Jam band formed in Crested Butte, Colorado in 1993. Currently, the lineup comprises six members:
- Bill Nershi (founding to present) — acoustic and electric guitar
- Keith Moseley (founding to present) — bass
- Michael Kang (founding to present) — electric five-string octave mandolin, acoustic mandolin, violin
- Michael Travis (founding to present) — drums, percussion
- Kyle Hollingsworth (1996 to present) — piano, Hammond organ, clavinet, synthesizer, Melodica, accordion
- Jason Hann (2004 to present) — congas, auxiliary percussion, drums
Originally calling themselves the Blue Cheese String Band, the group only played ski resorts for free lift tickets as well as private functions. At the time, they didn't think they'd be playing music as a full-time thing, and as such a lot of their old material is decidedly sillier in tone and content. The name "String Cheese Incident" is a reflection of this attitude; they had to have some name to perform under, and it served as a placeholder that just kind of ended up sticking. Several of the band members have confessed they don't really care for the name that much, but are kind of stuck with it at this point.
The band gained momentum and began touring more extensively, reaching their traveling peak around the turn of the millennium, with many hardcore fans considering 2000 their overall strongest year. From April 2002 onward, they began releasing entire shows under the On the Road name, official soundboard recordings (usually three discs apiece) that offered much higher sound quality than those on the Live Music Archive. Each recording came in a cardboard digipack until summer 2003, when the high expense of offering such a package of nearly every show necessitated a move to less expensive, more standard jewel cases. The brand was eventually subsumed into the Live Cheese website, though physical releases and official cover art still carry the OtR name.
Eventually SCI began to move away from bluegrass (though never abandoning it entirely) toward more rock and electronic influences, much to the displeasure of Bill Nershi, who, after a decade of playing almost entirely acoustic, began playing an electric guitar just to be able to be heard in the mix. The first whisperings of Billy actually leaving came in early 2003, though the rest of the band was able to convince him to stick around at that time. After the heavy electronic feel of Untying the Not, One Step Closer attempted to bring them back to their acoustic roots, though producer Malcolm Burn's insistence on stripping songs down to their most basic elements caused more tension than it resolved and effectively neutered many of the songs' jam potential. Finally, in 2007, unable to contain warring egos or agree on a creative direction, the band went on hiatus, unsure if they would ever again perform as a unit.
While on hiatus, the band members were able to more fully explore some of the genres that had made them fall in love with music and become more accustomed to the musical elements that had previously driven them apart, and after a successful test run at the Rothbury Music Festival in 2009, the band resumed activity in 2010, this time sticking more to festival circuits than full-fledged tours in order to have more time with family. After a creative infusion resulting in several new songs, the band went back into the studio and made Song in My Head with Jerry Harrison producing. The album was largely seen as a return to form, and as of 2014 the band appears to be slowly returning to touring individual venues as well as playing festivals.
Discography:
- Born on the Wrong Planet (1996)
- A String Cheese Incident (live, 1997)
- 'Round the Wheel (1998)
- Carnival '99 (live, 2000)
- Outside Inside (2001)
- On the Road series (live, 2002-2003 in physical format, with occasional "travelogue" releases thereafter)
- Untying the Not (2003)
- One Step Closer (2005)
- Trick or Treat (live, 2009; a collection of some of their best Halloween performances; available in both a 2-disc best-of compilation and a 9-disc box set)
- Rhythm of the Road, Vol. 1 - Incident in Atlanta 11.17.00 (live, 2010)
- Song in My Head (2014)
- Rhythm of the Road: Volume 2, Live in Las Vegas (live, 2015)
- Believe (2017)
This band provides examples of:
- Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: A particularly tortured line in "Galactic" ("this summer's latest block-bu-STER").
- Album Intro Track: "Samba DeGreeley" on 'Round the Wheel
- Audience Participation Song: "San José" ("woo!")
- Auto-Tune: Kyle sometimes uses this on the dancier tracks on his solo albums (e.g. "Happening Now").
- Bigger Is Better: Averted, aptly enough, with "Bigger Isn't Better".
- Canon Discontinuity: Several songs from One Step Closer suffered from this. Since its release, however, the band managed to thoroughly dispel the in-fighting that culminated in the hiatus, and with the exception of songs fraught with intra-band tension, like "The Big Compromise" and "Brand New Start", most songs from the album have returned to at least semi-regular rotation. Michael Travis's two contributions, "Rainbow Serpent" and "Swampy Waters", remain absent, and Kyle's "Silence in Your Head" has still never been performed live even once.
- Chewing the Scenery: Many of their older songs, such as "Johnny Cash" and "Jellyfish", afford them the opportunity to do this live.
