After slogging through an insistent downpour and the resulting thick, oozing mud, the guys trading chest bumps and girls woo-hooing with the regularity (and irritation) of a snooze alarm would have accepted the DMB on auto-pilot. They needed no spectacle.
Dave Matthews Band, for certain, are not about spectacle. The closest they came was when a handful of red balls bounced over the crowd during “You Might Die Trying,” as the stage was bathed in matching red light. That was pretty much that. Matthews took the stage one song earlier looking, more or less, like he always has forever (gray button-up with sleeves rolled up, black pants); daring stage wear for him is a T-shirt and jeans. The band looked the same, too, or at least the same as it has been since saxophone player LeRoi Moore’s death last year: horn players Jeff Coffin and Rashawn Ross and guitarist Tim Reynolds, joining stalwarts Boyd Tinsley (violin), Carter Beauford (drums), and Stefan Lessard (bass). But the Dave Matthews Band was different on Saturday night. Or, at least it tried to be. And, at its most successful, it was.
Hidden in the middle of a sprawling — yet abrupt by DMB standards — set, there was another Dave Matthews Band. A world inside the world, as Don DeLillo might say, populated by a economical rock band that played songs with definitive beginnings, middles, and ends instead of never-ending series of middles, and middles to those middles, and so on. Playing four songs (”Funny the Way It Is,” “Seven,” “Shake Me Like a Monkey,” and “Why I Am”) from this summer’s Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King bunched one after the other — only broken up by similar-in- spirit “So Damn Lucky” from Matthews’ solo record, Some Devil — the group proved they need not extend every song merely for the sake of doing so. They maybe even shouldn’t.
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