“I would go to Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and I would go to Red Rocks to see a big show. Those two were always the apex of Colorado music right there,” Nershi recalls. “I don’t know if I ever dreamed of really playing there.”
But he has — 48 times. Now when the String Cheese Incident guitarist stands on that stage, he looks out at a sold-out crowd of dedicated fans. And when SCI returns to the legendary venue July 14-16 for the band's annual Red Rocks run, it will play its fiftieth concert there.
“If it's not the top venue in the country, then what is? It's the best hometown gig any band could want,” Nershi says. “It's also a gathering place for friends that will do the show every year. So it's an opportunity for people to get together and have reunions; it was always a place where I would have family reunions — my family would all come out to Red Rocks. It’s a good place to unite and hook up with friends and family. We want to keep the tradition every year.”
Founding member Billy Nershi may never have thought he'd play the Rocks, but now he slays the stage while barefoot.
Tobin Voggesser
“We’re also the only band to rappel on stage,” notes Moseley.
The first time the band rappelled onto a stage was in 2002 at Deer Creek in Indiana, “when the regulations were much lower,” says Travis. In typical SCI fashion, there was a prankster twist.
“‘Kyle was like, ‘I’m not rappelling,’ so we’re like, ‘How about this: We’ll do a dummy wearing your clothes and pretend it’s you,’” Travis continues, stifling a laugh.
The rest of the band rappelled down before calling up for the ersatz Hollingsworth, which dropped from the rafters. “Our front-of-house guy hit the top of the microphone right when the dummy hit the stage,” Travis says, and the band howls.
That was the impetus for Hann and Travis to take on the towers, and then the band "got all the paperwork in time for the next year to do a full rappel,” Hann says. On July 22, 2017, the members rappelled to the Red Rocks stage from its roof while the Mission Impossible theme played.
Another tradition: playing two nights at Dillon Amphitheater ahead of Red Rocks, making for a five-night run in which Cheese returns all the love that Colorado has shown the band. The String Cheese Incident is inextricably linked to this state, and that’s not just because the band got its start here or earned a spot in Colorado Music Hall of Fame. SCI’s music encapsulates Colorado's freewheeling nature, the sense of freedom cultivated by bright-blue skies over 14,000-foot mountains, rushing rivers, deserts and forests. After all, a love of nature bonded these bandmates before music did.
“The outdoor-rec lifestyle was at the core of everything we did before the band and then carried on through the band,” Moseley says. “People in a lot of the mountain towns were some of our original fans, and this lifestyle is just what we do. We do outdoor recreation and we play music, and the band was born out of that.”
String Cheese Incident's Red Rocks shows are like a family reunion for both the band and fans.
Tobin Voggesser
Nershi moved there from Telluride, and got to know Moseley and Kang through skiing and music. Kang was working ski patrol during the winter of ’92 and remembers an inordinate amount of snow that year. “We just had this crazy winter skiing,” he says, “and Billy and I formed an acoustic duo where we got paid in season ski passes to play music in the lift line. That’s basically how the band started.”
The duo added Moseley, who switched from guitar to bass, and then a practice session at Travis’s family’s house brought the original four SCI members together as the Blue String Experience (the name eventually morphed into the String Cheese Incident; the bandmembers meant to change it, but the moniker stuck). “I remember meeting Travis for the first time at his parents’ place in Crested Butte,” Nershi recalls. “We went over there and played in the afternoon, getting together some songs so that we could play over at the Art Center in Crested Butte. It was the first time the four of us played. That was December of ’93.”
After a small New Year’s Eve gig in Telluride, SCI was asked to open the 1994 Telluride Bluegrass Festival. “The first Bluegrass was when we all collectively had our minds blown,” says Kang. “It was just one of those seminal moments, where we were like, ‘This is awesome. We should keep doing this!’”
And they did. For its first few years, the band didn't leave the state, primarily performing for friends’ weddings and ski towns, especially in Crested Butte and Telluride. But then more magic came its way.
“Our biggest breakthrough, the biggest rock-and-roll moment for us,” Kang says, happened in ’96, when the group was asked to play the Fox Theatre, which had opened in ’92 and was quickly establishing itself as a haven for jam bands. Cheese played five shows at the Boulder venue that year, which is also when Hollingsworth was roped into the group. He'd just moved from Baltimore to become a forest ranger, but the SCI dudes were persistent.
