‘Round The Wheel: Celebrating 30 Years of The String Cheese Incident

Following a serendipitous 15-minute performance at a local talent night in Crested Butte, Colo., The String Cheese Incident has remained a vibrant, variegated musical dynamo for over three decades. The group’s bright musical spirit has extended into the recording studio, the concert stage— where SCI performed upward of 220 shows one year—and other creative realms with the intent of enhancing the fan experience. The band has toured the globe and headlined leading festival stages while fostering an intimate, welcoming vibe. The six-piece remains true to its DIY origins, while serving as a north star for fellow artists seeking to explore innovative musical paths. Here’s the story of group’s journey in the band members’ own words.

BILL NERSHI: I had this idea in ‘93 that I was going to have one more year to goof off before I got my shit together. I had been a ski bum in Telluride for 12-13 years, so I decided that I needed to ski a different mountain for this final year. I got in touch with Keith [Moseley], who I’d met at RockyGrass or another festival we’d both attended where we’d done a little picking and drinking.

I started making some trips to Crested Butte to check it out and I asked Keith if I could park my school bus at the house where he was living, which I later found out was owned by [Michael] Travis. So I drove my school bus to Crested Butte from Telluride and parked it there. It caught fire on the way, of course, but I put it out and finished the trip.

Then I wanted to get an après ski gig going, so I started asking, “Who around here might be good to do this with?” People were saying, “There’s this guy, Mike Kang, who plays the fiddle.” So I looked up Mike and we started playing après ski shows, which led to a gig on the mountain getting our ski passes.

MICHAEL KANG: I moved to Crested Butte after a summer in Alaska and it happened to be a crazy powder winter, the biggest El Niño that they’d had in 20 or 30 years. The ski season was epic.

I met Moseley, Nershi and Travis that winter. We were skiing a bunch and there was no intention of being in a band, but we had some other friends who played music. I was learning how to play bluegrass—I played the violin, then I picked up a mandolin. Billy and I had a happy hour gig and ended up getting a ski pass to play in the lift line.

Our ski-bum lifestyle kind of became the band. It was accidental for me. It wasn’t like, “Oh yeah, this is what I want to do for my life. I’m going to find a band and do this.” It’s like the band found me, or we found each other, and then it kind of took off from there.

MICHAEL TRAVIS: I had worked with Keith in the forest service. We did contract work. We were tree climbing for pine cones and tree climbing to blast the tops of them so woodpeckers would move back in. Keith was my friend before the band.

I would leave to go do forest service work every year. But this year, I came back, and Keith and Kang were like, “We’ve been waiting for you; let’s jam.” At that point, I was still only playing hand drums.

I had bought a house in Crested Butte and Billy had moved into my backyard; although I didn’t know that until I got back. Billy lived in a school bus, over where we did our first rehearsal.

BN: Keith started joining us at the après ski gig once a week and he started playing bass. He was a guitar player, but he was like, “I can get this bass. It’s only got three tuners on it, but I’ll bring a pair of pliers.” [Laughs.]  

Everybody was playing in these little pickup gigs around town and one of the guys couldn’t make it to this specific gig. It was going to be me, Keith, Kang and Bruce Hayes, a good friend of ours who was pretty prominent on the scene there. When Bruce couldn’t make it, I began asking, “Who can we get to fill that spot?” It turned out Travis was coming back to town—I didn’t know who he was—and they said, “He plays congas. He’s really good. Let’s see if he’ll do it.”

That was the first time the four of us played together, in December ‘93 at the Arts Center in Crested Butte.

KEITH MOSELEY: I think we played a 15-minute set. The response was super positive and, right away, we sort of felt, “Hey, maybe we’re onto something here. Maybe we’ve got the right combination of players and songwriting for this to be something special.” We played like four songs. I think it was a couple of Bill tunes and a couple of covers.

MT: The recording probably exists somewhere. We’ve never found it. I think it was “Black Clouds,” “Sunny Skies,” “Lester” and maybe “Born on the Wrong Planet.”

MK: We put together a set of five songs because that’s all we knew. One of them was a Grateful Dead cover and one of them was Billy’s tune. I think we played a Grisman tune, and I think we played “Moonflower,” a Santana cover.

BN: It felt like something right away, but we might’ve thought it was just like any other pickup gig that we were playing all winter, except for the reaction of the audience.

