The 100: Dave Matthews Band, BEFORE THESE CROWDED STREETS

Back when I worked as an editorial assistant at Spin, my boss gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received, and one that I still hold relatively true to some 20 years later. She said she tried to never leave any kind of personal trail for herself online, which in 2004 largely meant she didn’t post to message boards or comment on blogs. “Don’t put anything on the Internet you weren’t paid to put there” went her mantra, and though it became harder and harder to live a life with a small digital footprint, I’ve done a solid job of minimizing the number of embarrassing bits of online detritus that could be used against me should I run for office or get nominated for an Oscar.

That wasn’t always the case, of course. When I first got online in the mid ‘90s, I treated message boards like social clubs and was eager to provide my input. I mostly wanted to talk about bands I liked, which is why I haunted the old message boards at CDNow (a long dead online music retailer that was later folded into Amazon) and at Nirvana Fan Club (which was primarily a Nirvana fan site but the boards were a wide-ranging music discussion forum). During my jam band phase in high school, I also spent a lot of time comparing notes on bootlegs at phish.net and weighing in on the live experience at nancies.org.

That last one was the primary online forum for Dave Matthews Band, which had begun as a college rock curiosity when they first showed up on MTV in 1994 with songs from Under the Table and Dreaming and were a full-blown pop phenomenon by the time the decade was out. I’m not sure DMB were ever cool in the indie sense (though Dave did appear on the cover of Spin) but they were hugely important to my high school experience. A true crossover group, they appealed to all ages and genders, were on the radio but also rewarded deep dives into bootleg culture, and provided a mainstream jumping off point for kids to get interested in jazz and folk and world music.

When I was growing up DMB toured every summer, and for reasons beyond my understanding they always wrapped their jaunts with multi-night stands in Hartford that usually took place the weekend before school started back up again. From 1998 to 2000, that was a baked-in tradition for me, a way to send the summer into oblivion and have one last outdoor shake-around before getting back to the educational grind. I genuinely loved those shows even if I’m a little embarrassed by my fandom now, and I got deeply invested in the types of statistical ephemera that makes jam music appeal to certain brains: set lists, variations, combinations, and obscurities. I spent a lot of time developing theories and getting into friendly arguments with other fans about this stuff, and we also debated the best DMB albums. Most people caped for Under the Table and Dreaming, while people slightly more invested in their poppier side stood with Crash, and true weirdos went all-in for their third album, 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets.

Before These Crowded Streets is a total blank check move, as it has a couple of true flexes (Alanis Morissette, then one of the biggest stars on the planet, does guest vocals on two songs; the damn Kronos Quartet also shows up twice) but is mostly the sound of the band following every one of their oddest impulses. First single “Don’t Drink the Water” was a wild table-setter, with its more distinctive low end and deeply strange structure and no real chorus. It had Middle Eastern tunings (“The Last Stop”), a queasy minor-key live favorite (“Halloween”), deeply horny prog-jazz (“Crush”), and a sprawling epic called “The Stone” that felt like an unsettling score for an incomplete psychedelic horror movie. Some of these songs became beloved institutions, but for a band primarily know as a party act this was a record full of bad vibes. I instantly adored it, perhaps because I appreciated the big artistic swings but also maybe because I knew it made the frat drunks feel kind of sad.

Before These Crowded Streets was released April 28, 1998. I got a haircut that day, an experience I have never cared for and still don’t. But I was excited on that Tuesday because I knew I would be at the mall and adjacent to a record store (I believe it was a Strawberries but I’m not entirely sure; I do know it wasn’t the Sam Goody, which was at the other end of the mall) which would give me a window to buy the album. I have spent my entire adult life chasing the feeling of getting ahold of new releases. I was never happier than when I had a new CD in my hand. There was such a sense of potential that I can still feel in my bones but I have rarely managed to recreate over the past few decades. It’s one of my great sources of middle-aged sadness. I don’t do a whole lot of purposeful listening to Dave Matthews Band anymore, but I still cry to “The Dreaming Tree” when nobody’s watching.