Jam Bands Play the Part of Community Organizers

By Melinda Newman
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, August 9, 2009

Marc Brownstein is fretful. The Disco Biscuits bassist has 4,992 friends on his Facebook page. If he adds eight more, the social networking site's regulations dictate that his friend page must become a fan page, which many fans rightfully assume could be run by an administrator or manager.

"I don't want a fan page; it's just another barrier between you and the fan. The fans on my Facebook page know they're talking to me and I know I'm talking to them and I value that," Brownstein says, sounding genuinely distressed that he is keeping the 60 friend requests he gets per day in "Facebook purgatory" -- neither accepting nor declining them -- while he figures out his dilemma.

There is a strong connection between the fans and such jam bands as moe., the Disco Biscuits and Umphrey's McGee. Unlike pop music, where the chasm between a rock star's seemingly glamorous excesses and the supposed drudgery of his fans' lives is celebrated, jam-band culture preaches closing the gap between artist and audience.

No band exemplifies that ethos more than Phish. The band, a major influence on the newer generation of jam bands, plays Merriweather Post Pavilion on Saturday as part of the group's first tour in five years. The tour sold out minutes after going on sale, according to Billboard, making Phish one of the summer's toughest tickets. Umphrey's McGee keyboardist Joel Cummins remembers seeing Phish as a fan more than 15 years ago. As an audience member, he observed certain ideals that he says he and his bandmates carry forth every night on stage: "They respected their fans' level of intelligence, never playing down to them."

"There's a sense of community and togetherness and the perceived lack of boundaries between musician and fan," agrees Dean Budnick, who is executive editor of Relix magazine and founder of Jambands.com. "There is that sense of mutual discovery in the music between the fan and the band of 'Wow, can you believe here's where we are?' The fans feel like they're part of that collective journey."

And in these tough recessionary times, that "we're all in this together" spirit is a tie that binds.

When Pedro Lemaitre of Arlington got laid off last summer, "one of the first things I thought was, 'Where can I go see the Disco Biscuits?' "

Like many jam-band fans the 26-year-old Lemaitre, who has found a new job, keeps coming back. He's attended 48 Disco Biscuits concerts since 2004. "I've never seen two shows that are the same," he says.

But not all fans can afford his level of interest. In some ways, the recession hit jam bands early. When gasoline soared north of $4 per gallon last summer, Brownstein says he knew the Disco Biscuits were in trouble. "We make our money on the traveling fan because half the crowd isn't from the town we're playing," Brownstein says. "The first three rows are the same kids every night."

After a "rough tour" in 2008, Brownstein says the members of the Disco Biscuits "powwowed" with their manager and booking agent and decided to drop their ticket prices from $30 to $35 to around $20. The result, Brownstein says, is the band's best tour in its 12-plus-year history. "You don't make new fans at $35," Brownstein says. "We were seeing ourselves hit a plateau. The number one thing you can do is write new great music to bring your crowd. We wrote about 50 new songs and drastically cut the [ticket] price."

Such thinking is smart, says Jonathan Mayers, partner in the New York-based Superfly Productions, one of the organizers of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. The Manchester, Tenn., multi-artist event started in 2002 as a celebration of jam bands. It has expanded far beyond that scope but still embraces the genre: Phish played two headlining shows at the Bonnaroo Festival in June, which drew 75,000 fans who bought tickets that started at $209.50 for a four-day pass.

"It's not about how much I can take off the table; it's about what's fair," Mayers says. "Everyone wants to make money, but it's about being inclusive. It's about making it so that people can attend the event and that will hopefully build a long-term base."

Similarly, the members of Umphrey's McGee say the recession has caused them to make some short-term adjustments. They try to play Thursday through Saturday nights and fewer Monday through Wednesday gigs because people are less inclined to come out early in the week. Additionally, they have found new ways to connect with financially struggling fans. Since spring, fans have been able to stream live shows at $5 a pop or five for $20. "We just give fans other options and ways to experience the shows," Cummins says.

Most of these bands are taking their cues from the groups that came before them. Jam band is an umbrella moniker used to describe progressive groups that meld musical genres, such as rock, country, jazz and reggae, and rely strongly on their improvisational skills. While many of them release studio albums, live shows are their bread and butter, not airplay on mainstream radio or MTV, both of which routinely shun such acts.

The godfather of the jam-band movement is, of course, the Grateful Dead, which was the first band to spur a cottage industry that existed outside of the mainstream music business (despite recording for a major label). The band made record executives blanch by not only encouraging audience members to tape their shows, but to trade bootlegs freely among themselves. Tie-dye-wearing fans, dubbed Deadheads, bragged of following the band from town to town, plying their wares -- folklore has Deadheads selling everything from lip balm to the much-lampooned toast on a stick -- in parking lots to support their travel habits.

Phish picked up where the Dead left off, passing down jam-band traditions to the next generation of acts. Among the unofficial jam-band commandments: Thou shalt offer reasonably priced tickets, play long shows that vary every night, and allow fans to record and exchange shows.

The bands are expected to make a living, but there is a certain utopian ideal at work here. Greed is not good. For example, when Phish's first 2009 concerts sold out within minutes, the group decided that fans would be able to download the three March shows at the Hampton (Va.) Coliseum for free within 24 hours of the gig.

Umphrey's McGee offers free tickets to fans who record shows in exchange for them making music available within 48 hours of the concert. "There's no point in trying to control all your content anymore. For us the best thing is get the music out there," Cummins says. "That's a gateway to getting people out to the show."

While the goal is to grow the fan base, many of these acts further embrace their flock by throwing their own events that cater to the faithful. Starting with the Clifford Ball in 1996, Phish presented its own festival for several years, playing up to seven sets over two days. Last month, the Disco Biscuits hosted the eighth annual Camp Bisco in Mariaville, N.Y. More than 50 acts -- many of which share the Biscuits' love of electronic music -- performed. Next month, moe. will hold the 10th-annual moe.down in Turin, N.Y. The band, which will play six sets over the Sept. 4-6 event, will be joined by Method Man and Redman, Cake and Ani DiFranco, among others.

While there may be a little purse tightening on the road right now, the fan loyalty jam bands enjoy has left them largely immune from the cataclysmic freefall experienced by the major record companies over the past nine years. That's in part because these labels have seldom given jam bands the time of day. Though the Dave Matthews Band is one of RCA's biggest sellers and 311 remains on Columbia, most of the excitement (and dollars) the majority of jam bands raise at their live shows has never translated into meaningful CD sales.

Umphrey's McGee's Cummins says he received his first royalty check from record sales last year, more than 10 years after the band's formation. Brownstein says the Disco Biscuits make money when they sell 30,000 copies of a CD, but that's because they own the masters and license the music for distribution. On a major record label, those slight sales figures will get a band dropped from the roster.

Furthermore, now that it is standard operating procedure for major record labels to ask for a portion of touring and publishing profits in addition to record sales, many jam bands say thanks, but no thanks. "We're not willing to give that up," Brownstein says. Plus, as he notes, if "you've never sold any records, [when] the record industry falls out from under you, it doesn't really affect you."

It seems by simply staying true to their music, jam bands may be having the last laugh in these tough times.

"It's funny . . . when we were this band coming out of South Bend, Indiana, playing to 100 people a night, we thought we'll get recognized by a major label; that's what's going to happen," Cummins says. "We've toured and toured and toured. Now instead of 100 people, it's 2000 and the bands that are on a major label say, 'we wish we'd done the grass roots development the way you did.' It seems we backed into things the right way."