Then I used my connections in Telluride, and we played some shows there. We were having fun playing and people were really into it. We still didn’t decide that we were going to try to make a big push or anything, but we put together some runs of Telluride, Crested Butte, Moab and stuff like that.

MK: Our first paying gig was New Year’s in Telluride. We threw together a set for that and we had a blast. Billy also had an invitation to open the next Telluride Bluegrass [in June 1994]. He had this bluegrass band called the Rusty Spring Band, and he had gotten invited the year before to open the festival the next year. That band wasn’t together, so he was like, “I’ve got this invite to open the Bluegrass Festival…” We were like, “We should totally do it. It’s Telluride Bluegrass!” So we had our sights on that to keep us going.

Prior to that initial performance, the band also had to land on a name.

MK: Before the first gig, we had to decide what we were going to call ourselves. We were like, “Well, we’re partially bluegrass, but we also like to play cheesy covers, so let’s call ourselves The Blue String Cheese Band.” It started out as that, then when we realized we were going to do this more than once, we were like, “Is this really going to be our name?” It seemed like too many words.

That winter in Crested Butte, there was this really crazy week of powder. Eventually, it got to the point where there was so much snow that everybody was super skied out. On one particularly famous afternoon after this pretty epic powder day, a bunch of locals went to this place called Donita’s, which is a Mexican food place right on the main strip. It started off as this normal happy hour thing, but it descended into a full-on restaurant-wide food fight where people were throwing enchiladas and burritos at each other across the restaurant. So for me, that was what immortalized the whole thing. That was the incident.

Then Billy created the logo with a woodblock print that he made. It became our first T-shirt. I think once we created merch, we became The String Cheese Incident. It was like, “Well, we have to be that.”

UC Santa Cruz, 1995 (photo: Woody Carroll)

The group expanded beyond ski towns, first making it to California in 1995. A year later, the four members decided to quit their day jobs and move to Boulder in order to focus on music. This decision also led to the addition of keyboard player Kyle Hollingsworth.

KM: It was fun being a string band, but as a group, we began to think, “Wouldn’t it be great to have someone sit in on a fat B3? That way, we could have this big old organ to fill in and have some sustain and it’s just not all plinky plinky string instruments. So we envisioned wanting a keyboard player before we knew exactly who we wanted. Then we were fortunate enough to find Kyle playing in a local Boulder band.

KYLE HOLLINGSWORTH: My band Durt opened for String Cheese at the Boulder Theater. Prior to that, I saw them at the Fox Theatre, and I remember thinking, “Who’s that little boy playing acoustic guitar?” That, of course, was Billy, the oldest one. He had a Billy Strings vibe and was super energetic, as was the whole band. It was awesome. I was drawn to bluegrass, but they had that acid jazz-funk stuff going on too, which was intriguing to me.

I met Kang through Dave Watts. I had come to Colorado to be a forest ranger or to continue my music career—I had a played with a lot of bands in Baltimore. I started as a landscaper while working my way toward being a forest ranger or going back to school. But then right away, I hooked up with some musicians, including Dave Watts from The Motet and Shockra. He had this commune called Double Dig. Fishman and some of the guys from Phish would crash at this place whenever they came through town. Travis lived there. Kang lived there for a while. So I was playing with Dave, and Kang was already over there. Then Kang asked my band to open, and the line I usually say is that he looked at me and asked, “Do you want to sit in with my band… for life?” [Laughs.]

I played with them in Boulder one or two times and then they said, “Come down and play with us at Telluride Bluegrass late-night.” After that, they were like, “By the way, in about a month, we’re driving to the West Coast, would you like to join us?” So I had to tell my other band that I was going on a two-week tour with this new band, although it didn’t mean I was leaving them. That happened at a Taco Bell, which was weird, but we didn’t have any gigs at the time.

I went on tour and, every night, Billy would say, “This is Kyle, don’t you think he should join the band?” Everybody would be like, “Yay!” Then the next night in some other town, he’d say, “This is Kyle, don’t you think he should join the band?” He did that every night.

Then, one day we were playing a wedding in Marin County and Kang took me out in this little boat. At some point, he stopped it and said, “We really want you to join the band. We think you could add a lot to this.” I couldn’t really say no because I was in the middle of the ocean, with sharks. [Laughs.]

