“That’s when I had to start playing guitar.
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“It sounded like the band was in the house,” he says, his voice still full of wonder. Reynolds tells me about the first time he “felt a thrill.” His strict Pentacostal evangelical parents were out of the house doing something, and he and his sister turned up the Beatles on the record player louder than usual. It’s funny, the things we remember about our moments of discovery. And it turned the band from a group of once-strangers with a cult-like following into a kind of cultural shorthand beyond anyone’s control. (Not captured in those statistics are the number of people like myself for whom Crash inspired entry into the vast concert bootlegs ecosystem.) Crash moved Dave Matthews Band from the ranks of observers into the echelon of the obsessed-upon, with all the attendant love and ridicule that brings. Crash went septuple-platinum, and to this day remains DMB’s best-selling release. Everybody in the music business wishes they could make a record like that, because it kind of defines people.”īy the end of that year, DMB was booking back-to-back nights in Madison Square Garden. “It’s just a perfect record from the beginning to the end. “There’s so many great songs on there,” says Reynolds, comparing it to Peter Gabriel’s So. 2 on the charts and containing a song called “Crash Into Me” that would go on to become the band’s most famous. But it was clearly an important accelerant, peaking at no. And I was like, damn, he’s way more than a bartender!” By 1991, Matthews had emerged from behind the bar, assembled a damn band, and started making music that magnified his curious gaze.Ĭrash, which came out five years later on April 30, 1996, wasn’t DMB’s first album, and you can reasonably argue for or against it being the band’s best. “And it was like Paul McCartney or something,” says Reynolds. Speaking by phone from Sarasota, Florida, with birds chattering behind him, Reynolds says with a chuckle that Matthews never picked up or even mentioned a guitar that was lying around, but at the end of the night he did sit down at a piano, mumble something, and start to play. Reynolds remembers the first time he went over to Matthews’s place to mess around with the young bartender’s drum machine. He observed and absorbed and finally casually-strategically approached them to share his musical ideas. He closed out tabs and he kept tabs on some of the locally revered musicians on the thriving live fusion scene, like guitar impresario Tim Reynolds, drummer Carter Beauford, and saxophone player LeRoi Moore.
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‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: The Earnest Intimacy of Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me”Īs a bartender at a lively place called Miller’s near the University of Virginia in the late ’80s, Matthews had operated, for a time, as a kind of professional stranger: that guy with the towel over his shoulder and his eye on it all that worker tasked with divining when to strike up a back-slapping, sweaty new friendship and when to maintain a dignified, nod-if-you-need-ice remove.
In that sense, it’s an unusual place to be, where you’re not as much of a stranger as you were.” “You lose the watcher, because you become watched, so that’s about the most difficult thing. “He said the strangest part is that you sort of stop being a witness to the people around you,” Matthews remarked to the Dispatch-News that April about what Carrey had told him. It had more gravity: They talked about the consequences of fame. All in all, not a bad little run for a 20-something singer-songwriter!īut Matthews and Carrey’s chat wasn’t just two dudes congratulating one another. And now the band was at Saturday Night Live, its second visit in a year, to play the first two singles from Crash: the plucky “So Much to Say” ( a-little-baaaay-by!) and the funky “Too Much.” Around the same time, the Richmond Dispatch-News reported, Matthews found himself having one of those pinch-yourself moments: a conversation with the red-hot Jim Carrey, just two flexi-faced, silly-voiced savants talking shop about their ascendence into the mid-’90s zeitgeist.
By 1994 the band was opening for Blues Traveler and Phish. A few years earlier DMB had been available for gigs at Charlottesville bars, fraternities, and debutante balls. Twenty-five years ago, in the whirlwind days before the late April 1996 release of Dave Matthews Band’s sophomore studio album, Crash, Dave Matthews the man was both savoring and confronting what it meant to be truly hitting the big time.
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