Though it's well past 5:00 in the afternoon, Dave Matthews is not as awake as he'd like to be. But then, that's because he started the day rather more awake than he had wanted.
"I had a very diffuclt morning," Matthews explains. "Our bus arrived in Indianapolis at about 5:30 in the morning, and I hadn't been able to sleep on the bus. Then I got to the hotel room, and construction began at seven sharp." This, he adds, is why our interview, originally scheduled for 1:00 p.m., has been pushed back so drastically. "I was fairly delirious," he says sheepishly.
But that's life on the road, a reality Matthews knows only too well. He and his band (Carter Beauford on drums, Stefan Lessard on bass, Boyd Tinsley on violin and Leroi Moore on saxophone) were full-time road warriors even before they hit the charts last year with their major label release, the quadruple-platinum Under the Table and Dreaming (RCA). The group formed in 1991 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Matthews, a native of South Africa, was working as a bartender. He met Moore and Beauford and began recording a demo of some songs he had written. A few informal jam sessions evolved into a full-time band, a self-released CD and, eventually, a major-label record deal.
Early in their career, the Matthews Band played bars, small clubs, frat houses, VFW halls, anyplace it could get a booking--and became intimately familiar with such extra-musical problems as the effect of high humidity on acoustic instruments.
"It got pretty damned humid in those little clubs that we played," says Matthews, who leads the band with his textural, percussive acoustic guitar playing. "We'd go out of tune a little, but it's not as bad as cold winds, like when you go to Europe and one nippy wind comes over the hill and completely detunes every instrument on the stage, except for maybe the drums."
At the same time, Matthews and company were refining a sound that was unlike anything else on the circuit. It wasn't just the intrumentation that set the group apart, it was the balance the band achieved between improvisational grit and compositional integrity. According to Matthews, what he and his bandmates go for isn't a forest of notes, but a snese of space within the songs--no jam-band indulgences.
"One of the pleasures of playing in this band is that there is so much space, you can sort of throw things into places and vary what you're doing," he says. "It just worked out that everyone has a space to move in. Carter is a very busy drummer, but because the melody instruments are playing in a rhythmic and spacious way, it makes more room for Carter to spread himself out inside of it. It's luck that we all ended up in the same place, because it allows us all to express ourselves best."
Luck may explain how these five came to be in the same band, but it's Matthews's skill as a songwriter and bandleader that accounts for the success of the band's current album, Crash (RCA). Catchy and compelling, the songs showcase the other members so well that it's easy to overlook how distinctly Matthews himself plays. But he shows some amazing stuff here, like the beautifully off-kilter rhythm pattern that opens "So Much To Say," or the marvelously minimal pattern that anchors "Crash Into Me," which uses a strummed drone and a few well-chosen bass notes to sketh a rich harmonic cycle. Clearly, Matthews is a gifted and inventive guitarist. But his concept of acoustic guitar is, well, a tad idiosyncratic.

GUITAR WORLD ACOUSTIC: Why acoustic guitar? IT seems to me that 95 out of 100 guitarists, were they to play with a band like yours, would immedeately choose to play electric.

DAVE MATTHEWS: The reason I stick with the acoustic is that I have an obsession with its percussive qualities. It has more of a drum quality that the electric, and on top of that, it's a security blanket for me.
It's amazing how completely foreign electric guitar is to me. When I pick one up, it seems like such an entirely different instrument, and the subtlety that it seems to require to play is something that I haven't developed. Whereas with acoustic, I feel like I can sort of smack away at it and break strings. Plus it keeps itself in tune fairly well, and I can feel it without all the amps; I can feel the guitar resinating.

GWA: Could it just be that a matter of simply having it right up against your gut?

MATTHEWS: Yeah. I think it's that. And that may be one of the reasons that I hold my guitar up there by my nipples [laughs], which isn't as popular with other guitarists. But I think it's because most of my guitar-learning years were spent sitting down, so the guitar was way up high. And then when I stood up and put a strap on, I tried to get it as high as it would be if I was sitting.
One of the first things I thought when putting this band together was that I wanted to play acoustic guitar in it. I didn't want to have a really powerful, electric guitar sound. I wanted to see if I could develop a powerful acoustic guitar sound.

