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| 04-25-2003 | Previous edition: 04-24-2003 |
         
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Printer-friendly version Band suits Grand Prix perfectly
Staff Writer The String Cheese Incident could very well be the perfect Grand Prix Week band. During the concert in Elliott Hall on Thursday night, the jam band displayed an exceptional disregard for song structure as their fans displayed a total disregard for their seating assignments, dancing wildly in the aisles. This carefree ideology is the very thing that sets Grand Prix apart from every other week in the semester. The concert could have equally been a clashing of two very different cultures; the collegiate crowd and the travelling gypsies that follow the String Cheese Incident from show to show. A row of vans selling goods such as imported beer, quesadillas and glass pipes set up shop in a campus parking lot on University Street. "I'm sick of the idea that we are hippies," said Stuart Urum, a devout String Cheese follower from Nebraska who has been on tour with the band for three years. "Hippies were about a war that started and ended before we were born. We are about the music. We are a travelling family." It was, after all, the music that brought the two communities together. The highlights of the show came in the first set with two conjoining songs. "Turn This Around" began as a hard rock song with a driving drum beat, spraying an incredible amount of energy into the crowd, causing every dreadlock in attendance to swing and bounce. The song then somehow exploded into a spacey jam that caused each eye in the crowd to open wide in astonishment. Just when the audience was nearing total euphoria the band brought the jam back into "Turn this Around." The song then turned its attention to Kyle Hollingsworth, the band's keyboard player, who controlled the jam's transcendence into another song, "Orange Blossom Special," a straight bluegrass finger-picking party song. "There are definitely some people in this crowd who have never witnessed String Cheese before," said John Nierzwicki, junior in the Schools of Engineering. "But after that jam, I guarantee a ton of people just left this place converted." Although the band's mix of funk, rock and old school bluegrass may put them in the "jam-band" category, fans are quick to state what sets the String Cheese Incident apart from their peers. "With Phish, you have the Trey show with four other guys playing behind him," said Ashley Perry, a student from Chicago making a visit to Purdue for the show. "String Cheese bring a real sense of community, not only to their fans, but into their music. You can hear each musician playing at any given moment, displaying a phenomenal sense of flow. String Cheese are truly an ego-less band. And that's what I'm looking for." Printer-friendly version |
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