were saying, "Dave we need some upbeat stuff."
No! It was like, "No shit!" Steve knew we should have some more uptempo songs; he knew I was going through hell trying to come up with them. The band knew that, RCA was saying, "We need some . . ." Using things like, "Where's that 'Tripping Billies?'" They mean the best, and I knew what they were saying, but it pissed me off to no end. Because what I was saying was, "I'd love to. But I don't have it." And certainly being pushed to do it isn't doing anything but putting it in reverse. So I needed to have someone that could walk up to me and say, "Sing. Just play. Don't dig a ditch, don't wade through this." What was being asked of me -- this was all my own interpretation -- I was being asked the impossible. But I also knew that it was seemingly impossible. I was being asked to move a mountain that was my bottomless pit of stupidity that couldn't come up with anything.
Where were you physically writing those songs?
Wherever. I wrote them over a period of time. I wrote a lot in the studio, but I guess I arrived with three or four songs that were basically finished. That was "Bartender," "Digging a Ditch" -- no, I guess those were the only two. Oh, and I had started "Busted Stuff" . . . I was depressed. I basically moved -- I live south of Charlottesville in the mill, but I basically went up north to where the studio that we have is, and just lived there. I lived upstairs in the playroom. It was not a good time for me. I usually find that when I'm in one of those slumps I do the better part of my drinking.
JOHN COLAPINTO
(July 9, 2001)
==================================================================================
And the Band Played On
The rest of DMB recount "The Summer So Far" sessions
I interviewed the various members of the Dave Matthews Band back in January over a three-day-stint in Charlottesville, Virginia. Because we were to touch on rather touchy subjects -- namely last summer's aborted album's sessions -- I met with each member individually.
The venue of each interview was selected by the band member, and it said something about each of them. Carter Beauford decided that he'd be happiest being interviewed while he drove. I've always been a great fan of interviewing my subjects while they negotiate traffic (it distracts them and loosens them up), so I found myself bombing around the Virginia countryside in Beauford's toy-sized, yellow Porsche 911 Twin Turbo. He was decked out in CK sunglasses and a black warm-up suit that made him look a bit like a superhero.
The far more low-key (at least, off-stage), Boyd Tinsley suggested that we talk at a local coffee place, the Mud Room. He sauntered in wearing shades, leather pants and a leather jacket. Hard to miss. He proceeded to speak in his surprisingly soft-spoken voice -- the complete antithesis to his explosive stage presence.
I met with LeRoi Moore in the Outback Lodge, one of his favorite bars, a hole in the wall place with a small stage for live acts. Moore isn't crazy about doing press, and I wondered vaguely if he wasn't trying to torture me a little by having me interview him in a place where we both had to shout in order to be heard. But soon enough, I realized that this was simply a place where he was happy and comfortable, and that he wanted me to feel the same way. After a beer or two, I did.
I spoke with Stefan Lessard in the band's private recording studio in the woods north of Charlottesville. He was in the midst of producing an album for a talented young female singer-songwriter named Devon. Lessard's three-year-old son was running around and banging away on various instruments as we listened to some of Devon's tunes. Then it was time for our interview, and Lessard proceeded to talk with unrestrained passion about the band's new album, and with unfeigned horror about the difficult six months they'd spent trying to record the earlier batch of songs. I was in the very basement recording studio where the band had been holed-up trying to get the album to work -- and as Lessard described the claustrophobia and bad vibes that descended on them during the recording, I found it not at all difficult to sympathize.
Stefan Lessard, Bass
"I was interested in working on [the album], but after about three months, it just seemed there was no direction. The songs sounded just kind of muffled, and I feel that's the way everyone kind of felt -- we all felt kind of closed in . . . After a while it seemed like we were playing more baseball and riding more ATVs, because no one really wanted to go into the dark studio and get into this mood. We didn't really know what we wanted out of this next album -- at least I didn't."
Boyd Tinsley, Violin
"Something wasn't there. Partly it could have been the material we were working on, partly the band, and Steve had come to a creative wall and couldn't really go any further than we'd already gone. And we needed to take another leap forward in our evolution, and maybe that whole situation didn't lend itself to that . . . There were always these times with the other albums where there'd be these songs we'd get to and it would be so exciting, and everyone knew this was going to be a hit, or just a killer tune. We never had one of those tunes on this album."
Carter Beauford, Drums
"They were great tunes, but we weren't sure what direction we wanted to go with them. So we started playing them on the tour this past summer. And they started to gel and take form and get personality, but the vibe in the studio prevented us from taking those tunes further . . . Everything was starting to sound the same. We felt like we were spinning in our spot and not really moving anywhere musically. We were all thinking this, but we were kind of not voicing it to each other [laughs]. It got to a point, for me, where I was like, 'Man, I need to say something because I don't know if I can take this.'"