“We played some shows where Kyle sat in, and he was immediately plugged right into it and played some things where it was like, ‘Wow, that was really adding to what we're doing,’” Nershi recalls. “He fit in with the music really well. He went on a tour with us, but not as a bandmember, and I remember that when he would play a solo or something, people would be like, ‘Wow, that was incredible!’ And I would say into the microphone, ‘That's Kyle Hollingsworth! Don't you think he should join the band?’ It was a little inside joke we had.”
They might have been joking, but they were sincere about performing. After the first Fox show, "we all moved to the Front Range, got serious and bought an old ski-town bus from Crested Butte," Kang says. "We built bunks into it and started traveling all around the country playing music, and the rest is history.”
The bus was named Bussy (you can’t expect creatives to be on point all the time), and it helped SCI take its unique sound to fresh ears across the country. Jamgrass was just beginning to gain popularity through such emerging Colorado bands as Cheese, Leftover Salmon, Yonder Mountain String Band and Hot Rize, all of which were inducted into Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2021 (along with the Fox Theatre).
“We were all in, doing 200 shows a year, just going for it,” Kang reflects. “It was exciting times, and also a ton of work. A few of us didn’t have places to live and would just live on the bus. Interesting times — you know, that was back in the ’90s. It was definitely more of a culture of that kind of stuff going on. There were no smartphones or anything like that, so we were just trying to navigate the East Coast and Indianapolis.”
Cheese would often return to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival — and still does, having marked the festival’s fiftieth anniversary in June. That's also where the band first promoted its hula hoops, which members would make in the back of Bussy to distribute to fans during the concerts. “At that point, we took them everywhere and made it part of our brand,” Kang says. “Now they’re everywhere, but we definitely played a part in getting it back in there.”
“I remember when we first started playing in Boulder, and we would play at our friend's restaurant, the Mountain Sun,” Nershi recalls. “We would set up in the window, and there would be people all hula-hooping outside the window while we were playing music.”
Each year, SCI plays a regularly sold-out run through Colorado, with two nights at Dillon, then three nights at Red Rocks.
John Verwey
The current lineup jelled when Hann joined SCI in 2004, though he had sat in for a show in 1999. “He’s been a real spark with the band,” Nershi says. “A really positive attitude, great drummer, always professional and always smiling and putting on the show.”
From the beginning, SCI had established itself as independent, releasing records via SCI Fidelity. It began its own independent ticketing system (now defunct) and joined its current management team, Madison House, in 1996. But years of vigorous touring took their toll. After its 2007 Red Rocks show, the band went on hiatus. There was “no intention of bringing it back,” Kang says. “I don’t think we even spoke to each other, really, for those couple years.”
But Cheese reunited for the Rothbury Festival in 2009, and slowly began playing concerts again, a move sparked by camaraderie, a shared vision and the mutual appreciation of the band and its fans.
“I think that we have some responsibility to the greater purpose of showing up with the band and the community that we've created and knowing that the whole scene is bigger and more important than just us or the music," Moseley says. "We have curated this scene that has brought people together. It gives people a place to go where they do feel safe, they do feel like it's all-inclusive. I can't tell you how many people have told me, ‘Oh, I met my best friend at your show,’ ‘I met my future spouse at your show,’ ‘I met my business partner at your show.’ That is important. And it's important that we can help to curate that scene, and I think all of us feel a responsibility to try to keep that vehicle moving, because it's more important than anything else you could do.”
As an early pioneer of the jamgrass genre, which blends rock, jam and sometimes electronic elements with bluegrass, during its thirty years the String Cheese Incident has attracted a following of fans so devoted, they follow the band around the country. Such an obsessive fan base hadn’t been seen since the Grateful Dead, except perhaps for Phish. But unlike Phish fans, the majority of Cheeseheads are Deadheads, as well. The members of SCI certainly are.
The Dead had an undeniable influence on SCI, both in the band’s sound and its members’ lives. Legendary lyricist John Barlow called the group “Grateful Dead 2.0,” according to Relix.
