Grassroots effort bearing fruit for String Cheese Incident

Although the jam band String Cheese Incident is based in Boulder, Colo., the quintet's hotbed of activity, for some reason, is Portland, Ore.

This past summer, the band hosted a three-day music and camping event at Horning's Hideout in Portland, attracting 4,000 fans. And this coming December, the group will return to Portland's Oregon Convention Center for a three-day bash dubbed "200l: A String Cheese Odyssey."

Steel Pulse will be the special guest on Dec. 29; Ozomatli will guest on Dec. 30; and the String Cheese Incident will go at it alone on New Year's Eve. The event will also feature multiple stages with music and performance art acts, audience-participation activities and limited professional childcare.

But before the event, String Cheese Incident--Michael Kang (acoustic and electric mandolin, violin) Bill Nershi (acoustic guitar), Keith Moseley (bass), Kyle Hollingsworth (keyboards) and Michael Travis (percussion)--will open a tour that focuses on the theater circuit east of the Mississippi.

"The Northwest in general, and Portland specifically, is where we have a lot of friends and fans," Moseley said. "It's the home of some freaky fans. In the summer we did four multiple-day camping events with all its craziness. Our fans love to come and decorate and participate themselves in the events."

The band's other summer camping shows--in Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Colorado [Telluride] drew about 3,000 fans each," Moseley added. "Even though other bands participated, we still got in two or three sets a day. We like to perform a 90-minute set, followed by a 30-minute break, and then another 90-minute set."

The band handles its own booking, management, and publicity. It also has its own record label, publishing company and travel agency.

No camping will be allowed for String Cheese Incident's December event in Portland. However, "fans can get their travel arrangements through our travel agency and get discounts on hotels," Moseley said.

"We create our own festivals. [At] last year's New Year's Eve concert--"Dancing Around the Wheel of Time"--we had food, vendors, a kid's area, a parade with floats, balloons dropping ... It was a lot of fun, which is what we want when we go to a concert."

The band's efforts seem to be paying dividends. According to Moseley, String Cheese Incident shows recently drew 6,000 fans to Red Rocks in Denver and 8,000 to the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Calif. "We're very popular in the [San Francisco] Bay Area," he says. "And now the push is on east of the Mississippi."

With two studio and two live albums to its credit, String Cheese Incident recently finished work on its fifth album, which is to be released next year. Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) handled production on the album, marking the first time that the band turned to an outside producer.

"We used Steve not to make a commercial hit record, but to make a good studio album that would stand the test of time," Moseley said. "We're trying to highlight the songs rather than the jamming of the live albums."

But jamming is what drives the String Cheese Incident fans wild. Like many jam bands, covers make up an important part of the band's live repertoire. String Cheese Incident has been known to cover artists as disparate as Miles Davis, Aerosmith, Bill Monroe, Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder.

The group opens its 26-date tour on Oct. 19 in Indiana, playing college campuses and clubs, and will cap it off with the three-day extravaganza in Portland at the end of December.