Two days before New Year’s Eve the Aragon was swarming with security guards, merch-table workers, and various flavors of roadie and support personnel—all part of the infrastructure for a three-day year-end concert blowout from Umphrey’s McGee. They’ve come a long way from their beginnings on the inglorious South Bend music scene of 1997. “We started just for fun and free beer,” says founding guitarist Brendan Bayliss. “We were getting paid in beer and we thought it was awesome.”
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Of course, jam bands don’t necessarily choose to operate outside the industry. Major labels won’t touch them unless they’re as huge as Phish—it’s hard to make money selling records by a group that’s all about live shows and tape trading. The music doesn’t get a lot of respect either. Jam bands often seem to confuse some of rock’s great aesthetic atrocities for virtues—the standard approach is apparently to combine the worst parts of acid rock and prog with a dash of white jazz—and I’ll come out and say that, aside from some live recordings of the Dead and a bootleg of the show Phish did with Jay-Z in Brooklyn, I don’t keep that kind of stuff in my house.
This focus on live shows works to the advantage of bands like Umphrey’s McGee—though many people understand the “music industry” as the business of selling records, only the very biggest acts can sell enough to support themselves. Most make their money, assuming they make any at all, by playing concerts. Umphrey’s McGee’s last few studio albums have sold in the modest range of 30,000 copies. “I’ve never seen a penny from any royalties,” Bayliss says. “In my world that doesn’t exist.” Because they don’t depend on moving units, they don’t consider the people trading their music to be pirates. If anything, those fans are unpaid promoters. “If anybody’s getting hurt by file sharing, they can afford to get hurt. Britney Spears, if her album leaks she’s still driving around in a fat-ass car. For us, we don’t make money selling albums. We make money selling tickets. So getting the music out—if people listen to it, maybe they’ll buy a ticket.”
sharp darts