- Darker and Edgier: Under the guidance of producer Martin Glover (a.k.a. Youth, the bassist from English post-punk band Killing Joke), Untying the Not was a much more serious and introspective album than their previous efforts, with most of the tracks awash in layers of spacey electronic sound and focusing on death and coping with it. Critics lauded the band's effort to create something unique in the studio rather than commit watered-down skeleton versions of their live jams to tape, as jam bands have a not-unearned reputation for often doing. (They even garnered some positive comparisons to Pink Floyd.)
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Born on the Wrong Planet was released before Kyle joined the band (although he made minor contributions to it) and has a much sillier tone than their later works. It can be a very disorienting listen for a newbie.
- For people who got into the band after their hiatus or shortly before it, the heavier emphasis on bluegrass and/or lack of synthesizers and other electronics in the band's earliest days can seem unusual.
- Paul McCandless (of New Age group Oregon) provided soprano saxophone on roughly half the tracks on 'Round the Wheel and toured with the band for awhile after its release. Most fans are probably more familiar with the songs he appeared on minus his sound.
- Epic Rocking: It'd be hard to call them a jam band without it.
- Fading into the Next Song: Several songs on their albums do this. Examples include “Search”/“Drifting”, “Land’s End”/“San Jose”, and “Samba De Greeley”/“Come as You Are”, among others.
- Former Child Star: "You've Got the World" cautions against falling into this trap.
- Humanity's Wake: "Rollover"—nature was here before us, it's going to be here after us.
- Incredibly Long Note: The last chorus of "Resumé Man" always features one.
- Karma Houdini: In "Texas", the band crashes their bus into the awning of a liquor store and the cops discover their stash of mushrooms, but their only consequence is an $80 fine.
- Limited Lyrics Song: Kyle puts out a fair amount of these. "Rosie", "Yo Sé", "Seventh Step", etc.
- Long-Runner Line-up: The current lineup qualifies as of summer/autumn 2014. The band has never subtracted members, only added.
- Mood Whiplash: The lyrical portion of "Just Passin' Through" is a jaunty piss-take on death. After that comes a somber, though lovely, instrumental coda.
- Orphaned Series: For a while, the Rhythm of the Road archival series was this. A second installment finally came out in 2015, five years after the first one. Since then, the series has returned to radio silence.
- The Power of Love: "Shine"
- Public Domain Soundtrack: A few of their instrumental tracks use traditional melodies as a springboard to exploring other genres. "Valley of the Jig" is basically a trance version of "Red Haired Boy"
, while "BollyMunster" takes the Irish folk melody "Star of Munster" and supplements it with Indian and electronic elements. - Renaissance Man: The band interviews one for a road crew position in "Resumé Man". He blows it with his proclivity for drink.
- Re-release the Song: Billy has done this with a few of his tunes. "Down a River" has been reworked from its initial appearance on 2001's It's About Time. He also re-recorded "Restless Wind" with the Emmitt-Nershi Band on New Country Blues, and also re-did "Just Passin' Through" for side project Honkytonk Homeslice's second album, where it got a promotion to Title Track.note
- After a severely stripped-down two-and-a-half-minute acoustic appearance on One Step Closer with no jamming, "Betray the Dark" returned on Song in My Head in its original electric form, clocking in at a much healthier seven minutes.
- Roll in the Hay: Mentioned on "Sunny Skies".
- Sampling: Sometimes used in the live show, though most notably on Kyle's solo studio efforts—in particular, "The Preacher", an instrumental punctuated by occasional snippets from a sermon Kyle recorded off the radio.
- Self-Titled Album: A rare live-album example: their first live album, A String Cheese Incident.
- Sixth Ranger: Jason Hann.
- Something Blues: The band regularly covers Vassar Clements's "Lonesome Fiddle Blues". Also, "Weary Homesick Blues" (a Billy original) and "Parker's Blues" (Kyle instrumental, inspired by Maceo Parker).
- Step Up to the Microphone: Basically any time one of the drummers gets to sing. Travis's original songs, like "Time Alive", "Rainbow Serpent", and "Swampy Waters", tend to be performed only a few times before falling out of the rotation, though he's usually the one to tackle covers requiring high-pitched lead vocals, like "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "So Lonely". For Jason, most commonly when freestyling in the middle of "Sirens", though he also did Eminem's "Lose Yourself" at Wakarusa 2014, and debuted a cover of Stevie Wonder's "Master Blaster" on the band's fall 2014 tour.
- Textless Album Cover: Untying the Not can be or not be this, depending on whether or not the black cover sleeve is on the jewel case.
- Title Track: All of their studio albums have one except Untying the Not, which gets an Album Title Drop ... on a B-side ("Dirk").
- Uncommon Time: The verses of "Piece of Mine" are in 7/8.