GWA: But what I hear in the Dave Matthews Band is a lot subtler than the kind of sound you'd expect from a band with a powerful guitar sound. It's almost as if, by playing acoustic guitar, you're being a sort of passive/aggressive leader.

MATTHEWS: [laughs] Yeah, but when you have a really large electric sound, whether it's keyboards or electric guitar, there isn't a lot of space to fill. Someone like Eddie Van Halen only needs to play the first and the fifth, and it sounds like the biggest chord in the universe. Whereas with an acoustic guitar, you sort of have to fill more space.
And then, in some senses, the power that electric guitar takes up in other bands is taken up by Stefan's warm, melodic bass playing, leaving me a lot of room in the middle there to do what I do: which is try to turn the guitar into a drum. Desperately try.

GWA: Speaking of drums, one of the things that struck me about Crash is the way Carter's playing recalls Billy Cobham's work in the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, yeah. He would enjoy hearing that.

GWA: But the way the two of you interact is not like the way John McLaughlin interacted with Cobham in the Mahavishnu; it's more like the relationship between a percussionist and a drummer.

MATTHEWS: That's really interesting. There's a great deal of communication among Carter, myself, and Stefan. The three of us have a little core that we build in there. I react very much to what Carter does. But he also reacts to what I do--in an instant. It's a great honor to play with someone who can move so hastily in reaction to what someone else does. He reacts to lyrics as well as my guitar playing.
The interaction between me and Carter works because of my love of time and his love of acoustic guitar. They bring us together in a really strong way. He and Stefan build such a foundation that I feel free. But I bet he'd say that we do the same for him. My praises for Carter's musicality are endless.

GWA: I can't say I blame you. Given the large role that rhythm plays for you, both in the studio and on stage, how do the songs develop? Do you come in with ideas of how the band will fit into these songs, or do the others just divine what you do?

MATTHEWS: There are conversations that we have the first time we play a song. Like when we worked out "Crash Into Me," I might have said to Carter, "How about alternating between a straight one-two-three-four beat on the snare and a march?" And then he took that and did whatever he did with it. Stefan sort of follows the root, but everyone takes their own initiative with the songs. I mean, if there's something that I really don't like, I will say something. But I don't think one of the reasons that I put this band together was so that I could walk in and everyone would understand what I was trying to get at.
And I feel so honored, in a way, so impressed by each individual's playing, that I really don't want to say, "You should play this." It's more like, "This is the song. What would you play on this?"

GWA: Do you know the kinds of things they react to, and anticipate how they'll play?

MATTHEWS: Yeah, and it goes completely in the wrong direction. [laughs] A song like "Crash Into Me" describes itself immedeately. If I were to play it for you solo, it would be the same song as when the whole band plays it. It was improved by arrangement, but the song was very much finished before that.
But it's different on a song like "Drive In Drive Out." When I came up with that, I knew that it was a Carter song. And I wrote the ending knowing how Carter would make it happen. I knew that he would turn that into this 6/8 madness, because I'd heard him do it before. It's a gift that he has. So in that instance, the song needs the band; it needs everyone's part and everyone's contribution to make the arrangement happen at all.
So there's a hell of a lot of variation in how the songs get written and put together. But I think that the more we get to know each otehr, the more writing we'll do together. I find a lot of spaces and a lot of clarity when I play acoustic guitar alone. I think we'll be able to split it up and see where the group writing takes us and where my writing takes us.

GWA: One thing I was to get back to is what you were saying about the drum aspect of the acoustic. A lot of people who play acoustic guitar with electric or loud bands end up just locking into a barre chord and strumming like crazy, with the result that the amount of harmonic information being expressed is fairly minimal. But you rarely play anything that simple.

