The String Cheese Incident may have a bluegrass foundation, but the decades-running jamband pulls from a wide variety of genres, including classic rock, jazz fusion, world and even electronic dance music.
The Colorado-based group will bring that freewheeling variety show to San Antonio’s Stable Hall on Thursday, May 28.
“There’ll be a lot of dancing,” founding member Bill Nershi told the Current in a phone call. “There will be a lot of very colorful people in the crowd. And we hope to bring that atmosphere of a festival to each night of music that we play.”
The Current spoke to Nershi last summer, when the group was scheduled to play two nights in New Braunfels. However, those shows were cancelled after the area’s catastrophic July 4 flooding led to more than 100 fatalities.
It’s tempting to call Nershi the String Cheese Incident’s frontman. After all, he stands center stage, acoustic guitar in hand, and he penned and sings many of the outfit’s most beloved tunes.
But here’s the thing about SCI: all the members write and they all sing. It’s truly a collaboration.
So, while electric mandolinist extraordinaire Michael Kang may shine with epic guitar-style leads over the top of the rich tapestry the band lays down, you’re just as likely to hear creative embellishments from keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth or bassist Keith Moseley. It’s about collective improvisation, not just the soloist. And that’s not even bringing the group’s drummer and percussionist into the mix.
That instrumental stew makes String Cheese Incident a jamband and makes possible something listeners can expect nightly: long improvised jams.
“It makes us really open our ears, listen to each other, create a melody, create a groove,” Nershi said. “And kind of pluck it out of thin air. Make something compelling that will be a great creative experience for us and, hopefully, an interesting sonic experience for the listeners.”
The band caters to fans who want to go all-in, playing multiple nights in the same venue or in foreign locales. Earlier this year, it announced plans for a three-night event in Morocco come September.
The following conversation with Nershi has been edited for length and clarity.
When you first started playing years ago, did you aspire strictly to be a roots and bluegrass guy? It’s unusual that you’re a full-time acoustic player in a big, loud rock band.
I’ve always been kind of a guy to, like, hang out and play guitar. And when you’re just home playing or you get friends and play, it’s really easy to just bring an acoustic guitar. And a lot of the times when I play in a get-together, laid-back environment, it’ll be people bringing their acoustic instruments and playing music together that way.
So, I ended up getting really comfortable playing my acoustic guitar. And that transfers to playing with String Cheese too. You know, it’s just, it’s a comfortable instrument for me. And really, electric guitar is my second instrument. And even though they’re both guitars, it’s a different world in a lot of ways. I think part of the sound of the band is that there’s an acoustic guitar in there, you know, gluing things together sonically.
Something that first time attendees at an SCI show might notice is that the band does a huge range of covers. A jazz fusion tune like Weather Report’s “Birdland” could surprise people unfamiliar with the genre. How do different covers get into the band’s repertoire?
It depends. The covers depend on which band member is bringing it in and might say something about what people listen to when they’re just home listening to music. Keith might say, “You know, I’m really into Tom Petty, love all his tunes.” Kyle might say, “You know, Beck wrote this tune, I really would love to play it.” You know, could be [drummer Michael] Travis brings in a Bowie tune. It could be anything. And it depends on the person. And if we if we think it’s a good tune, a good song, then we’ll work it out. The latest one I brought in was a reggae version of [Bob Dylan’s] “Like A Rolling Stone.” My favorite thing is when we when we take the cover and we make it our own. Sometimes, we’ll try to play it as closely as we can. If there’s leads, solos or melodies, then maybe we’ll decide we need to do it faithfully like the original. But a lot of times, my favorite ones are when we take a song and we totally do a shift on it to play it in a different way, in a different style. And we make it our own. Those are the ones that tend to become part of the setlist, more recurring.
What is the either the toughest cover you’ve ever learned as a band?
Well, I remember working up “Roundabout” [by Yes]. And that was very intense. [Kansas’] “Carry On My Wayward Son.” We put a lot of time into those.
New listeners also might be surprised to learn the sheer volume of tunes that you can pull off, most of which are original. How do you keep that going? Are the set lists written in advance? Do you ever add songs on the fly?
Well, we don’t get into that, and we don’t want to take the mystery out for people. But I’ll say that there’s a lot of material. Everybody in the band writes. And there’s a constant influx of original tunes and some covers, but mainly original tunes. And that’s one of the challenging things about being in this band is that you really have to stay up on, you know, 100, 150 tunes at any given point. There’s a lot of work put into that. We can play a five-night run without repeating anything and still feel like we’re playing strong material that we’re pretty up on. And yeah, it’s a challenge as a player to be up on all these songs and then decide, “We’re going to play this song, which is a bit of a curveball that we haven’t played for maybe a year. But we’re going to bust it out.” You know, it’s nice to have a bust-out every now and then.
It seems that ‘90s jambands like you, Phish, moe. and STS9 hit on a sustainable business model for the Spotify era. You were never making a living off of studio recordings, whereas virtually every other band was. Now it’s pure genius, because making a living off studio recordings, for the most part, is a lost art. And you guys have developed this following of repeat customers who will see you for multiple night runs, potentially in multiple cities. Did you see that the record industry was about to change? Or was it more a matter of luck?
Well, there’s a couple of factors. No. 1 being that when we talked to bands that were kind of ahead of us somewhat, and bands that had started before we had, we talked early on about record deals. Should we get a record deal? And we would talk to people like, you know, people in the Allman Brothers. We would talk to different people that had record deals and we would ask them about it. And nobody had anything good to say about it. It looked like the record business was declining as far as making a living off selling records. And at the same time, our model was the Grateful Dead and Phish as far as, “How are we going to reach people? How are we going to fill the crowd?” And the decision was, we’re going to tour all over the country. And we’re going to build as big a fanbase as we can. So that was our approach. We had two years where, in those two years, we played 450 shows. We had our bus that we had converted. It was a transit bus from the Crested Butte ski area in Colorado. And we converted it to a touring bus. And we drove that around, and we pretty much lived on the bus for three, four years, where we were just on the road the whole time. And these were the years where we went to every region, blanketed the country, and we really built a fan base in that time. And that was our plan. And the fact that now it makes more sense to a lot of people and a lot of other bands are doing that, it was just because we were planning. We were trying to pull from the experience of bands that had come before us, and formulate a plan that we felt like was going to be our best road to success.
$76.97-$104.56, 7:15 p.m. Thursday, May 28, Stable Hall, 307 Pearl Pkwy, stablehall.com.
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