Friday, November 01, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Making His Case

String Cheese Incident guitarist jumps on pro-marijuana bandwagon

Billy Nershi, the guitarist for String Cheese Incident, doesn't read much news. Before this interview, he didn't even know that the pro-marijuana magazine High Times awarded his band a 2001 Doobie Award for best jam band album ("Outside Inside").

"Really? I did not know that," he said when informed. "When did we win that?"

But Nershi -- whose band performs tonight and Saturday for a fair amount of marijuana partakers at the Rio Pavilion -- is aware that on Tuesday, Nevadans will vote on whether it should be legal for adults to possess up to three ounces of pot.

"I don't really smoke pot much, but I also don't think it should be illegal," says Nershi, who has performed in a headdress, cape and beard. Here's his last-minute pitch to voters:

"If everybody smoked pot instead of drinking beer, there'd probably be a lot less bar fights, or concert fights. It's a peace-promoting drug, for sure."

Nershi believes pot remains illegal because government agencies want to keep receiving tax dollars to fight the losing "war on drugs."

"You can have beer commercials. Why the heck can't you have a blueberry bud commercial, or something like that? It's not damaging our society, and certainly no more so than alcohol," he says. "They're both mind-altering drugs and, you know, probably a lot more damage is caused by alcohol."

Nershi's band earns a lot of pot-smoking fans, but that's the way of the jam band. For its jamming part, String Cheese Incident improvises intricate, meditative grooves -- rock, bluegrass, world music and jazz -- for about three-and-a-half hours each concert.

The group is based in Colorado. Nershi says the open-minded atmosphere of his mainstay, Telluride, is what String Cheese Incident wants to achieve.

"The festival atmosphere in general, I think that's what we're trying to create each night we play," he says. "The festivals in Telluride definitely had a profound impact on me. They've had bluegrass festivals, which includes all kinds of music. And jazz festivals, which used to have all kinds of music."

String Cheese mixes things up by changing its set list regularly.

"We try not to repeat songs, night to night. We have a lot of material now, so that I think when we played our first five shows" during the current tour, "we didn't play one song twice."

The band also changes arrangements of songs through improvisation.

"You need to be able to lose yourself in the music, but ready to snap back in the arrangement at any time. It's a lot going on, musically, but it makes it interesting and challenging."

How does Nershi keep all those songs separate in his mind?

"It's getting more and more difficult. I'm starting to look into telePrompTers," he jokes and laughs. "It's funny, and it's not funny."

For several years, the band has recorded all its concerts in order to sell concert albums. It uses a high-end, multitrack recording system. Then it mixes albums using recordings from the soundboard and from microphones set up around the crowd. Fans can buy CDs of any concert.

"If you order a show you saw on tour, it will probably take you a month and a half to get it. But every single show we play is available," Nershi says.

String Cheese's varied set lists -- which include originals as well as such covers as Jean-Luc Ponty's "Rhum 'N' Zouc" and Bill Monroe's "Walls of Time" -- keep the band from dying of boredom, Nershi says. String Cheese could never follow the industry standard of playing the same songs every night.

"If we did that, we'd probably have already retired," he says.