LeRoi Moore, Sax/Flute
"I felt [the songs] could have worked, especially after we started playing them a bit on the road in the summer. Then it came around a little more. At least, I started to understand them a bit better . . . I think at some point we'll still work with those tunes too. They're not dead and gone by any means."
JOHN COLAPINTO
(July 9, 2001)
==================================================================================
How "Summer" Sprung a Leak
The long, strange trip from the studio to desktops
It takes but one rogue engineer's intern or one bassist's scorned ex-girlfriend to make a band's private musical moments public. Usher, Weezer, Mary J. Blige and even the notoriously protective Radiohead have all had unsanctioned music leaked via the Internet. In the instance of the Dave Matthews Band's lost album of last year, the leakage came courtesy of an unlikely and elaborate series of clandestine e-mailings and betrayals.
Given that Dave Matthews is . . . well, Dave Matthews, anything he does in the studio is tantamount to spy plane blueprints or snapshots from Area 51. Following producer Steve Lillywhite's dismissal last fall, eight discs of the work in progress ("Some songs were pretty much finished and others need a lot of work," says Lillywhite), were burned, each labeled "The Summer So Far." The master tapes were immediately locked in the DMB's Charlottesville, Virginia studio vault where they've remained ever since.
Distribution of the eight discs went as follows: one to Lillywhite, one to the engineer Stephen Harris, one to RCA A&R man Bruce Flohr, and one for each DMB member -- Matthews, bassist Stefan Lessard, violinist Boyd Tinsley, drummer Carter Beauford and saxophonist LeRoi Moore. Lillywhite claims that "there was no other way anyone else could have had that music," and that the original discs were "of really good quality, much better than what people are downloading."
While wide-held belief had been that the initial leak came from within RCA Records, Bruce Flohr is adamant that his copy has always been accounted for, that he has neither lent it out or casually left it around the office.
Lillywhite says that he and Harris can account also for their copies. "Once I got fired, I put my disc away. You want to move on," Lillywhite said. And while Flohr "thinks everybody in the band has accounted for their copy," Matthews and DMB declined to speak with Rolling Stone on the topic.
Initially, The Summer So Far was safe from pirates. During the fall of 2000 and into the first few months of 2001, it was the holy grail on DMB message boards -- speculated about, but unheard. Craig Knapp changed all that.
Knapp is a music teacher from Long Island, New York. In the winter of '99, his chorus performed a version of Matthews' "One Sweet World" that he gave to the frontman upon meeting him outside a show in February. Knapp also fronts the Dave Matthews tribute band Ants Marching, a staple on the East Coast. The band's homepage (www.antsmarching1.com) prominently features a photo of the group with Matthews.
In early March of this year -- several weeks after the official release of DMB's 2001 studio effort Everyday -- Knapp received an e-mail from Tom Griffin, a student at New York's St. Bonaventure University. Griffin claimed to have a disc of "the unreleased version of Everyday," with "four new songs on it," and offered to send Knapp a copy.
Knapp figured he would receive alternate takes of Everyday tunes -- perhaps the odd B-side or acoustic reading. Several days later, on March 15th, the package arrived. "There was a note included with the disc," Knapp says. "It said '[This CD] is the Virginia album that was to be released last summer. The story of how this got out is sketchy and unreliable. I will spare you the story.'"
After hearing the disc and knowing he was in possession of the coveted Lillywhite sessions, Knapp was torn about how to play his hand. He says that he wanted the DMB world to experience the joy that the songs brought him, but did not want to disrespect Lillywhite or Matthews himself. Knapp made it known on the Dave Matthews Band Mailing List Web site (www.dmbml.com), where he contributed frequently, that he had the material. Within days, his inbox was clogged with hundreds of notes, many insisting he upload the material. He was incessantly heckled on DMB message boards and in chat rooms, called a hoarder. His phone rang off the hook.
"I was beaten down," Knapp said. "People were bashing my inner strength and morality . . . There's a very selfish attitude out there."
Fed up, Knapp told the DMBML that he intended on burning the disc -- as in, with a lighter fluid and a match. Before doing so, however, he opted to contact Lillywhite, a regular on the DMBML with an obvious enough e-mail address. Knapp sought the producer's guidance and alerted the DMBML that, should Lillywhite give the green light, the music would indeed go public.
