Walking up to Red Rocks on Thursday night, you wouldn’t have known, by the fans’ moods, that the String Cheese Incident is breaking up.
Like any incident, the atmosphere was festive, conversational and inebriated. The fans – known widely as some of the most avid and involved fans of any band – were there to party and hang and dance, even if it was possibly the band’s fourth- to-last show ever.
The first evening of String Cheese’s four-night stand at Red Rocks was a party, despite the news that guitarist Billy Nershi is leaving the band after these shows – thus breaking up the Cheese – in favor of pursuing rootsier music.
The band was never visibly off, even though they’ve admitted that the past seven months haven’t been the easiest.
Instead the band was unstoppable in its pursuit of the groove. While most improvisational roots bands claim to have the ability to connect with their audiences on a transcendent, Vulcan- like level, only a few actually can.
Other bands are just referring to the quality of drugs being passed around the audience, but String Cheese really does have that otherworldly ability to connect with the masses bobbing along. Most of it is the music, sure, but a lot of it is the vibe the band fosters.
Seriously, what other six-piece group is going to take turns hula-hooping during an extended midsong jam?
The band’s music was ruled by the funk, the jazz, and the rhythm and blues – set within typically noodly compositions. String Cheese played a set that stretched far across its expansive catalog, touching on older songs that took the wind out of the crowd as soon as they recognized the opening strains.
One of the highest points came in the form of a moonlit, tripped-out cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” which opened the second set.
As with any String Cheese concert, the fans are every bit as important as the music – and that’s something the band would likely agree with.
From the walk up the south ramp, where a woman was pontificating over a hand-rolled cigarette (“These rocks are, like, a million years old”), to the middle of the swaying madness, where a 3-year-old girl was dressed head to toe in glow- ropes, never leaving her mother’s bobbing shoulders, this was a celebratory bunch obviously out to enjoy themselves without focusing too much on the sad reality that they might never see this incarnation of the band again.
Because of printing deadlines, this review was filed well before the band was to finish its set.