By the fall of 1996, during a year in which the group performed nearly 170 shows, The String Cheese Incident made their East Coast debut.

MK: There was a period of time when we were like, “Are we really going to call ourselves The String Cheese Incident?” The whole thing was kind of a joke at first and we thought, “We could change our name. Nobody really knows us now.” But then we decided, “No, there are hundreds of people who know us by this name, so we’re going to keep it.”

Then we said, “OK, if we’re going to really hang onto that, we really have to work hard to make every show an incident.” That’s how we dug into the name, and on our East Coast tour, we tried to figure out what random things we could do to make everything memorable.

BN: We started thinking in terms of incidents and each incident being a little different than the other one. For this one tour, our manager, [Mike] Luba, got these people together to add another dimension to it. At one show, we had this gal eat a light bulb before we started. Then, the next show, we had these gymnastic tumblers go across the stage. Every night was a different little thing like that.

KH: I remember the Pain Proof Girls. They would dress scantily and put cigarettes out on their hands or each other’s tongues. Then they’d swallow a sword. I also remember we had a marching band.

MK: We had someone who dressed half as a man on one side and half as a woman on the other. We also had these kid acrobats come out on stage one time. Some people would come to the show, sit there and be like, “What the hell is going on?” [Laughs.] But it was memorable.

The first time we came through the East Coast, we played a Halloween show at Jack Straw’s in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were like, “We’ve never been here, so we’ve got to do something wild and special.” That’s when we all came out dressed in diapers. We told Luba, who we were meeting for the first time, “You’ve got to dress in a diaper. That is your Halloween costume.” So he came and did it.

There was always this random desire to do fun stuff. The hula hoops also kind of came from that. We wanted to push the envelope in whatever way we could. That grew into different kinds of performances at New Year’s shows and also what we would do at Horning’s [Hideout], which is how we ended up finding a community of people who were really into that as well.

During this era when the group was mostly still performing in clubs, the five musicians made the decision to purchase their own sound system, which they lugged and loaded into every venue.

KM: It was probably the suggestion of our sound guy at the time because we were playing bars and a lot of venues that didn’t necessarily have great PAs. So early on, we decided to sink some money into this Meyer sound rig, which had these two refrigerator-sized subs that we named Bubba and Bertha. We’d roll that PA in everywhere we went, and it was an upgrade over whatever the local people had. We took pride in that.

We put a lot of thought into making the band stand out as much as we could. We also had a friend, Austin Shaw, who was a great artist, and we had him make a couple of giant batik backdrops. When we set up in a tiny club, we’d tack these big batiks to the wall and bring in our own black lights to shine up there. So from the beginning, it was trying to create a little bit of a vibe and an atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the band maintained a mountain ethos.

BN: The group hoot developed over the years with String Cheese. It’s a fun way to interact with the crowd. It began when we were playing to a lot of skiers and outdoorsy people. I was trying to figure out a way to carry over some of that adrenaline you get from mountain biking, skiing or climbing— whatever it was that we were doing before we got engulfed in the musical world—and bring that to the audience.

So I asked the audience to think about standing at the top of a steep ski run in that moment when you jump off and make your first turns and it may be steeper than you thought. We tried to capture that energy and that feeling and then make as much noise as we could as a single being— the band and the audience, everybody was involved.

The group’s DIY spirit also extended to its business operations, which included a record label, a travel agency and a ticketing company. SCI would soon run afoul of Ticketmaster, prompting the quintet to file a lawsuit.

MT: The DIY concept was built into our DNA, being ski bums first and musicians second. We’d be back country, hiking mountains together without lifts, and that was the whole ethos of how we were put together. We were the kind of guys who were willing to jump into a ski town shuttle bus that we converted and do more than 220 shows a year.

It really helped having a management company with Mike Luba, Nadia Prescher, Jeremy Stein, Kevin Morris and Jesse Aratow. The Madison House team had our backs, and it wouldn’t have been possible without them also leaning into it.

We liked carving a path of justice into the music business, trying to clarify things that could be sketchy or wishy-washy, whether it was a record deal, a travel agency or even Ticketmaster, who we sued. There was this staunch Braveheart-ism—“Freedom!”

