Background and influences

- Music was always in the family. It was always around. We were always, you know, hearing music and always living music more or less, through my parents and my brothers and sisters. So it was in the house all the time, you know, 24 hours a day. And jazz music I might add, as well as gospel and whatever was on the radio at the time, which was my favorite thing. You know, The Beatles and Dave Clark Five and The Monkees and you know, all the British groups that invaded the US at the time. I was exposed to Buddy Rich at age three. My dad took me to see Buddy Rich. Well, he didn't have a babysitter, so he kind of had to take me and I was fortunate enough to see Buddy play and perform and not knowing what the drums or any instrument was all about. I didn't know what music was all about. I was fascinated with the look of Buddy, you know, his posture and his speed and the whole thing. And I thought that was like fascinating to me, you know. So, I decided to take up the drums more or less. I wanted to emulate his every move, you know, everything about Buddy Rich. I wanted to be Buddy Rich. I wanted to become this guy. So therefore, I jumped on a set of drums that my dad had in the basement from one of the bands that he was playing in and just started messing around with them. And my dad saw something. He thought, you know, I would probably go further with working on this drum kit, you know, so he decided to buy me this Roy Rogers drum kit. And I had this Roy Rogers drum kit, which was made out of paper heads and like 10 shells, and I beat it up in a few days, but the love for that was there. My dad knew something was going to evolve from this, you know, this card of wanting to beat up on these tubs. So, that's where it all started, and I just took it from there and here I am. My major influences early in my career, were people such as Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Tony Williams, Cozy Cole, Papa Jo Jones. I was more or less into the straight ahead thing, but along with James Brown and Sly Stone and Stevie wonder, you know, those of kind of and The Jackson 5 and all that. So I wanted to incorporate that backbeat, that funk thing, you know, in there. Throughout my career, I've played with many, many different bands, many different styles of music. I've played with country bands, rock bands, fusion bands, even in orchestras playing timpani and what have you. I feel as though it's important to do that, to expose yourself to everything that's out there. It's something that will make a musician, a better musician. One of the bands that I played in then, I kind of feel really proud of and really proud of bound is a band called secrets. It was a fusion band that I played with out of Richmond, Virginia. Some great, great musicians came out of that band, and I was fortunate enough to be exposed to those great musicians. (acoustic music) The Dave Matthews Band came together through a number of gigs at this club in Charlottesville, Virginia called Millers. Dave at the time was a bartender and he would see a LeRoi, our sax player and myself do tons and tons of gigs at the club. It was a jazz club and well a jazz club, jazz clubs/whatever, because they cater to a lot of other things, a lot of other styles of music, but jazz was the focus at the club. And Dave decided that he wanted to get something going, as far as a group and he wanted LeRoi and I to help him out with this project that he had in mind, he came to us with a tape of some guitar work that he had done of like two or three tunes. And when he played them for us, we thought that this was something, you know, kind of interesting here, you know, and we thought that maybe we could interject some positive stuff into his sound that he had, you know, his style of playing guitar on his vocal style. We, the three of us got together and started rehearsing these two or three songs in my mom's basement. We decided we needed a bass player at the time. You know, after a couple of weeks of rehearsing stuff, we decided we needed a bass player. We called upon a Stefan Lessard, who at the time was like 15 or 16 years old. He could read well, he could play his bass well, and we thought that he would be a disciplined, pretty disciplined musician to be a part of this little thing that we were getting together. After a month or so we decided to take this thing to the studio and record for the first time after working on, let's say six or seven tunes that we had created in my mom's basement. And we did so, and the little demo tape turned out nicely, and we were like, quite happy with it. We played played it for some friends and in the community and our friends, they really enjoyed it. They thought it was something that was going to take off at the time we had no intentions of trying to become rock stars or anything like that. And we still don't, you know, we were just musicians and we liked playing our instruments, but everyone at the time were saying that we needed to pursue it and get it on the airwaves and do this and do that. And we were like, okay, you know, let's go ahead and pursue this thing to the hilt. We did so, at the time we were in the studio, there was one song, 'Tripping Billies', LeRoi thought that the song needed, you know, a fiddle in the works of the tune. And we decided to get Boyd Tinsley to come and sit in on that particular tune and the session. Boyd did so and he nailed it on the first take. And we were all doing back flips in the studio because of this, you know, so we decided, hey, we need to nab this guy. So we got Boyd to consider joining the band. It took about six months to do so, but we eventually got him. From the moment I heard Dave's material, I knew right off the bat that it was something that I wanted to pursue. I felt as though his music was a challenge for me. And it was something that, made me decide right at that moment that I could take this jazz music that I've been listening to all my life basically, and apply that to this new style of music that Dave had introduced me to. You know, it was it's acoustic music, but his style of playing the guitar and his style of singing was fascinating to me. And it was something that I hadn't heard before. So I thought this would be this great challenge for me to incorporate my style of playing into what he was doing.