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Posted By	Discussion Topic: Dave Matthews Band to Release "The Summer So Far"
WhackBagKid TALK TO ME, GOMEZ. HE WHO IS #1.	posted on 07-09-2001 @ 8:22 PM
O&A Board Regular Registered: Sep. 00	CREDIT: http://rollingstone.com The birth, death and rebirth of a DMB album The odd saga of the Dave Matthews Band's lost album is the most compelling mini-drama of the Napster age. Recorded during the summer of 2000 in DMB's hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia with their longtime producer Steve Lillywhite, the sessions were aborted, and Matthews flew out to Los Angeles to finish the album with producer Glen Ballard. Instead of merely continuing the process Lillywhite had begun, Matthews and Ballard began writing new songs together, songs that so inspired Matthews that he decided to shelve the original tracks he had brought with him. The new songs would become DMB's blockbuster 2001 release Everyday. (Only one song -- "#36," which would be lyrically reworked into Everyday's title track -- was gleaned from the earlier sessions.) As for the other orphaned songs that make up The Summer So Far (the name written on the eight discs burned for producer Steve Lillywhite, engineer Stephen Harris, A&R man Bruce Flohr, and each DMB member following the aborted sessions), they have not gone away quietly. Leaked over the Internet as "The Lillywhite Sessions," the tracks have captured the imagination of the DMB faithful, who have been demanding their proper release. Now comes word that the fans will get their way. "At some point, the band has every intention to put those songs out in some form or another," says Bruce Flohr, Senior VP of A&R and Artist Development at RCA Records. "Down the line, the band will finish the record in the way it was intended to be finished. The songs will come out, and people will still want them." Were that to happen, Lillywhite -- who has also worked with the likes of U2 and the Rolling Stones -- says there would be substantial work to do beyond just mixing and mastering. "Some songs were pretty much finished," he says. "But others need a lot of work. They were just put on there as more like a demo than a formal recording. There would be some overdubbing needing to be done. But songs like, 'Bartender' and 'Busted Stuff' and 'Diggin' a Ditch,' all sound good to me as is." DMB has been playing most of the songs on their current tour, and, according to a band spokesperson, versions of them are likely to pop up on the next DMB live album, possibly due by year's end. But, even supposing The Summer So Far were to get its official release, the question remains: Why was it scrapped in the first place? "It's a myth that the big, bad record company came down and said, 'Where's the hit?'" Flohr says of the decision to shelve The Summer So Far. "That's absolutely incorrect. There are plenty of songs on that unreleased record that are going to be big commercial singles. No one -- Steve Lillywhite, Bruce Flohr, Dave Matthews -- no one knew that Glen Ballard and the band were gonna go on such a creative spurt that the songs that were originally recorded were going to be put aside." Here's how drummer Carter Beauford explained the Lillywhite/Ballard transition to Rolling Stone earlier this year: "Bruce and I stepped outside one evening after doing some takes, and he said, 'Carter, how do you feel about this record?' I just had to come out and tell him I wasn't feeling it. The vibe wasn't there, you know? It was lacking everything the Dave Matthews Band was about. So I said, 'Look, I don't feel it, and I'm almost certain the other guys don't feel it. We need to make a move.' And Bruce said, 'That's all I needed to hear.' From that point he began working to find someone else to produce the record and working toward putting our heads into a forward and positive space." While Lillywhite says that the band's decision to record in Charlottesville was unwise ("You make a record in your hometown and it becomes less like making a record and more like going to work. There's forever someone saying, 'Oh, I've got the plumber coming in the afternoon, so I won't be coming to the studio.'"), he maintains that the sessions weren't uncomfortably somber or listless. "Honestly, I've read a lot about how everyone [in the band] was very upset and sad," he says. "But I didn't feel anything like that. These sessions were nothing compared to a U2 album." "I think I could put my hand on my heart and say Dave is and was very proud of the recordings that we made," Lillywhite continues. "Obviously, Bruce is on record as coming up to Dave and saying that, as a fan, he didn't feel the record. To be honest, I think Dave was as upset by it as I was. If anyone tells you your songs aren't good enough, you're gonna get hurt." Flohr has a different take on how things were going in Charlottesville. "There was a heaviness to the sessions," he says. "And I think the process was laborious to a certain extent. What I was hearing as an outsider, someone who wasn't there every single day, was a darkness to the record that I felt -- and I think everybody around the band felt -- could be improved if they had a change of environment." "[The Summer So Far songs] inspired pity," Matthews told Rolling Stone in January of this year. "Self pity, or pity for the sad bastard that wrote them. I felt like I was in the process of failing, in the process of letting everyone down. In the process of not supplying the band with songs, not giving the producer the music, not giving the record company tunes -- so inside that environment, I was continuing to do just that, come up with these sad bastard songs." Moreover, Matthews admitted that the bottle had somewhat of a gloomy grip on him during the sessions, as reflected in the drunken motifs strung though "Bartender," "JTR" and "Grace is Gone." "It was not a good time for me," he said. "I usually find that when I'm in one of those slumps I do the better part of my drinking." Despite Everyday's mammoth sales -- the album moved over 700,000 its first week in stores and over 2 million to date -- it received a lukewarm critical reception and even alienated some hardcore fans who found it inorganic, unrevealing and generally non-Daveish. "I'm just worried that I didn't hear the band," Lillywhite says of Everyday. "I don't know, it's all very alien sounds. I'm a fan of the Dave Matthews Band and always was from the word go. Part of the uniqueness of the band is what the four other members bring to it. That wasn't accented enough." Beauford seemed to agree with Lillywhite. Asked if Ballard's heavy-handed authoring approach was threatening -- the producer wrote essentially non-negotiable parts for the band -- he said, "To be straight up, to a degree, yes, because it almost divided the five members. [Everyday], in a way, is Dave and Glen's record, really." Before Summer was leaked, DMB fans who were unsatisfied with the streamlined Everyday griped en masse in chat rooms. Gaggles of interviews, in which Matthews was forced to address the lost album, served to fuel curiosity and demand, the logical limit of which is the "Release Lillywhite Recordings Campaign." The brainchild of Pankaj Arora, the RLRC (www.paware.com/lillywhite), was founded "by a fan for the fans with the goal of ensuring the band realizes the enormous demand and desire for the studio versions of the songs produced with Lillywhite, and with the hopes that they will at the very least simply consider possibly releasing the works after realizing the immense demand and desire for it." Arora's crusade was somewhat mooted when, roughly one month after Everyday's release, The Summer So Far illicitly strayed onto the Internet. Drooling traders queued up to download the twelve-song set -- at least 70,000 in week one -- while the band members themselves publicly expressed regret and anger regarding the unauthorized distribution of a project they'd deemed unworthy. Many fans quickly embraced the markedly darker effort as a rare microscope on Matthews' psyche. That assessment is understandably bittersweet for Lillywhite. "I'm a big boy," he says, "but it affects your self-confidence. I've got to say, if nothing else, I do feel vindicated that my faith in these recordings is shared by so many other people." GREG HELLER (July 9, 2001) Big thanks to Unicron for the Sig. This Is Red This is Green This message was edited by WhackBagKid on 7-9-01 @ 8:30 PM

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