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of jam music
You know the Dead. Heard of the Disco Biscuits?
By Jeff Bercovici
When people talk about pop music they usually mean the kinds of acts you might see chatting with Carson Daly on "Total Request Live" or posing for the cover of Rolling Stone.
But some of the country's most popular bands couldn't get on "TRL" if they begged. They've never been made over by a stylist or had hits penned for them by faceless Swedish men. Their songs, far from being perfect three-minute radio-ready ditties, are more often epic improvisational symphonies.
These acts have funny names: Leftover Salmon, the String Cheese Incident, the Disco Biscuits, Deep Banana Blackout.
They’re jam bands, and for the millions who love them, there is Relix magazine.
Started in 1973 as a tape-trading newsletter for Grateful Dead fans, Relix was for decades virtually unknown to the sorts of people who don't have dancing bear bumper stickers on their cars, but new owner Steve Bernstein aims to change that.
Bernstein, head of continuity of business for Citigroup, read Relix growing up as a Dead-loving, mandolin-playing teen.
He rediscovered it during a stint in Tokyo working for Salomon Smith Barney and booking American jam bands on concert tours of Japan in his spare time.
Bernstein bought the magazine in the summer of 2000, taking a majority stake himself and convincing some other "white-collar Deadheads" he knew to come in as minority investors.
In March of last year he relaunched the black-and-white Relix as a full-color glossy, hoping to capitalize on what he sees as an explosion in the popularity of jam music over the last few years.
"There are a million fans of the band Phish—literally a million," says Bernstein. "Of the top 20 concerts on New Year’s Eve, 13 of them were jam bands."
Though the jam band subculture has been around since the Dead started playing in the '60s, it didn’t assume its modern form until two years ago, when Phish, the supergroup of the jam world, suddenly went on hiatus.
That decision left a massive hole in the live music market, and previously lesser-known groups like Widespread Panic, Gov't Mule and the String Cheese Incident rushed to fill it.
All of these acts combine elements of rock, jazz, bluegrass and funk with a predilection for trippy, extended instrumental breaks—the standard jam band formula.
But Relix has expanded its definition of exactly what constitutes a jam band of late, says Bernstein. These days, it feature stories on everything from innovative deejays like Paul Oakenfold and DJ Logic to traditional bluegrass and folk musicians.
"The term 'jam band' is very nebulous anyway," he says. "The term is becoming much more a brand of music. To me it's all about quality of musicianship. There's a big difference between being a performer and being a musician."
While mainstream music stars can get by on looks, style and a good producer, jam bands don’t and can’t.
Their members are typically homely, unfashionable and ill-groomed, and they are usually too modest and affable with their fans to make for good gossip subjects.
Similarly, while Rolling Stone can sell magazines by putting Britney Spears’s navel on the cover, Relix has to rely on the drawing power of artists that many serious music lovers have never even heard of.
Still, Bernstein likes his odds. As the jam band culture matures, he says, it can only get bigger, as the generation that grew up with the Dead warms to the new bands now in the pipeline while the youngsters learn about the predecessors whose influence helped shape the stars of today.
Relix’s circulation went from 30,000 to 40,000 with the February/March issue now on sale, and Bernstein says he believes it could grow to a couple hundred thousand within a few years. Relix.com’s sister web site, Jambands.com, already receives 1.4 million unique visitors a month, he notes.
"I think our numbers could grow exponentially," he says. "I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface."
February 11, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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