MK: We took pride in doing everything DIY because we felt like we could do it better and serve our fans better. So we formed our own ticketing company because we figured we could get people tickets for cheaper, kind of like what the Grateful Dead were doing with their mail order ticketing. The biggest reason was to stay in tune with our fans. We sent out newsletters and personal messages. We started our own record company. We pretty much did everything ourselves, mostly because we wanted to be able to provide a better level of service.

So we would get a ticket allotment and sell them. It started out fine. We weren’t selling out arenas; we were playing these 3-4,000 cap rooms and getting some percentage of tickets that we could sell. All the independent rooms had no problem with this. But then it became a problem at these venues where Ticketmaster was selling 100% of the tickets. It eventually came to the point where they were like, “Nope, we’re not going to let you do this.”

We felt like it was important enough for us to make a stand, and we were able to partner with a law firm that understood what we were trying to do. We felt like there was a real serious antitrust situation. Ironically enough, that’s kind of what’s happening now.

Eventually, Ticketmaster didn’t want the negative publicity, so they were like, “You guys are small fry” and they offered to settle with us.

While The String Cheese Incident exuded a loose and friendly vibe on stage, the band’s work ethic resulted in a rigorous rehearsal regimen.

KH: Particularly in the early days, part of what made us sparkle was making sure we were in it and staying creative through rehearsals. It became part of the fabric of who we were. Early on, we’d have a day off and, even though we’d been on the road for 300 days, we’d find someone’s house where we could work on some stuff. Every single day on the bus, we also listened to tapes of the previous show.

We’d work on the grooves, getting things tighter, but also expanding the repertoire with a new tune or a new cover. We probably rehearsed more than any other band on the planet.

KM: Certainly before every tour or anytime that we’ve had more than a month off, we’ll try to get together for five, six days a week before we go out and play. It’s kind of a tune-up. When you’re in a band like ours with hundreds of songs in the repertoire, it’s not easy to stay up on all of them.

But even beyond that, we’ll do a lot of listening after a tour. We’ll agree to listen to a certain show in its entirety, then everyone will take notes, and we’ll do a conference call to talk about it. I think you never want to give up the self-critique and the effort to improve the music. A lot of that, for us, is based on questions like: “How do we declutter the groove? How do we get out of each other’s way or play parts that are complementary versus competing?” We also keep circling back to the vocals and working on them.

If we take a month or more off, it’s also great to get in the room and catch up personally with each other, to learn what’s going on in each other’s lives and get on the same page. You’ve got to check in with your bandmates, with your brothers, and be in an understanding emotional state, so that when you go out there on stage and try to create things together, everyone is in a good place. Maybe someone’s struggling a little bit with a family issue or something personally, and that gives you a little more empathy, which translates into being able to play more of a supporting role.

Horning’s Hideout (photo: Brian Spady)

The group’s musical range remains a defining characteristic and helped pave the way for many far-reaching artists to follow.

KM: The diversity of the band is definitely a strength, but sometimes I think it can be a little bit of a limiting factor. Sometimes when people who are not familiar with the band are trying to grasp who we are or what we sound like, I’ll say, “Check us out on Spotify or go to YouTube. There are a bunch of different songs. If you don’t like the first song, just go to the next one. And if you don’t like that one, then go to the next one.” [Laughs.] There’s so much variety.

In some ways, it can be a little bit hard for people to grasp the band upon initially discovering us. That’s complicated by the fact that it’s not always the same singer and we’ll jump from a bluegrass sounding song to an R&B-sounding song or something with programmed beats and electro fiddle. It certainly keeps things interesting for us, but it’s also a challenge.

MT: I feel like we’ve always gone after what I now call obnoxious diversity. It’s been an exciting quest and I’m pretty sure we’re the only band doing country tunes and dubstep in the same set—playing Hank Williams and having Skrillex sit in.

It’s exciting and our tastes are so broad that it definitely has been purposeful. We have six songwriters and four regular lead singers and primary songwriters who will sing in every set. That’s rare. I don’t think there are a lot of bands that have four lead singers who are going to sing a song every set.

It always felt like an extension of trying to make all the forms of music that we love fit under the single roof. So, as opposed to saying, “No, we’re not that,” we’ll say, “Maybe we are that.” At least one or two people in the band will be loving whatever music we’re doing.

There’s that inclusivity and intent, which is how we’ve been able to play Electric Forest and DelFest in the same year.

