Friday, October 31, 2003 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Say `Cheese'

String Cheese Incident vows to get freaky for Halloween concerts

The men of String Cheese Incident plan crazy stuff for their Vegas show, including a temporary wedding and a freak-filled "Freak-In" show.

Conservative people could be excused if they called String Cheese Incident a band for neo-hippies. The Boulder, Colo., group jams and improvises long songs, which blend rock, bluegrass, jazz and island sounds, deep into the night. And fans have been known to toke up big, fat joints.

The group isn't a bunch of slackers, though. Pianist Kyle Hollingsworth, for one, earned a degree in jazz piano at Towson State University in Baltimore.

But String Cheese Incident does play up its heady, mischievous side. For its two shows in Las Vegas this weekend, the band is staging a "Freak-In Convention" full of freaky-looking costumes and contests.

During the show, there will be a raffle, and the winner is to be married to percussionist Michael Travis for the length of the concert. All of the raffle money will go to Nevada's Citizen's Alert, the nonprofit, nuclear-issues group.

The String Cheese tour is, otherwise, ostensibly meant to promote the band's new album, "Untying The Knot." The group recorded the album by moving for two months to Sausalito, Calif. Actually, they lived in boats and rode bikes to Plant studio, where Fleetwood Mac recorded "Rumours," Stevie Wonder created "Songs in the Key of Life" and Prince debuted with "For You."

This weekend's shows depend on ticket sales through UNLVTickets.com, as do all concerts at UNLV's Cox Pavilion. This is notable for SCI, though, since the group has filed an anti-trust complaint against Ticketmaster, claiming Ticketmaster has contracted with so many venues to shut out competitors that String Cheese Incident is unable to sell many tickets to fans through its own SCI Ticketing, as it did in the past. Ticketmaster has countersued.

"We're just trying to sell tickets to our fans. We're not trying to take down `the man,' " Hollingsworth says.

Elfman: What's the latest with the suit against Ticketmaster?

Hollingsworth: At one point, we were selling 50 percent of our tickets. Now, I think, it's down to 8 percent. We want to go back to where we were. We want to sell directly to our fans. ... The best-case scenario is that this opens the door for a lot of different bands and breaks down that barrier.

Elfman: I guess it's gonna be a crazy show out here. Mike is going to get married temporarily to someone who wins a raffle?

Hollingsworth: Yeah, something like that. I can't really disclose the details at this time. ... And it's not legally binding.

Elfman: Since it's a raffle, then legally, the winner can't be somebody in the band's wife, right?

Hollingsworth: Right, it has to be someone he does not know. Also, we're doing the whole "Freak-In," instead of a "Freak Out," this year. ... And how can you be any freakier than Vegas? I think we're gonna do our own Vegas, based on connotations of the word, "freak." ... We're also out doing our tour for our album, "Untying the Knot." We just started playing some of the songs live, which is a challenge to us.

Elfman: Why is that?

Hollingsworth: Because the new album has a lot of sampling on it. ... And we're not using samples in concert, so we're trying to figure out how to do it live. It's not really possible, unfortunately.

Elfman: How do you feel about the album now?

Hollingsworth: When you first (record) it, it's a great experience and you listen to it all the time. ... Like, `We worked so hard on this, you can hear the sweat.' But then I overplayed it for myself, and now I have to put it away and not listen to it for a month. But that's a good sign, because before, I would finish a project and never really listen to it at all.

Elfman: In the field that you're in, there are other bands that have the reputations of putting out bad albums and playing great in concert. What's the deal with that?

Hollingsworth: A lot of bands don't learn how to utilize the studio. ... That's why we tried to put a lot of time into this album. We put a lot of time into the creative aspect of the studio (time), instead of capturing the band live, which never really works. We did that for the last album. The last album, `Outside Inside' is good, but it was basically String Cheese goes into the studio and plays live. ... This time, we made an album we can't even perform live.