Fidelity Records (left to right) Michael Kang, Billy Nershi, Michael Travis, Keith Moseley, and Kyle Hollingsworth comprise the Colorado-based band, String Cheese Incident.

By Antero Garcia

Daily Bruin Senior Staff



While some may claim that great cheese comes from happy cows, and that happy cows come from California, the type of cheese that causes thousands of Americans to chase it all over the world is actually from Colorado.

With the common bond between the members of The String Cheese Incident being skiing, it isn’t surprising that the band started as a group of self-proclaimed ski bums in the small town of Crested Butte, Colo.

“We started in the winter of ’93-’94,” said mandolin and violinist Michael Kang in a phone interview from Boulder while getting ready for the band’s rigorous touring schedule. “We were all just living up in the mountains skiing, and we ended up hooking up to play a few songs at these talent contests once a month.”

The members of The String Cheese Incident have never judged the band’s success on commercial stardom, what with their main priorities being hitting the slopes as often as possible and giving their fans the best concert experience possible.

“We aren’t concerned with being the next big thing on MTV; that was never our goal,” Kang said. “We just wanted to have a good base of people that love what we do and it seems to be working.”

Having sold over 50,000 copies of its latest CD, a live album titled “Carnival ’99,” The String Cheese Incident finds that it does not need radio airplay or magazine advertisements to sell its music. Instead, the band has relied on a tightly knit and loyal fan base to help spread the word on The Cheese throughout the world.

“We’ve always worked with our friends and held our destinies in our own hands,” Kang said. “We were confronted a few years ago with either signing to a major label or doing it on our own and we just figured it would be best to do it ourselves and keep creative control.”

Since making that decision, the band has gone on to form SCI Fidelity Records, a record label that the band uses not only to put out its own albums, but a host of side projects with other bands as well. In addition to its own record label, The String Cheese Incident has avoided mainstream integration by selling concert tickets to its consistently sold-out shows through its Web site, www.stringcheeseincident.com.

Bruins will have the chance to see The Cheese this Friday and Saturday when they perform at the Wiltern Theatre. According to the band, a live performance is not just a concert; it’s an Incident.

“Our live shows are very different from our studio albums,” Kang said. “We have a lot of improvisational themes in our shows.”

With set lists varying each night, taping has always been encouraged at the band’s shows. In fact, Kang believes that it is through the trading and distribution of concert tapes that the band has found such a large fan following.

As a reward for following the band on its shows, The String Cheese Incident tries to put on special performances, including Halloween and New Years shows. In addition, the band plays special concerts all over the world, known as International Incidents.

“We really try to give our fans an opportunity to express themselves creatively and add to the experience,” Kang said. “We get to have fun playing music and sharing it with people, and we want other people to feel that.”

Because of the band’s jam-based approach to music, its promotion of concert recording and selling and its memorable live shows, many people compare The String Cheese Incident to the widely successful quartet Phish. With Phish now on an indefinite hiatus, many Phish-heads are looking toward The Cheese to fill the jam band gap.

“There have been a lot of comparisons, and I would say Phish and us have similar tastes, but at the same time, we feel we have our separate roots and philosophies on life,” Kang said. “If it attracts Phish’s fan base, hopefully they will enjoy the experience.”

While the band is often stereotyped as only playing jam-oriented music, Kang stressed the importance of diversity. Because each band member has a different musical background, the melding of genres is key to the group’s ideas.

“Everyone has a say in what kind of music we play,” Kang said. “Part of the strength of what we do is we mix different styles into a cohesive unexplored territory.”

Sometimes this unexplored territory shows through in the band’s quirky renditions of classic cover songs. On “Carnival ’99,” for example, the group performs the Weather Report standard “Birdland,” whose signature melody was originally performed on horns, entirely on stringed instruments like guitar and mandolin.

Kang said the band has been trying to cover songs by Peter Gabriel and Led Zeppelin lately, but the group’s repertoire changes frequently. By covering well-known songs, the band generates a lot of ideas for its own original songs. The String Cheese Incident recently finished recording an array of new songs for its next studio album, “Outside Inside.”

“We recorded with producer Steve Berlin, who is a horn player for Los Lobos,” Kang said. “We’re excited about it. We actually left the studio saying ‘God, I actually enjoyed that.’ Sometimes it’s tedious and can be hard and this is the first time we walked out of the studio feeling really good about what we did.”

And feeling good is really all The Cheese wants, both from its own experience and from its fans. For students who just aren’t sure if they are ready to be a friend of The Cheese, Kang offered

some advice.

“They’ve got to come and experience it and find out,” he said. “We always figure that there is going to be a moment in each show that will interest everybody.”

Standing adamantly by his belief that The Cheese pleases all crowds, Kang elaborated on why the band seems to appeal to so many.

“Ultimately, we’re just trying to live our lives as best we can as human beings; live our lives with integrity and maintain a happy lifestyle with good relationships with our friends,” he said. “And we hope that that message gets through in our music.”

So why will thousands of music lovers fill the Wiltern Theatre this weekend? It’s the cheese.

MUSIC: The String Cheese Incident performs on Friday and Saturday at the Wiltern Theatre. For more information or tickets go to www.stringcheeseincident.com. Tickets can also be purchased at www.ticketmaster.com. The band’s latest studio release, “Outside Inside,” is set to be released on May 15.