The Road To Big Whiskey: The Dave Matthews Band narrated by Sam Erickson
Elena Pizzetti
Erickson grew up in Charlottesville, the vibrant university town which in the second half of the ´80s sees the evolution and interweaving of the personal and artistic lives of all the musicians that have marked the history of the DMB. When he was still a high school student, Sam used to attend the local venues that offered live music, especially Miller´s and the C&O, where he went to see concerts by Cosmology (John D´Earth´s band), Boyd Tinsley Band and Down Boy Down. He was there for the first Dave Matthews´s gigs with TR3 (Tim Reynolds´s band) and for the band´s debut at Trax. In 1994 he was asked to take photographs for the booklet of the first official DMB album, Under The Table And Dreaming. It was the beginning of an artistic partnership that has lasted through the band´s entire history to date. Since then, Erickson has been almost a constant in recording studios, concerts, on stage and backstage, photographing and filming a vast amount of material. In 1998 he filmed a documentary for MTV on the making of Before These Crowded Streets. In 2007 he filmed Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City Music Hall, published in the dvd of the same name. He directed Across The Pond, the dvd featured in the boxset DMB Europe 2009 (review on the February issue of Buscadero) which immortalizes in an intimate and evocative way the DMB concert of June 26, 2009 at the Brixton Academy in London.
The most comprehensive and ambitious work ever produced by Erickson on the band is called The Road To Big Whiskey: an hour and a half documentary which aired on American Fuse TV in June 2009, and is now in Italian theaters thanks to the screenings organized by Con-Fusion, the Official Italian DMB Fan Club. Divided into four chapters, The Road focuses on the making of the band´s latest album, Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King. Viewers are taken to recording studios in Charlottesville and Seattle where the band was writing and arranging new songs, and we can witness the birth of Seven and Why I Am and the first recording of Shake Me Like A Monkey. There is a special, melancholy charm in those parts featuring LeRoi Moore, still alive at the beginning of the recording sessions. The central part of the documentary goes along the entire history of the band, from the first performances in Charlottesville till today.
Erickson´s video camera takes us on a 360 degrees journey, showing footage and testimonials from recording studios and backstage, chasing explosive live sequences and even exploring the world of the crew working behind the colossal architecture of the DMB shows. Everything is embellished by a selection of extraordinary photographs dating back to the 80s, taken from the director´s archives. No lack of goodies and rarities, such as early versions of some songs of Before These Crowded Streets or the hint of the unreleased Sugar Will: the documentary is packed with quality material that only the archive of an early and constant witness can offer. A key ingredient is added to the sociologist´s research ability and to the artist´s eye: the deep bond of friendship that ties Erickson to all the members of the band, a bond which is evident in everyone´s total openness and intimacy during the interviews. Every moment of the DMB´s life is openly explored: the tough times of the Lillywhite Sessions and Everyday, the death of LeRoi Moore, the rebirth of the band and the rediscovered joy of playing together in Big Whiskey.
I reach Sam by phone in New York for an interview on The Road and the DMB. Here is an excerpt from what will turn out to be a long and pleasant chat about cinema, photography and the shared passion for film. Before we start, we exchange a few words on the delay with which the DMB is becoming popular in Italy and Europe. I express my confidence in the power of word of mouth by those who attended the three Italian concerts, similar to what happened in the U.S. at the beginning. "Exactly, and the band is putting more effort as well."
How did you first meet the members of the Dave Matthews Band? Were you already friends when you started working with them as a photographer?
My connections to the band go back a long way even well before Dave Matthews himself arrived in Charlottesville. The first guy I knew in the band was Boyd. I must have met him in 1983 or 84. He and I were in the same crowd in highschool and I used to see him playing his violin with friends and jamming at parties. Also in highschool I knew about LeRoi through his dad who was my driver´s ED teacher. Carter I used to see play with some jazz bands back in those days. Dave used to sing with TR3 when he first arrived in town – it must have been 1988 or 89. The first time I ever saw him sing was at the C&O. He sang Exodus by Bob Marley. He had very long hair then, almost all the way down his back. I didn´t meet Dave until the fall of 1991: I was dating his sister Jane and she invited me to come see her brother´s band play at Trax. I met Dave after the show and he and I became real good friends as well. I didn´t actually professionally photograph the band for another couple of years, until the recording sessions for Under The Table And Dreaming. I took a lot of the pictures in that album´s booklet. It was the summer of 1994, but I was hanging around with them since 1991 basically.
The Road to Big Whiskey features many rare recordings and unreleased live footage. Have you got a lot of similar material that was not included? Will there be a chance to see it in the future?
This documentary is litterally the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kinds of photographs and footage that I have of the DMB. Obviously it´s up to the band and management as to how and when the rest of the material gets released, but you can rest assured by knowing that there is a lot of stuff that I have. A lot of it relates to the Before These Crowded Streets sessions. I spent a year filming them almost straight through, from the recording sessions at The Plant and at the Electric Lady through most of the summer world tour: I went to Brazil with them that year (1998, author´s note), I filmed the shows at Giants Stadium and Foxboro stadium - the first time they played big football stadiums - and the last show in Chicago that became the Live in Chicago album. There´s a lot of great material, also from behind the scenes, that relates to that period and one of these days we´ll figure out how and when to release it.