"I am blessed to receive this gift," Knapp wrote to Lillywhite. "My question for you is one of moral standards. I would really like to share these songs with the DMB trading community. However, I feel that if the Dave Matthews Band and Steve Lillywhite didn't release these songs, then what gives me that right? I guess my question is simply this: Am I disrespecting the Dave Matthews Band and Steve Lillywhite by making these songs available?"
Once Lillywhite was satisfied (via a few more e-mails), that Knapp truly did have what he purported to have, the producer replied, "I would hold onto [the music] for now until I have had a chance to speak to Dave and see what he feels is the best plan." He added, "Do you like it?"
Knapp posted his interactions with Lillywhite on the DMBML, hoping to lessen the ire of frothing chatters. (Lillywhite eventually asked him to stop doing this and he complied). Shortly thereafter, Knapp received another e-mail from Lillywhite, or so he believed. It read:
"I was able to contact some people and we came to the conclusion that because of DMB's loyal fan base following, honesty and patronage towards the band over the years, releasing these tracks should be, let's say, sort of a treat to the trading community . . . keep in touch and enjoy."
According to Knapp, it would be months before he realized that the thumbs-up note was a hoax. A clever DMBML poster who had kept close tabs on Knapp's interactions with Lillywhite sent the letter posing as the producer. Lillywhite's e-mail address had been altered ever so slightly (the letter "I" replaced with the number "1"). In other words, Steve Lillywhite never gave Knapp, or anyone else, permission to digitally distribute The Summer So Far.
Believing he had the producer and Matthews' (or at least someone close him) blessings, Knapp uploaded the material. His computer itself is too slow to accommodate the sudden deluge of requests, so he forwarded the tracks to a few better-equipped pals. On March 24th, the album ended up in the hands of Jason Tang, a freshman at Indiana's Purdue University. While Tang's pal Paul Romer, an audio technology major, digitally remastered the disc (!), Tang himself set up a site to allow for the album's downloading. The day it went up -- Monday, March 26th -- it received 5,000 hits. By that Saturday, 40,000 folks had logged on. Their lines hopelessly jammed, Purdue shut the site down. Tang moved it elsewhere and 15,000 more Dave-heads got their Summer before that site was also sealed off.
Not that Tang's closures mattered. By then, the album was all over Napster, Gnutella, etc., and a feeding frenzy of downloading and burning began. The compare-and-contrast game between Summer and Everyday kicked into high gear on message boards. By modest estimates, 1,000,000 people have now heard at least part of The Summer So Far.
But how did Tom Griffin get his copy, the one he copied and sent to Knapp? Griffin lets this much be known: His friend's family owns a house in Colorado. Sometime last winter, someone in the Dave Matthews Band vacationed at that house. According to Griffin, the DMB member allowed his friend to hear the Summer disc, and, at some point -- presumably when the DMB member hit the slopes -- the disc was "borrowed" and burned. Griffin's friend then returned to St. Bonaventure excited, if somewhat unaware of the white rhino he'd bagged. Minutes later, Griffin made his own copy.
As for why he chose to forward the music to Knapp, Griffin -- who maintains that he had no intentions of mass-distributing the material -- says that he had seen Ants Marching a few times and knew the band was trying to work Summer songs into their sets (a handful of them had been DMB live staples well before the ill-fated sessions ever began and live versions of them were readily available via the band's devoted network of tapers/traders). His intention, as a true Dave-head, was simply to provide Knapp and his players with a finer point of reference for "their" new material.
"I didn't want it to be exploited," Griffin says. "I didn't want everyone to have it, but I knew eventually over time, if not through [Knapp], then someone else, that it was going to get out and I wasn't going to be upset over it."
One final note: When Knapp initially offered The Summer So Far, he requested that all those who download it give to the Bama Works Foundation, a massive charity network established by the Dave Matthews Band offering national and international aid to a wide array of causes -- diabetes, homelessness, rape crisis and others. Tang made the same appeal on his Web site.
As of this story's completion, Bama Works has received eighty Lillywhite-related donations, ranging from $10 to $50, totaling $1,600.
GREG HELLER
(July 9, 2001)
==================================================================================
Dave Matthews Band The Summer So Far
RS Rating: ***1/2
This is a review of an album that, officially, does not exist -- at least not yet. It was ditched, unfinished, after six months labor, in the middle of last year, hence the provisional title given the eight discs privately burned for members of the Dave Matthews Band and associates, including dismissed producer Steve Lillywhite, before the tapes were shut away in the DMB vault. The only reason at least a million DMB fans have now heard at least part of this record -- many of them have their own CDR or hard-drive copies of the whole thing -- is because of a tawdry episode of borrowing/burning in which a band member's CD was copied, and subsequently uploaded, without his or the band's knowledge or blessing.
