SPIN: You were a bartender in Charlottesville, Virginia, before you became an international rockstar. Is there much difference between slinging bottles and rocking arenas?

DAVE: I was never as attatched to making a good drink as I am to putting on a good show. My motivation when I was bartending was to annihilate people. I was a heavy pourer. And if a customer showed some gusto, I would fill his glasses until he was useless and I had to drop him on a park bench somewhere. I think I have the same motivation playing live: I want people to leave psyched and thinking either "What a nice guy!" or "What a nice band!"

SPIN: What performers do that for you?

DAVE: Trent Reznor. I'm just into him. The whole way he presents himself. He walks out there naked. I think I do the same in my own nice-guy, smiley, Southern way. When I was doing an acoustic tour with [honorary DMB guitarist] Tim Reynolds, we'd sit in the back of the bus before the gigs and crank up Nine Inch Nails and pretend we were Trent and go insane. His stuff is like Beethoven. It's awesome.

SPIN: What sets Crash off from the last record, Under the Table and Dreaming?

DAVE: Last time, we were trying too hard. It was great for our purposes, but it missed the dirty corners, the mildew in the bathtub. We were sort of hesitant, and the album came out poppy and clean and crisp.On the new album we said, "Let's go in and mess things up."

SPIN: Is it ever intimidating to play witha bunch of seasoned jazz players like the ones in your band?

DAVE: Jesus, yes. One of the graces of this band was that I was so intimidated by them. Our style developed because there was no way I was going to tell them what to play. LeRoi [Moore, the band's saxophonist] has a knowledge of music so vast that a question that might take me a very long time to go through, like how to treat something, he's like, boom!

SPIN: You have an unusual sense of phrasing. Who are some of your models as a vocalist?

DAVE: When I started writing my own stuff at 19 or 20, I was listening to a lot of African music. Youssou N'Dour was a big influence. I'm also inspired by piano players like Keith Jarrett and Abdullah Ibrahim. The melodies they play just thrill me because they jump a long way through different ranges.

SPIN: What's with that dance of yours?

DAVE: You mean my goofy leg spasm? I can't fight off the dance. I think it's genetic. My grandmother used to do the Charleston when she was a wild woman of the '20s. and I think I got it from her. I guess I'll never have a cool rock'n'roll dance.

SPIN: Other bands that built their success on the fraternity circuit are accused of being excessively careerist, yet what you've one to build a grassroots following strikes me as more D.I.Y than most Lollapalooza bands.

DAVE: The funny thing is, those bands who are not in the "touring band" category, their sole purpose is to get a record deal. They send tapes and send tapes hoping to get a deal. We never did that. I think we sent one tape out and it fell into the great vast black hole of nothingness. No response. But people were coming out to see us. And they were paying my electricity and phone bills, so we decided to keep going. We just played wherever we could. The fact that the fraternities pulled us was coincidental.

SPIN:What's it like to party with Blues Traveler's John Popper?

DAVE: It's cheerful. It's high-spirited. The celebration doesn't necessarily exclude the less politically correct avenues of entertainment. He's a big brother to me. Whatever jokes people make about him, whatever their cynicism about him may be, Popper is a phenomenal musician. When John came into the studio for Under the Table and Dreaming, I was taking a crap upstairs. He walked in and shouted up at me, "What key is the song in?" And I said, "I think it's in G or A." By the time I had finished my business upstairs, he had finished his solo.

SPIN: What do you think of the coolness wedge the media has driven between the H.O.R.D.E. bands and the Lollapalooza bands?

DAVE: My standard is not whether it's cool but whether it's good. It's all music. Whether it's to satisfy anger or satisfy sorrow, it's just music. If it's the birds singing or it's a corpse being dragged from the ground, it's just music.

SPIN: Say the H.O.R.D.E. tour lands in the same town as Lollapalooza sometime this summer and there's a rumble. Do you think you guys could take Rancid?

DAVE: We could take them. If nothing else, we'd kill them with kindness. We could definitely drink them under the table. The thing is, I like Rancid. I like so many of those bands that we're supposed to be opposed to. I certainly would like to party with Rancid. I'd love to party with Trent Reznor.