In the documentary you interviewed several crew members who´ve been working with the band since the beginning. It looks like an extended family: What´s the ´secret ingredient´ of such a long-lasting cohesion?
Everyone likes to talk about their band being a family, it´s a bit of a cliché, but in this case there is no better way to put it. I think the crew has a lot to do with the success of the DMB over the years: the consistency of their great sound due to Jeff Bagby, the consistency of the amazing lighting due to Fenton (Williams, author´s note). I don´t know what the band would do if any of them wasn´t there - if Ian Kuhn wasn´t there… There´s so many of those guys that have been there from the beginning and their kind of knowledge comes from spending an amount of time on the road with the band. They have been building the show night after night.
In terms of what the secret ingredient is for why that works, you´ve got a very loyal band that pays their people well, that gave people opportunities and trusted them. The people took those opportunities and rewarded that trust. There´s always been a really great relationship over the years between the band, the management and the crew and that´s the secret: just trust and opportunity.
It´s curious: Dave defined DMB´s music with the words ´joy´ and ´honest´ to me, now you used the word ´loyal´ first…
Yes, absolutely, those two things go together. This is not a band that´s about mystery and anger, it´s guys who love playing music, and their music is very open and inviting to the audience and the people that participate in it, and that shows in the way that they deal with people that work for them.
You largely use black and white in your photos, whereas The Road was entirely filmed in color. Was it a choice you made specifically related to the audio-visual medium or was it a request of the TV?
Sort of a little bit of both. There aren´t any true black and white video formats. There is black and white movie film that you can shoot, but these days nobody shoots moving pictures in film almost at all anymore. So if you´re going to shoot something in video it´s gonna be color and then you can make it black and white if you want to. In still photography you can use black and white film that has a very particular looking feel. If there was such a thing in video I might use it, but there really isn´t. Then combine that with the fact that broadcasters almost always are going to want color programs.
How do you relate to digital technology?
I´m definitely old school, I prefer film to video generally speaking. Video technology has gotten closer to replicating the look of film than still film in my estimation. The footage we shot in 2009 for The Road was all filmed on really nice digital Sony HD cameras. In still photography I am still hanging on to my film cameras. I shoot most of the live concerts digitally these days, because usually people need those things so fast. Digital photography is really convenient, but I don´t find it as artistically satisfying as film, especially in portraits. With film it´s very satisfying: you´re holding a negative, you´re looking at it… it´s a tangible, physical piece of art. If I´m shooting in the studio or behind the scenes with the band I shoot film, because usually people don´t need those photographs right away, they´re things for the archive. One of the things I´m most proud of with my work with the DMB is just the archive of the photographs that I have taken over the years. It´s a tremendous amount of pictures that only a tiny percentage of which everyone´s ever seen before.
Who are your favorite photographers and directors?
I think any of us people that work in rock photography would agree in expressing extreme gratitude to the recently departed Jim Marshall, who set the bar for what behind the scenes rock´n´roll photography could be. He was an amazing photographer. In terms of film directors I´ve got a lot of favorites. What Scorsese did with The Last Waltz was amazing. I love late 60´s and early 70´s American cinema very much: Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dogday Afternoon, The Godfather… there are some great films made in the early 70´s in America. I´m not a big action, adventure, psy-fi or Avatar-kind film fan. I like a great story, an intimacy, a greediness to a film, that is often quite lacking into these big ticket movies.
You´re filming the band in the next Summer Tour. Is there going to be a DVD release?
Right now it´s just a question of getting great footage from this tour. I´m sure it will be released on the web and hopefully for commercial release some time later. Obviously the band and the management know what I have and over the years they´ve chosen to release it as they saw the need to. I do think there´s more than an emphasis in the whole organization with stocking the past, starting to release it to let the people know what rich history the band has. I think you´re gonna be seeing a lot of this new stuff and a lot of the archive from the 90´s as well. I would guess that more and more often you´re gonna find special things that the band will do. But that´s not my area of expertise and I´ll leave it to the management to let everybody know exactly how the material is going to come out.
The Road was – and is going to be – screened in several cinemas in Italy. How does this make you feel? Could you have ever imagined it would get so far?
That´s fantastic, I certainly would love to see The Road released like that over here, because I do think it would work really well in a cinema. It´s incredibly exciting, I wish I could be there with you!
For those who can instead, the appointment is Saturday June 26th in Turin: The Road To Big Whiskey will be screened at 9 p.m. at Cinema Massimo (National Museum of Cinema). The hall will host an exhibit dedicated to the DMB, featuring selected shots of Erickson and two works by the artists Cristiano De Matteis and Giuseppe Andriano.
