Dave Matthews Band And The Sound Of Settling
At 13, I began turning my childhood bedroom into a reliquary for the Dave Matthews Band. Subway-sized posters hung from the popcorn ceilings with images of Matthews singing from the stage of the Tibetan Freedom Concert or his band ambling through the forest on a hazy, gray day. On one wall, a massive matted frame held torn ticket stubs, snapshots of the stage I took while following the band on a winter tour in New England, and the title page of my high-school term paper about them, signed by Matthews in red Sharpie swoops: "Grayson — Peace and thanks, Dave Matthews." In a photo beneath it, I am 17 and posing with him, wearing the look of mixed terror and joy that only meeting your teenage idol can inspire.
In less than a decade, I saw the band 40 times and amassed a collection of 500 bootleg recordings, each dutifully hand-labeled with set lists and salient concert notes, stored in gargantuan CD binders onto which I had affixed Dave Matthews Band patches. I had a girlfriend, sure, but I realize now that the band was my real childhood love. I haven't lived in that room in North Carolina for nearly two decades, but my parents leave it largely as it was when I graduated in 2001, a dusty shrine to the heroes of my adolescence. For them, I think, it is the last will and testament of my childhood, a roadmap between the person I was when I first heard the group at 13 and the person I was quickly becoming by the time I left home.
Indeed, for a kid in the rural South, the Dave Matthews Band could open worlds. From their earliest days in the coffee shops and downtown bars of Charlottesville, Va., these musicians dared to web a busy mix of
