SHARING IN THE GROOVE

A rambling oral history of a rambling musical genre.

In today’s popular culture, nostalgia for 1990s music tends to focus on the ascent of grunge rock and the golden age of hip-hop, but it was also the decade in which jam bands went from college-town curiosities to (in some cases) major-label successes. Music writer Ayers (One Last Song, 2020) charts the trajectory of several of these bands in this oral history, drawn on interviews with dozens of musicians, managers, and other veterans of the scene. He takes readers to cities including Princeton, New Jersey, where John Popper of Blues Traveler and Chris Barron of Spin Doctors were high school friends; Burlington, Vermont, where Phish got its start; and Athens, Georgia, the home of Widespread Panic. The early days of the bands have some noticeable similarities, mostly centered on a shared love of weed; more interesting is the way they reacted to whatever degree of mainstream success they achieved. Eric Schenkman of Spin Doctors is ambivalent about his own band’s success with the 1991 album Pocket Full of Kryptonite, saying, “You exchange the crowds, you exchange the expectations. And you lose your core crowd, it’s hard to keep the thread of that music alive.” Many of the bands endured, but didn’t capture the MTV success they once had, and when Napster launched in 1999, it changed the music industry. Ayers provides short passages throughout to give background information, but he mostly lets the subjects speak for themselves, which isn’t necessarily a good thing; the book would have benefited from more context (and some editing too; it is, at times, repetitive and shambolic). Jam band aficionados will likely find much to enjoy—general readers, maybe not.

For dedicated fans only.