“When I first heard about the Dead, I thought it was a heavy-metal band because of the name,” admits Kang, who moved from Korea to California at age thirteen. “Soon enough my friends and I started going to the shows when we were fourteen or fifteen, and I got pretty into it. I went to college in Berkeley, which was kind of the epicenter for the Grateful Dead in 1984.”
SCI also spent time with members of the Dead, as well as Barlow, Robert Hunter and the Merry Pranksters, while touring in California in the late ’90s. At the time, none of the SCI musicians had a clue they would become leaders of a new wave of the jam scene that their mentors had started decades before.
Nershi, Kang, Moseley, Hollingsworth and Travis joined Phil Lesh & Friends with moe., Galactic and Gov’t Mule for the historic 1999 Summer Sessions tour, which included a stop at Red Rocks. While SCI’s first Red Rocks show had been alongside an amalgamation of bands pulled together by Planet Bluegrass, its second was even more momentous, since the band got to play with one of its heroes. The ’99 set opens with “Playing in the Band,” with Kang covering the vocals and mandolin.
“It was just super surreal,” Kang recalls. “Fast-forward to now, being in the next generation of jam bands, with the scene still as vibrant as it is. ... I definitely feel like we’ve created a larger tribe of like-minded people and like-minded culture, and that in itself is pretty cool. It’s definitely not lost on us. I feel like I’m witnessing something really cool happening.”
Lesh has remained friends with the SCI musicians, and everything was meant to come full circle last year, with the Grateful Dead bassist sitting in at the band's Sunday Red Rocks show. But then Lesh fell ill, and breakout bluegrass star Billy Strings filled in. (This year's special guest is John Fogerty, on Friday, July 14.) Even Lesh-less, the concert exemplified the spirit of the ’99 show: Just as Lesh and the Dead were an inspiration for SCI, the band has gone on to influence many new acts on the scene, and Strings is one of them.
“He talked about seeing a String Cheese show with his dad, and at that point, he had no idea that you could do what we do with bluegrass bass music,” Moseley recalls. “He said it was an eye-opener for him.”
“In particular, for him to see Billy Nershi play a bluegrass song to 10,000 people at Red Rocks,” Hann adds. “That just wasn't on his radar, that bluegrass music had that potential to rock.”
One day in early June, the sun is finally breaking through the clouds over Louisville after an unusual few weeks of rain. A fox bounds down the road, its umber coat flashing against the backdrop of the Rockies. Nearby is The Lab, SCI's nearly decade-old recording studio, which is filled with funky psychedelic paintings, the members' Red Rocks Hall of Fame awards, music books and travel books and other ephemera collected through the years. Moseley, Travis, Hollingsworth and Hann are meeting here to discuss Lend Me a Hand, the band's first studio album in six years, which releases September 8.
Cheese teased the album by dropping the title track and a music video on June 9, and while the single carries the typical positive lyrics and cheery, swinging beats for which SCI is known, the eleven-track album is far different from anything the band has released previously. Songs such as "I Will Follow You," "Eventually" and "Ain't I Been Good to You" dip into folk and even indie palettes, and the whole album emphasizes lyricism over long jams.
“The album sounds more mature, and we're definitely more mature — or that’s a nice way of putting it,” Travis says, and chuckles. “But yeah, with all the gymnastics we used to put on songwriting back then, this was a place to relax into a calmer version, or older, more mature version.”
This new version of SCI was heavily influenced by the album's producer, Brad Cook, who came "highly recommended," Moseley says, having produced for Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats and Bon Iver, among others. “Each album has its own personality that's determined by the songs that are written, and by the producer,” he adds. “Upon getting together with Brad in pre-production, his whole take on it was, 'Everybody knows you guys can play your instruments. Everyone knows you can go out there and play great twenty-minute jams. What I want to focus on is the songs; I want to make it sound like we're in a living room with the band and you're just playing acoustic versions, more or less, of your songs.'"
And that's exactly what the band achieved, creating an intimate album that's still rooted in the familiar soundscapes unique to Cheese; the penultimate song, "Way Back When," even provides bluegrass fans with a traditional, instrumental four-minute jam.
