Incident report
Keir Nicoll, The Peak

A spinning wiener balloon, slowly spiralling above - that's all I remember...

But really, even though there was enough haze choking the air in the Chan Centre's spacious hall that I was happy I'd forgotten to bring my own, the String Cheese Incident show last Wednesday night was memorable. Possibly more than anything else, it was the foray into the 'headzone' that most impressed this intrepid ethnographer. It's easy to forget that granola society commands the numbers it does until you venture out to a concert hall or field for a general meeting.

The contrast between the prestigious (read: snootier than a wine sniffer) Chan Centre and its patrons on October 16 was worth the ticket price alone. The highly overdressed, double-breasted-suit-sporting door staff seemed happy enough though, and, in an odd way, their overstuffed livery complimented the uniform of the crowd. The peasant dresses flowed, the cone-shaped joints glowed and there were more dreadlocks than in Peter Tosh's shower drain.

Don't get me wrong - I've spent my fair share of time baked in the sun at some Grateful Dead tribute roster band concert or another, and they can be great fun. Indeed, this performance involved its own share of the cultist performative activities - the aforementioned wiener balloon being only one of many soaring through the concert hall's barrel vault. A giant squid-balloon-apparatus bounced above the crowd for most of the show, and at one point, dozens of 'classic' balloons were batted about, appearing from above like a giant pan of popcorn.

The String Cheese Incident does fit well into the 'Grateful Dead Tribute Roster' genre. The lineage of post-GD post-Phish-head music seems to have currently culminated in SCI and their strain of souped-up, hillbilly-bluegrass-treble-rock (the lineage really starts with the Kingston Trio, just between you and me).

The band consists of fifteen-effect-pedal-toting-electro-mandolin player Michael Kang, Elton-John-invoking keyboard player Kyle Hollingsworth, drummer Michael Travis (whose kit would make Neil Peart anxious), bass banger and riff pounder Keith Moseley, and frontman Bill Nershi. Nershi looks like a less greasy Jerry Garcia who'd spent much more time in men's groups running through forests wearing nothing but essential oil of patchouli. SCI are technically very proficient, and they gelled a number of very engaging jams both at the lighter and darker ends of this genre of music (read: really bouncy happy to spooky bouncy happy). However, SCI often drifted into AOL-esque soft-rock samba sequences, veering dangerously toward sounding like Ottmar Liebert (could the keyboardist actually be Elton John?). Ultimately, their music sounds like the product of a circle jerk with Liebert, David Grismond, and the Grateful Dead at Dave Matthews' house.

The SCI honestly sound too much like duelling Allan Parsons and elder Pat Metheny for their own good. Truth be known, this Dead City dropped-out and tuned-in scribe yearns with a psychedelic tear in eye for the good old days of Phish and their more absurd, intense, and less rhumbafied musicianship. However, the SCI do have a well-orchestrated music and light show, and they played for a whopping three hours. Add to this the uniformly smiling faces in the crowd and it was, over all, a feel-good scene. In the face of such other super-tech but coldly executed live acts such as Stereolab or Blonde Redhead, it's nice to see a band so obviously and generously playing from the heart.

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