MK: We would all definitely say that String Cheese has always been a real mishmash of a lot of different things, and there’s no one central person who drives the ship. That’s kind of what makes it interesting for us, but it also makes it difficult in the sense that we push each other to learn things that aren’t in the wheelhouse of the things that we might learn individually. So a lot of the rehearsal time is just us getting on the same page and figuring out what ingredients to put into the stew to make it work. We might’ve gotten better over the years at having some acuity and ability to do that, but it’s challenging to be in this band and cover all the styles.

We take a lot of pride in it and it’s a lot of work. I think back to when Billy taught me how to play bluegrass or when we got into the EDM world, mostly because Travis and Jason got really into it, and I also started listening to more EDM when I started going to Burning Man. That was a real stretch for a lot of people who never generally listened to that kind of music, but it led to all these new collaborations and things we do at places like Electric Forest. So it’s been nice to move in and out of these different genres and have a stake in all of it. That certainly makes it interesting and exciting, and it also makes it challenging to pull off. But that’s a good thing, I’d say.

Percussionist Jason Haan joined SCI in 2005, bringing a variety of interests and affinities.

MT: I felt like a sixth voice could open up what we were doing and give it a luxury Cadillac kind of feel. Listening to Widespread and the Dead, it’s like you’re hanging out with this huge ship. I also kept hearing a gap—“What about adding a shaker right here? How about a tambourine?” Jason sat in with us in ‘96 at the High Sierra Music Festival and I was really impressed with his soloing talent and his energy. I remembered his name, and in 2005, I hunted him down on the internet and asked him if he wanted to come play with us for a bit.

JASON HAAN: When I first met them, I was in a Los Angeles band called Zoo People. We were signed to Atlantic Records, and I think our A&R guy had signed Hootie & the Blowfish. I’d describe Zoo People as a mix of Steely Dan and Allman Brothers. We did the West Coast dates of the H.O.R.D.E. tour and we also played at High Sierra. When we got there, we were a small band playing on a side stage, and all the buzz was about String Cheese Incident.

I saw them play the Jean-Luc Ponty song, “Mouna Bowa” and at that time, all the jazz guys that I was playing with were listening to that record [Tchokola]. So all of a sudden, I’m seeing what’s supposed to be this jamband playing this song, and I thought that was so cool. It kind of destroyed my conception of what a jamband was supposed to be.

I think part of the reason why they later invited me to join the band was that I knew how to program electronic music. Travis and Kang had been going to Burning Man, and they began incorporating it into the band. Kyle was into Beck at the time, so he was doing some electronic stuff too. It was all just kind of happening and eventually, I got that house beat going for “Rosie.”

MK: We were there for the early stages of the whole jamtronica thing, and it made sense to me because basically, the ethic of the people involved was kind of the same as what we had been doing. I thought that whatever your take was on whether or not people should be playing instruments or not was beside the point. It was more a cultural movement of people being able to express how this art, music and community were all coinciding. I think at the end of the day, that’s what the Grateful Dead was and what Phish continues to be. The music was a soundtrack for people being able to express that.

MT: I consider the time between 2008 and 2012 to be a magical cultural movement in the EDM-jam crossover scene that we were swept up in and that we helped create. I feel like part of that was Jason brought programming to String Cheese. I was all about it, Kyle was all about it, Kang was all about it. Kang had a computer on stage for a while playing bass sounds. There were so many electro-jam crossovers. We were in the middle of it and we were stoked on it. In 2008, I would have said that dubstep was my favorite musical form ever because of the raw emotion. This was the Bush era, before Obama, when there was this pretty crazy feeling and it was very cathartic.

The String Cheese Incident went on hiatus in August 2007 after Nershi expressed a need to step away. The band eventually returned to the stage nearly two years later for a warm-up gig in late June 2009, followed by a widely anticipated appearance 10 days later at the inaugural Rothbury festival in Rothbury, Mich.

BN: In retrospect, I would’ve handled that very differently. At the time, I was getting a little burnt out and I had some ideas about what I thought the band should be doing musically that weren’t jiving with everybody else. I was pretty adamant about it and when I saw that the two paths were not the same, I was like, “I just can’t do this right now. I’ve got to do something different.”

