String Cheese Incident gives fans fresh approach

  Fidelity Records (left to right) Michael
Kang, Billy Nershi, Michael
Travis, Keith Moseley, and Kyle
Hollingsworth comprise the Colorado-based band, String
Cheese Incident.

By Antero Garcia
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

While some may claim that great cheese comes from happy cows,
and that happy cows come from California, the type of cheese that
causes thousands of Americans to chase it all over the world is
actually from Colorado.

With the common bond between the members of The String Cheese
Incident being skiing, it isn’t surprising that the band
started as a group of self-proclaimed ski bums in the small town of
Crested Butte, Colo.

“We started in the winter of ’93-’94,”
said mandolin and violinist Michael Kang in a phone interview from
Boulder while getting ready for the band’s rigorous touring
schedule. “We were all just living up in the mountains
skiing, and we ended up hooking up to play a few songs at these
talent contests once a month.”

The members of The String Cheese Incident have never judged the
band’s success on commercial stardom, what with their main
priorities being hitting the slopes as often as possible and giving
their fans the best concert experience possible.

“We aren’t concerned with being the next big thing
on MTV; that was never our goal,” Kang said. “We just
wanted to have a good base of people that love what we do and it
seems to be working.”

Having sold over 50,000 copies of its latest CD, a live album
titled “Carnival ’99,” The String Cheese Incident
finds that it does not need radio airplay or magazine
advertisements to sell its music. Instead, the band has relied on a
tightly knit and loyal fan base to help spread the word on The
Cheese throughout the world.

“We’ve always worked with our friends and held our
destinies in our own hands,” Kang said. “We were
confronted a few years ago with either signing to a major label or
doing it on our own and we just figured it would be best to do it
ourselves and keep creative control.”

Since making that decision, the band has gone on to form SCI
Fidelity Records, a record label that the band uses not only to put
out its own albums, but a host of side projects with other bands as
well. In addition to its own record label, The String Cheese
Incident has avoided mainstream integration by selling concert
tickets to its consistently sold-out shows through its Web site,
www.stringcheeseincident.com.

Bruins will have the chance to see The Cheese this Friday and
Saturday when they perform at the Wiltern Theatre. According to the
band, a live performance is not just a concert; it’s an
Incident.

“Our live shows are very different from our studio
albums,” Kang said. “We have a lot of improvisational
themes in our shows.”

With set lists varying each night, taping has always been
encouraged at the band’s shows. In fact, Kang believes that
it is through the trading and distribution of concert tapes that
the band has found such a large fan following.

As a reward for following the band on its shows, The String
Cheese Incident tries to put on special performances, including
Halloween and New Years shows. In addition, the band plays special
concerts all over the world, known as International Incidents.

“We really try to give our fans an opportunity to express
themselves creatively and add to the experience,” Kang said.
“We get to have fun playing music and sharing it with people,
and we want other people to feel that.”

Because of the band’s jam-based approach to music, its
promotion of concert recording and selling and its memorable live
shows, many people compare The String Cheese Incident to the widely
successful quartet Phish. With Phish now on an indefinite hiatus,
many Phish-heads are looking toward The Cheese to fill the jam band
gap.

“There have been a lot of comparisons, and I would say
Phish and us have similar tastes, but at the same time, we feel we
have our separate roots and philosophies on life,” Kang said.
“If it attracts Phish’s fan base, hopefully they will
enjoy the experience.”

While the band is often stereotyped as only playing jam-oriented
music, Kang stressed the importance of diversity. Because each band
member has a different musical background, the melding of genres is
key to the group’s ideas.

“Everyone has a say in what kind of music we play,”
Kang said. “Part of the strength of what we do is we mix
different styles into a cohesive unexplored territory.”

Sometimes this unexplored territory shows through in the
band’s quirky renditions of classic cover songs. On
“Carnival ’99,” for example, the group performs
the Weather Report standard “Birdland,” whose signature
melody was originally performed on horns, entirely on stringed
instruments like guitar and mandolin.

Kang said the band has been trying to cover songs by Peter
Gabriel and Led Zeppelin lately, but the group’s repertoire
changes frequently. By covering well-known songs, the band
generates a lot of ideas for its own original songs. The String
Cheese Incident recently finished recording an array of new songs
for its next studio album, “Outside Inside.”

“We recorded with producer Steve Berlin, who is a horn
player for Los Lobos,” Kang said. “We’re excited
about it. We actually left the studio saying “˜God, I actually
enjoyed that.’ Sometimes it’s tedious and can be hard
and this is the first time we walked out of the studio feeling
really good about what we did.”

And feeling good is really all The Cheese wants, both from its
own experience and from its fans. For students who just
aren’t sure if they are ready to be a friend of The Cheese,
Kang offered

some advice.

“They’ve got to come and experience it and find
out,” he said. “We always figure that there is going to
be a moment in each show that will interest everybody.”

Standing adamantly by his belief that The Cheese pleases all
crowds, Kang elaborated on why the band seems to appeal to so
many.

“Ultimately, we’re just trying to live our lives as
best we can as human beings; live our lives with integrity and
maintain a happy lifestyle with good relationships with our
friends,” he said. “And we hope that that message gets
through in our music.”

So why will thousands of music lovers fill the Wiltern Theatre
this weekend? It’s the cheese.

MUSIC: The String Cheese Incident performs on
Friday and Saturday at the Wiltern Theatre. For more information or
tickets go to www.stringcheeseincident.com. Tickets can also be
purchased at www.ticketmaster.com. The
band’s latest studio release, “Outside Inside,”
is set to be released on May 15.