MATTHEWS: Yeah. I think it comes from having played so much by himself before this band was formed. I had friends who played guitar and drums, and I used to play with them a little bit. But I was never really committed to a band; I never played or rehearsed extensively with a band. I played by myself, but I was very much obsessed with melody, as well as rhythm and percussiveness.
There were limitations to what I had learned by playing alone. What I wanted to do was play a backbeat while I was playing chords, and then sing over that. After trying that, I discovered that I could play more melodic progressions that were inside a chord. Or I could start writing with more of a melodic approach to the guitar, staying in a key but being more adventurous with the chords I was playing, allowing my voice to wander a little bit. Then I could use my voice as sort of a percussive instrument, as well.
I began to play very percussively on the guitar because I was fantasizing about having a drum kit behind me. Sometimes I wouldn't let any of the strings ring, almost like a reggae thing--kind of the way [Bob] Marley played. He wouldn't even play the chord; he just struck on, just hitting his guitar.
So that's where it came from, and when I started playing with Carter, he just inspired me even more to keep that style. When this band got together, it was a real confirmation to me that I wasn't going in a completely incorrect direction on the guitar. Having these people who I had been fans of for so long say, "That's cool. We'd like to play with you," was very important.

GWA: I would imagine so. What you said about playing as if you had a drum kit behind you reminds me of the way some blues recordings sound like the guitarist is hearing drum parts in his head, and playing as if they were there.

MATTHEWS: Exactly. I have a friend who plays down in New Orleans. This guy, Corey Hart. Not the Corey Hart who...

GWA: Not the "Sunglasses at Night" guy.

MATTHEWS: No, Corey Hart, the blues player. I love sitting and listening to him because I hear so many instruments happening. But it's just him and his guitar. Well, his foot, too. BUt you can hear the drummer, almost, and you can hear the harmonica player or the violin player, or whatever it is, because of the way he's treating the high strings. And you can hear the bass player or the chord player because of what he's playing lower down.
That was one thing I used to like to do. I liked to separate--take the bottom two or bottom three strings--the E, A and D--and play a pattern, sort of like a dance that my fingers do. And then, if I would have any spare fingers, I'd make a drone out of the higher strings. "Crash Into Me" is a good example of that. I have this drone on the higher strings and then the bass thing going on simultaneously. So it almost sounds like two different instruments. Well, it doesn't really sound like that, but they have two different spaces, and then the way my right hand hits the guitar makes another space.
If I really like a chord progression, I'll try to find a rhythm that will throw it into the air more, like on "Crash Into Me." At first it was a very straight guitar line, and had the drone and the same progression. IT was sort of like a country tune. But then, when I started breaking up where the root notes were landing, it changed the song a lot.
I think an opposite example is "Satellite" [from Under the Table and Dreaming], which began as an exercise for my fingers. It was played on three frets adjacent to each other, and was really ugly sounding. But it was a good exercise for my fingers. And when I spread it out over the scale, it became quite pretty.
I guess I try to cover a lot of bases. The nice thing, though, is that if I cover those bases on my guitar, it frees up the other instruments to either double up what I'm playing or do something else. So my idea in dividing up the quitar is to treat each string as a separate drum--almost treating each fret on each string as a separate drum.

GWA: Do you ever use alternate tunings, as many guitarists do, to keep from falling into the same pattern of chord shapes on the fingerboard?

MATTHEWS: Yeah, I do that at home, sometimes. I've often thought that would be a way I could improve, or just vary, my writing. I guess I should start considering doing that on the road a little more and writing that way. It's sort of the same thing John Lennon said when he started writing on the piano--it was just because he was running out of ideas on the guitar. I thought that was interesting.

GWA: Still, you guys seem to be doing pretty well in the ideas department. I mean, take a song like "Too Much." Not only are there those wonderful stop-start bits in the arrangements, but you took several discrete musical elements and made something of their relationship to one another. That's something you don't hear often these days, particularly on the kind of songs that end up in regular rotation on MTV.

MATTHEWS: Yeah. I don't know where the hell that bridge came from; it was a big surprise, because it was a giant departure from the rest of the song. But it fits right in, and it makes the song make sense to me. We were very excited when we were in the studio. That song beat the hell out of us, which is funny, because it comes across as the most "on" in a lot of ways--or the most clearly in your face. But it was the song that took us the longest to record. We were all like, "Goddammit. We love this song so much!" But we were still beaten by it. It sounded too fast or too slow. And then I think we went back and found that the first take was the one we liked the best. After like a week of being beaten up by that song, we went back to the early tape and said, "Well, that's a good one."