At that point, I didn’t know whether the band would get back together or not, but it was something that was very real for me. It was hard. But, ultimately, the benefit was that everybody in the band got to step back for a couple of years. We were so intensely into it, and we had worked really freaking hard for a long time.

I think that the break was really good for us. We came back and played that Rothbury show, and we were like, “Oh, this place is really cool.” Then we ended up having Electric Forest there.

It wasn’t easy, but I think it was beneficial. It’s always beneficial to be able to step back for a little while and reassess. Or not even think about it and get your head in a different place.

MT: From our perspective, Billy felt like he was not getting his expression thoroughly met. It was super challenging for him to feel a part of the tapestry and he wanted to do a solo thing for a while.

That’s when Jason and I did EOTO for like 200 shows a year—we went nuts. I think one of the things we learned is that if band members are not OK with how the band is generally showing up as a broader spectrum of this crazy juggernaut of a variety show experience, there is an opportunity to do that on your own in a side project.

In the end, I think we all had a renewed understanding that this thing we do has got its own breath and its own pacing. It’s creating this other thing that’s outside any one of us.

Hulaween (photo: Keith Griner)

Over the course of SCI’s existence, the band’s interest in creating unique experiences rather than just performing concerts has led to a number of special events. The first of these multi-day gatherings took place at North Plains, Ore.’s Horning’s Hideout in 2000, followed by Electric Forest, which moved into the Rothbury location in 2011, as well as Suwannee Hulaween which began two years later in Live Oak, Fla.

BN: I think we gravitated toward those kinds of events. Going back to my own initiation into the Oregon Country Fair, being from the East Coast and moving to Colorado, but never having spent that much time on the West Coast before, it was pretty eye opening to me how people could be so unbridled for a weekend—or even a whole week. [Laughs.]

Another big influence on us was going to Japan and playing at the Fuji Rock Festival, where we saw how an environment was created at these places. When you entered it, you were like, “OK, everything’s different now in this alternate reality where there are so many endless possibilities.”

We really enjoyed that feeling and wanted to bring that kind of vibe to our own festivals, while also having the opportunity to play a lot of music in all these styles, which seemed to fit. So we took a lot of the elements from those places, whether it’s the lighting and the art in the Sherwood Forest at the Electric Forest festival or Horning’s, where on Sunday morning, they would blow bubbles that were 15 feet across that would just sit on top of the lake.

Some of those Saturday evening extravaganzas that we had at Horning’s with John Dwork and Peak Experience [Productions] were pretty over the top. The whole crowd would walk through a portal before the set started and then the band would go out there and walk through the portal and do this entry. I think there was one, where while we were playing, people wearing these giant penis costumes were dancing around in a circle. It definitely kept things interesting. [Laughs.]

MK: Horning’s was an expression of a lot of the things that happened at Oregon Country Fair, which was an expression of what the Merry Pranksters were doing. We kind of fell in with that crew because we had a really strong connection with all these people from the Bay Area. The Burning Man thing is what elevated a lot of that. Then Electric Forest was born out of the desire to bring in elements of the things we had done that blew people away. Horning’s had so much of that and was the must go-to event for our fans in the early 2000s. Then we started going to Burning Man and became friends with a lot of the installation artists.

During the time when String Cheese was taking a break, I started this environmental education nonprofit with some friends, and we were working with a lot of really amazing Burning Man installation artists who had recycled art. We filled a truck with all of this art in the Bay Area and then took it around to four or five different festivals all summer. I used whatever music connections I had, and a lot of that installation art was the first stuff that was brought into the scene at Rothbury, which became Electric Forest.

We saw Electric Forest as being the next wave of the concert experience, where you’re having that kind of multidimensional multimedia experience at a show. I guess that’s always been part of what we’ve envisioned the experience and the incident to be. It was born from the idea of creating an actual incident.

The word incident has also come to describe special collaborative sets with guest artists, such as the Zac Brown Incident or the John Fogerty Incident. This emerged out of the band’s enthusiasm and facility for performing with other players.

KM: Keller [Williams] toured a lot with us in the early days. He would often open the show and then sit in for two, three tunes—our tunes, his tunes—and we would collaborate. We even learned a bunch of his tunes and backed him on a record [Breathe]. So he was probably the first example of one of those collaborations and then it grew from there.