In other words, I'm in possession of stolen goods. That little or no money has changed hands in the file-sharing of this music -- this has been, so far, a matter of community rather than commerce -- does not change the fact that distribution started with theft, however innocent, accidental or well-meant. There is a reason why its called "bootlegging." But the moral issues that complicate the allure of illicit music -- the songs and performances we believe we need and deserve to hear, even if the artist intended otherwise -- went out the window for good back in 1969, when the blank-label, Bob Dylan collection, The Great White Wonder, hit the racks. With its Nth-generation dubs of early-1960s demos, Highway 61 Revisited-era outtakes and extracts from the then-recent "Basement Tapes," The Great White Wonder made an artistic mockery of Self Portrait, the nutty smorgasbord Dylan himself was moved to release the following year.
The DMB faithful may well feel the same way about The Summer So Far (a.k.a. "The Lillywhite Sessions") and the double-platinum record Matthews made and issued in its place, the chrome-plated-pop biscuit, Everyday: that the former, no matter how raw and incomplete, is the better and more honest record, and certainly much closer to the familiar, organic bounce of the DMB's live sound than Everyday, which was produced with airtight severity by AOR whiz Glen Ballard. But I am an admirer of Matthews' songwriting and the band's concert aesthetic, not an apostle; I prefer the liberated juice of Live at Red Rocks and Listener Supported to the canned perfection of Crash. And I have to say this: Matthews, drummer Carter Beauford, bassist Stefan Lessard, violinist Boyd Tinsley and saxophonist LeRoi Moore made the right decision to put these songs and performances aside, and start fresh. On the sheer momentum of the DMB's first decade -- previous platinum albums, stadium-tour grosses -- a finished Summer would surely have debuted at Number One in Billboard. But it would not have stayed there: This is dark, frustrated music. Matthews is clearly a man, and songwriter, in crisis, and the band sounds uncommonly sluggish in places, eerily distant from the songs and the singer. It is fascinating to hear this as theater, a real-time, creative episode. It isn't always fun.
Subsequent overdubbing, mixing and editing might have fixed that. Lillywhite, who produced the DMB's first three RCA studio albums with an impressive sympathy, didn't get to complete the job. And more than half of the twelve songs on Summer survive in the DMB's current set-list rotation, suggesting that the sessions, not the material, were the problem. But on record, the cumulative hurt and emotional thrashing in "Busted Stuff," "Digging a Ditch," "Grey Street" and the long, self-pitying "Bartender" are so strong that Matthews seems to drown in his own candor. And although Summer runs over seventy minutes long, there is little room in these working versions for healing, glee or instrumental exposition. Moore's saxophone and Tinsley's violin were clearly sidelined by Ballard for Everyday, but the pair's contributions to grey shuffles like "Big-Eyed Fish" and "Captain" are limited to melancholy trills and extended sighs, gestures of empathy rather than engagement.
Still, there is a bleak magic that seeps through these songs, a kind of intoxicating voyeurism that comes from being a party to secret anguish: an abused woman's ache for escape in "Grey Street"; the images of repetitive labor and funereal silence in "Digging a Ditch"; the obsessive martyrdom for love in "JTR." The plain pain and argument in Matthews' voice is compelling and convincing; it is hard to turn away from his dismay, even when he drops a bomb like the opening couplet of the final track, "Raven": "Rise and graze on this/The future is a mess." Everyday is a thornbush of confession as well. The difference is that Ballard's emphasis on chunky electric guitar gave even that record's most lyrically sour material a magnetic heft -- you could swing to the sadness. On Summer, the slow-to-mid tempos and Matthews' pillowy acoustic strumming make you feel like you're wrapped in black velvet -- almost to the point of suffocation if you listen to the whole thing straight through.
The Summer So Far may become an entirely different record if it is ever finished and properly released, which seems inevitable now. The blank spaces in the arrangements leave plenty of room for changes, and Matthews' experience as a collaborative writer with Ballard on Everyday -- a valuable lesson in concision and hook smarts -- could lead him to do some rewriting as well. But in its present state, The Summer So Far is a vivid lesson in the craft, confusion and risks of record-making. With Everyday, Dave Matthews put out the record he needed to make; with Summer, hardcore DMB fans alienated or disappointed by Everyday can now have the album they wanted in the first place. For now, everyone's a winner -- except the accountants.
DAVID FRICKE
(July 9, 2001)
==================================================================================
