(Matthews concedes now that the changed dynamic was perhaps a bit too “constructed” for this group.)Īnd then the usually quiet Moore spoke up. Improvisation, a DMB hallmark both in the studio and on stage, had vanished, replaced by a reliance on sheet music. Some hurt feelings remained about the way in which two albums - 2001’s “Everyday” and 2005’s “Stand Up” - were put together, with a much more controlled writing process that circumvented some of the musicians’ creative input. “We needed to change the linens, strip down everything, scrub it, find out what was down there,” added Beauford. And then, by confessing that fairly aggressively, it sort of got us all to stand up again and to not just sit in our little positions, trying to maintain that facade to each other.” “I wanted to stop the band,” Matthews admitted in his dressing room before a tour stop in Fresno, the night after Outside Lands, “because it was becoming no longer a joyful thing. And after so much time together, things had gotten a bit stale. In the few years prior, they’d had several false starts in the studio, struggling to put together a seventh studio record. Moore’s death sharpened the musicians’ focus, bringing a new urgency to the remaining members. “But he loved L.A., him and I were the two guys in the band, we just loved California.” “There’s a bit of melancholy, I think, when you get back here,” said Lessard, who now lives in Laguna Beach. “It’s always easier to leave than be left,” Matthews said to the faces staring back at him, some of them wet with tears like his.ĭMB is gearing up for two sold-out shows at the Greek Theatre, beginning Wednesday, that mark the group’s first return to L.A. The face of the band - usually the jovial, two-stepping type - crooned in front of the sellout crowd, and then he cried. Drummer Carter Beauford, who’d known Moore since childhood, needed to take his anger out on something and pounded away at his kit he couldn’t think of being anywhere else.
Bass player Stefan Lessard didn’t want to be there. That night, the band played its scheduled gig at Staples Center anyway. He was at his Los Angeles home, recovering from injuries suffered in an all-terrain-vehicle accident, when he took a sudden turn for the worse. LeRoi Moore, the shy saxophonist who’d been with the band throughout a nearly two-decade journey from tiny bars to stadiums and stardom, had died unexpectedly earlier in the day. 19, 2008, and the Dave Matthews Band was mourning the loss of one of its own.
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