Anytime you get a chance to collaborate with someone who’s been an influence on your music, that’s something special—like what we just did at Red Rocks. We played with George Porter, Ivan Neville and Tony Hall and did a whole New Orleans Incident. Then on Sunday, we played with Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and Sierra Hull— we played some of their tunes and some bluegrass standards. It’s always fun to get outside of what we do all the time and dip into someone else’s tunes, someone else’s delivery and be a part of someone else’s musical expression.

The John Fogerty Incident that we did at Red Rocks a year ago was a big, full-circle moment for me because when I was 12, some of the very first songs I ever learned to play on guitar were Creedence songs. I hugely enjoyed that as well as the rehearsal we did with him. I’ve got some video on my phone of him telling us how to play the songs, and little stories and anecdotes that are just priceless for me.

It was the same thing when we did a Doobie Brothers Incident some years ago at LOCKN’. They were huge for me in my formative years of playing, and I’m still a fan.

There have just been so many over the years, like when Vassar Clements sat in with us or Peter Rowan and David Grisman played with us. We’ve been fortunate to connect musically with so many of our heroes and influences over the years, and those have been highlight experiences for me.

KH: Whenever we’re doing this, we prefer to Cheese-ify the songs to some degree. If we’re playing “People Say,” a Meters song, we’ll say, “Do you think George would be cool if we kind of went Latin here?” We always want to make it ours to some degree, if that’s possible. Sometimes it’s a no, like with Lauryn Hill, and sometimes it’s a yes—George was like, “Totally, let’s do it.” The goal is not to regurgitate but to try and make it us.

JH: Lauryn Hill sat in at Electric Forest but when she came in for rehearsals, she had really difficult arrangements that she wanted to do. So almost her entire band ended up playing with us. But they were really cool, and they came early to work stuff out before she got there. There were 14 of us playing, and we eventually set up in a big circle around her in the rehearsal room. She would share all these little musical lessons and the music changed for us. She explained that, as a rapper, the music has got to be really strong on the one and the three like funk, but as a female artist, she needs the upbeat to be really strong because that’s where she sings. I’d heard stories about her being late but she showed up on time for the actual show because our tour manager told her that we were starting an hour earlier. [Laughs.]

Zac Brown was awesome. We got to go to his place and throw hatchets in his man cave.

Playing with the guy from Kool & The Gang [James “JT” Taylor] was really awesome because it was such a good vibe. Even “Celebration,” which had become my pet-peeve song after playing it at so many weddings from an early age, came off really cool with his arrangement of it.

Ann Wilson sat in on “Barracuda” and Heart was my sister’s favorite band when we were younger. So I’d learned all their stuff through osmosis and I was able to call my sister and be like, “Wait till you hear this!”

In 1997, The String Cheese Incident released its self-produced studio debut Born on the Wrong Planet. Eventually, starting with 2001’s Outside Inside, which was produced by Steve Berlin, SCI began working with outside producers, most recently Brad Cook on 2023’s Lend Me a Hand. Each of these collaborators has emphasized a different aspect of the band’s expansive sound.

MT: With Born on the Wrong Planet, I remember trying to learn how to play a drum kit and having an embarrassing moment where I couldn’t get the kick-drum part in time. It got to the point where I went in there with a kick-drum beater and did the kick-drum part with my hand. So that was pretty tough to take. [Laughs.] But I think humility is a constant companion if you’re doing things right.

As far as our studio albums, none comes close to [2003’s] Untying the Knot for me, as far as the depth of character and my experience working with Youth from Killing Joke. It was a quantum quake in our fabric because we came in there as this hyper Colorado jamband, and we’d heard about this producer that Madison House found who’d done some big albums, which included “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” that huge song by Verve. He had all this swagger and was chain-smoking joints through the whole process, while he was telling me: “No, that’s not going to work, Travis. Do I have to come in and hit the fucking drums for you? Hit them harder. And none of that jazz.” Anything besides a quarter note was jazz.

At the time, I could’ve been heard saying, “He’s a total dick! I can’t stand it. What are we doing?” But in retrospect, I think it was amazing to watch him work. He’s a genius, and it created our most out-of-the-box album. It was also the most Pink Floyd of our albums, and Pink Floyd is probably my favorite band of all time.