But SCI also included the genuine, heartfelt "One More Time," a song about Madison House partner Jesse Aratow. "Jesse was one of our original managers that joined up with us when he was living in Telluride; he helped promote one of our very first Telluride shows, I believe. He was with us starting in the mid-’90s, and he was just an integral part of the team as an artistic and business leader, and all-around spiritual leader, heroic person — just a very inspirational, great person to be around," Moseley says. "Everyone that knew him, worked with him, just loved him. He was always able to spin positive into tough situations; his little catchphrase was 'Keep the dream alive,' and we've all got shirts and stuff with that now. ... He shockingly passed away from a heart attack, but there were no warnings at all and he was very young, so it was a really tough loss for the band and for management and for everyone who worked with him.”
“I wrote it on ukulele in the mountains,” Hollingsworth says, “but the lyrics came from all of us. I went to everybody and said, ‘Give me five descriptors of Jesse,’ and I pulled them together and worked with Sam Beam from Iron & Wine."
It was a difficult song to write, but as Hollingsworth notes, it always comes back to a chorus — Thought I'd see your face one more time — that anyone can relate to. “It’s gonna be tough to play live,” he admits.
But the positivity that Aratow encouraged in the bandmates also imbues every track, both lyrically and in overall mood. "Lend Me a Hand" acknowledges the "mental health awareness era" that we're living in, Moseley says, and aims to address how it is "empowering for people to know that no matter who you are, it's okay to ask for help and knowing how to share your personal experiences, to share your struggles, is really a healthy thing to do."
That's also reflected in "Love and Friends," with Nershi's signature storytelling sprechgesang, reminiscent of such hits as "Joyful Sound," which can be so schmaltzy that they may as well be Barney sing-alongs for adults. But then, adults need to be reminded of the points that Nershi and purple dinosaurs make. In the case of "Love and Friends," it's that "being able to have a good, solid group of friends can really get you through some difficult times," Nershi explains.
While Cheese may play some of the new songs at its upcoming Red Rocks run, the band isn't taking a new direction with its sound or its shows. "Every album that you make is kind of a snapshot. This is where we are right now, today. I would guess that the next album we make will probably be very different than this," Moseley says. "Like Travis said, I think we've matured a lot as songwriters, as musicians. We just continue to evolve our craft and get better and better, and in that way, I think this album is in some ways the best we've done, you know? Of course, that's what you're always shooting for, is your best. But I do think it's a great piece of work."
That said, Moseley continues, "The album is clearly just like one slice of what we do."
From its dazzling lights to illustrious soundscapes, an SCI concert is always memorable.
John Verwey
SCI shows definitely run the gamut — the band builds on its bluegrass foundation with layers of electronic, rock, reggae, jam, jazz, funk and more. Plunging into such varied sound pools has allowed it to cast a wider net for fans. Hann notes that the group is going from playing Telluride’s fiftieth anniversary last month to playing Electric Forest, two festivals with polar-opposite audiences. And while some of SCI’s fans may hate music that other fans love, they all share a love of Cheese.
And to fully embrace Cheese is to fully embrace change. The band has been constantly experimenting since the beginning, Travis notes: “We just all already started by saying, ‘Okay, that's cool. What else are we gonna do?’ We just kept doing that and doing that till it got weirder and weirder.”
“Yeah, and then all of a sudden we’re doing a dubstep ‘Terrapin Station,’ and [the audience] is like, ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ And we’re like, ‘That’s a good point, maybe we shouldn’t be doing that,’” Hann jokes. “No, it’s okay to make the hippies cringe.”
The band laughs before Moseley puts it in a more PC way: “It’s okay to challenge your audience.”
“I think the diversity is both a blessing and a curse,” he muses. “I think in some ways the diversity has helped with our longevity, and we have a broad fan base. And on the other hand, it's hard to get a grasp on what this band is about. For some people, you know, most bands you put on, the instrumentation sounds similar on most songs, and you can quickly get a concept of what the band is about. And with this band, that doesn't happen.”