GWA: Well, you know, you often have to screw something up to realize that you like it best the way you had it originally.

MATTHEWS: [laughs] Yeah, that's true. I often feel like there's a puppeteer somehwere, because I'm so often shocked by where my fingers fall or where the melodies come from. I can't credit myself, because it usually come from mistakes. A lot of mistakes lead to some of my favorite songs.

GWA: Freud said that there are no real accidents; that often, what you think are accidents are really what you actually wanted to do, but didn't know you wanted.

MATTHEWS: Oh, yeah? That's probably one of the few things that I agree with him on. The whole "mother" thing makes me nervous.

GWA: Well, it made people nervous back then, too. But that reminds me. What music did you listen to when you were young? Who did you try to play like when you were learning how to play?

MATTHEWS: I never really spent a lot of time learning other people's music. When I was first studying the guitar, I may have learned a couple of easy Beatles songs. There was a lot of music in my house when I was growing up. I think my mom was ina Vivaldi phase when I was in her womb, because I am so inexplicably insane about Vivaldi. But there was also a lot of Tchaikovsky and Bach and Beethoven--all the pop ones. And Stravinsky, a little bit. My brother was the one who started playing the weirder, strange, more contemporary things like Stravinsky and Mahler.
But the first music that I chose, that I really fell for, was pop music. I like the Jackson Five for a little while, because I was five. Then I got very obsessed witht he Beatles, because they made perfect things, as far as I was concerned. I was very young--about seven--and I couldn't understand how anybody could make such perfect things. It made me think extraordinary things were possible if people could so consistently make great music. And then, when I was about 10, I guess, my brother introduced me to, like Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and Jethro Tull. But at the same time, I grew up with a lot of folk music--James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Joan Baez, Buffy St. Marie. So there were a lot of different kinds of music that I listened to.
I think the person that inspired me most when I was a teenager was Bob Marley. He was on the edge, at least socially, but very accessible, and also an innovator. And I loved the rhythm. That was the thing that I thought was missing from a lot of the music that was on the edge then. I mean, I was a teenager; I was pissed. I was in South Africa; I was really pissed. But a lot of the edgier music was--well, ugly doesn't bother me, but I think you can express ugliness and still be clever about it. So although I still really appreciate a lot of heavier music, it was rare that a band like Led Zeppelin cam along, who were experimental and would play with rhythms.
That was one of the reasons I started getting into reggae and African music more in my late teens, why eventually I got into African jazz and then came to the States and met all the guys down in Virginia. Because jazz is unafraid of melodies. Not in the same way, but like classical music. And to African music, and Latin music. Music that has a history to it is not afraid of melody, and I think one of the reasons American music has been so great is that, much like African and Latin music, it couldn't be stood on by oppressive sources. God knows, Africa's been stood on forever, but there's a music that comes, and I think a lot of concentration has gove into music, because it's very hard to oppress art. You can oppress its product, but you can't really oppress its source.
So I got into different kinds of music, music that inspired me to not want to sing monotonous vocals, that inspired me to sing as wacked-out as I could think of without feeling that I was too much of a yodeler. And that inspired me to try and write guitar things that could be edgy, but not blase. Because a lot of times when this heavy music comes out, I feel like asking, "Well, what's new? What are you trying to say with this? Are you just trying to say that everything's fine, and you're just going to make a noise and scream because you're upset that you didn't get your ice cream this morning? Or are you going to play something where you're reaching, where you're trying to find something?"
So I just keep trying to, not follow in the footsteps, but follow in the spirit of people who have inspired me. People like Bob Marley. People like Abdullah Ibrahim or Keith Jarrett. Stuff like that.

GWA: It's interesting that you named two pianists and only one guitarist.

MATTHEWS: Oh, I'm a huge fan of pianos. If pianos were lighter, maybe I'd be a piano player. It'd be hard to have one up there by my nipples.

--GWA