It also was fun working with Brad Cook on Lend Me a Hand. I’ve learned to love the simplicity of a straight-ass beat, and he loves that too. He made the drums forefront in all the tracks, and that felt good. It’s fascinating to watch how different producers work and what they’re trying to do. Malcolm Burn, [who produced 2005’s One Step Closer] and Youth had a lot of personality, and you had to manage around that. Brad was a super homie. He was such a sweetheart and it was so easy to let him take the reins and just be like, “Yeah, man, that sounds cool.”

KH: I can think of two albums where I felt like we achieved what we were originally going after. On [2001’s] Outside Inside, Steve Berlin went in trying to reproduce what we do. It wasn’t like, “OK, a Latin song is not going to work on this album because you already have ‘Outside Inside’ and another rocker.” He just wanted it to sound really good. He kind of pared it down but it was still us.

With our last album, Brad Cook also helped us achieve the vision. I wasn’t involved in choosing him, but I did talk to Kevin [Morris] about an acoustic-y Workingman’s Dead kind of vibe. He said that to Brad, who was already in that realm and we reached what we were going after.

I’m sure Travis talked about Youth. He pushed us so hard that it didn’t sound anything like us, but it turned out to be great anyway.

KM: We’re still evolving. For instance, we’d never played a shuffle on an album until “Lend Me a Hand” on the last record. So we had to work at learning to play a shuffle that sounds authentic. It was a new thing, even though you’d think, “Oh, they must’ve done that all the time.” But the six of us were sitting down in the room saying, “It’s almost working, but what do we have to do to make it better?” So it’s a continual work in progress, but we’re way better at that now than we were before we recorded the song for that album.

By this point, over three decades into the group’s history, SCI’s music will sometimes surface in unexpected places.

MT: It was definitely quite an honor when we discovered that we had a dedicated cover band, The Cream Cheese Accident. That tickled us. We had a gig recently where Keith couldn’t make it, and we had the bass player from The Cream Cheese Accident take over for him and it was pretty fun.

KH: The strangest place I’ve heard our music, and it’s happened twice, is Monday Night Football. I heard “Rosie” a couple times in between breaks. I remember the first time I heard that, I was like, “What?” A bunch of people reached out right away. Another weird one was Orange Is the New Black. During a sex scene [in season two, episode four] someone talks about being at Bonnaroo when The String Cheese Incident was playing and then getting on stage.

All six band members share common ideas and themes regarding the totality of the SCI experience.

MK: One thing I will say is that I feel very proud of the culture we’ve built around String Cheese. The fans are awesome and the vibe is super positive. I feel like our fans really take care of each other and that’s something we all feel really proud about. I also think that through thick and thin and through the stuff that’s easy and not easy, we’re still trying to do the same thing.

MT: Being in the middle of playing music for people is a rarefied state and it always feels elevated. It feels like inhabiting some other domain or overtone of existence that is different than the mundane.

JH: I think the idea behind the incident is to blur the line between the audience and the band. We’re all on this journey together. Yes, we’re on stage and we’re guiding everyone through the stories that we do and the styles of music that we play. However, the most amazing part about our band is the way that the audience can bring themselves to a show and just be however they want to be. It’s not a bro club, it’s not a fairy club, but it can be both of those things. That’s reflected in the diversity of the people who attend and the diverseness in the music that brings it out.

BN: We’re out here to have a good time and enjoy ourselves. I think that comes across to everyone and flows back to us. Sometimes it gets serious, but there’s still an undercurrent of positivity. We don’t have to be serious and down to business all the time.

KH: I think the essence of The String Cheese Incident is dedication. It’s our willingness to take a lot of chances and be diversified. It’s a great brotherhood, a great family. I think about fans, I think about community and the people who have been with us for a very long time.

KM: The band members are six independent characters who sometimes have different visions of where the band is going. But the strength has been our ability to work together and learn to say yes to each other initially, rather than no. We’ve learned to let each band member run with what they’ve got before passing judgment.

We’re six strong-willed guys with a lot of patience and willingness to support each other creatively, while having our eyes on the big prize of continuing to move forward as a band artistically, musically and as a collective. We’re always asking, “What can we do to make the concert experience feel welcoming to everyone? What can we do to give back to the communities that we play in? How do we connect with everyone that comes to a show and share some positive energy?” I think that’s the vision we all hone in on, and it becomes a powerful thing when you’ve got a whole organization looking at those same ideals.