Travis has a rebuttal to that: “My thought would be this path of diversity has been quite something, and it's been hard to stay the course, but it's just honoring everyone's expression. And I do think we are perhaps the most diverse band in history and try to make it a package that really takes people on a very big adventure that doesn't have any genre boundaries — just really kind of digging into the concept of a hyper-diverse band.”
That diversity is reflected in the festivals that Cheese hosts, which have become another part of the band’s legacy. Rothbury, the jam- and bluegrass-oriented festival that was the first hosted by SCI, later became Electric Forest, which now is mostly known for more EDM than jam bands, drawing crowds of 40,000. In 2013, the band also created Hulaween, which attracts 20,000 music lovers. While SCI doesn’t own the festivals, they're charged by the bandmates’ psychedelic touch, inspired by Travis and Kang’s frequent trips to Burning Man. “We've always maintained that it's better for promoters and funding people to own them and help design them and things of that nature," Kang says. "I do not wish festival promoting or ownership upon anyone."
Even as it tries new enterprises, the String Cheese Incident continues to use its music to take every concert-goer on an individual journey that will ignite inspiration, joy, communal fidelity and zest. Every year, Red Rocks is filled with people looking for that experience: families, hippies, wooks, the collared-shirt dudes who are always mistaken for undercover cops because they’re not in tie-dye, EDM kids with hats covered in so many pins they could be helmets. And everyone’s smiling. Bubbles, wafts of patchouli and THC clouds swirl through the air. The vibes are Rocky Mountain high.
And the band can feel it. “The first fifteen times we played Red Rocks, I was pretty overwhelmed,” Nershi recalls. “It’s not just because it's Red Rocks, but the way that amphitheater is set up: You’re at the bottom of this kind of funnel with these rock sandstone walls reaching up on each side. All the energy is funneling down to you, like, ‘Okay, we're here now, what are you going to do to impress us?’ and you're like, ‘Oh, shit.’
“It took a lot of time to play Red Rocks to get used to the energy there,” he continues, “but now it’s our hometown gig.”
At Red Rocks, the String Cheese Incident absorbs the crowd’s enthusiasm and returns it tenfold. Long jams swell and evolve, then rush like whitewater rapids before descending into deep, existential canyons carved by thumping bass, a captivating keys number and drum solos. Sweet, acoustic bluegrass pickin’ evolves into boundary-pushing, fast-paced charges of energy. Lyrics encourage joy. A wave of sound circles over a peak that listeners can tell is coming, building anticipation before finally reaching a crescendo and igniting a pure dance party.
As the bandmates look back on thirty years and forward to their fiftieth Red Rocks show on Saturday, July 15, they are humble and exude gratitude. “I’m super thankful that I get to come to work every day and be a part of this thing that's bigger than any one of us. You know, it's the scene that we've created,” Moseley says. “The vibe that we try and curate is what continues to attract people to the shows, and it's a little bit of a mysterious thing. It's hard to define why people are attracted to it — lyrically, musically, the diversity, the inclusion, the family feeling that you get at shows. It's all intent. It's our intention to create that. But it's not maybe easily defined on exactly how we create that.”
“Our legacy and our continued mission is to be conscientious stewards of an emotional and spiritual legacy like this," Travis adds. "We have such a family together, and just continue to be reverent and humble in the face of being hosts and students.” When Nershi reflects on the past three decades, he pauses and closes his eyes, as if he’s sorting through the stockpile of good memories and hard work.
“A lot of what has kept us going and enthused about playing music together is the same thing that happened the first night that we played music together thirty years ago,” he begins. “And that is, when you put out what you're trying to put out — things that are important to you and your creative soul, while you're playing music together — and when the listeners react to that in such a positive way, it's easy to become something you never get tired of doing. Because it's a cyclical thing: When you get that energy back from people that are enjoying your music, then it gives you the ability to continue to express yourself and continue to build confidence in doing your thing and feeling that appreciation.
"As far as playing music, and especially live music, it doesn’t feel like it's a chore, because it's always such an enjoyable experience to feel like the crowd of fans are so there with you and appreciating what you're doing," he continues. "And we feel the same way about our fans that listen to us at shows. … For me, that’s that affirmation that what I'm doing is not wasted time or energy. That's what it's all about. So we can do that forever. As long as we're able to.”
