Something you’re going to learn about me if you know me for any non-negligible amount of time at all is that I’m a big jam band enjoyer. Many people are not. In fact, a lot of people are adamantly and actively anti–jam band. And that’s okay! They’re not for everyone. In particular, it’s very understandable to not want to be associated with hippies, who are, as often as not, surprisingly bad people underneath the veneer of peace and love they like to present to the world. But I decided jam bands were definitely for me in 2002, when I nuked the family PC downloading String Cheese Incident songs off Kazaa.
What the average person knows about jam bands is: 1) they play really long songs; 2) they smoke a lot of weed; 3) their fans smoke a lot of weed. A lot of the time jam band fans spend explaining and defending them to nonfans goes toward convincing the unmoved that there is more to it than that. Unfortunately, there are not too many books a jam proselytizer can point skeptics to help them make their case. Most jam band literature is about Phish, which is understandable, because they loom so much larger over the scene than everyone else. But even then, sometimes they have to bunk with another band in the same pages.
One reason I suspect there’s probably not a lot of general literature about jam bands is that the people who love them and are the most qualified to talk about them invariably get lost in the sauce when they get into their subject matter. They expect that their rapture alone will be sufficient to make an unenlightened bystander say, “I want what he’s having!” In practice, however, the layperson winds up never receiving much information that’s helpful to them. So when a book comes along that finally gives some decent overall coverage to the scene, and it’s by a music journalist, who ideally should maintain a certain level of professional detachment from their subject, that’s a pretty big reason to get excited.
The best thing a book like Sharing in the Groove: The Untold Story of the ‘90s Jam Band Explosion and the Scene That Followed could accomplish is to capture what makes jam bands special in terms that someone who doesn’t like jam bands can accept and understand, even if they don’t agree. I won’t say this is impossible, but for some reason, it has historically turned out to be remarkably difficult for those who have tried. I thought Mike Ayers had a better shot than most, but his book still drops the ball, albeit for different reasons than usual for someone writing about this scene.
Before I get into some of those failures, it should be stated that while a lot of the people interested in reading a book like this are going to come to it with their own ideas about who counts as a jam band and who doesn’t, it ultimately doesn’t matter very much. The oral history format Ayers chose to run with has its pros and cons, and we’ll talk about some of the latter later, but one of the biggest pros is that it leaves no room for hippies to bring their gatekeeping bullshit to the table. A lot of them like to say that Blues Traveler and the Dave Matthews Band aren’t “real” jam bands or that only “bros” like them, and in a lot of cases it turns out those people’s only apparent criterion for exclusion is that their fans prefer drinking to smoking. Doesn’t matter. The Spin Doctors have never scanned as particularly “jammy” to me, and I had never even heard of God Street Wine before reading this book. Doesn’t matter. The book is concerned with the bands’ kinship to the “jam” ethos, not yours. If you can’t accept that this book counts Medeski Martin & Wood as a jam band, you’re going to have a hard time. (They aren’t, they’re jam-adjacent, but it doesn’t matter see how fucking HARD this is?)
That said, many of the bands featured in Sharing in the Groove are those who met more with mainstream definitions of success during the ‘90s. Getting a major-label record deal was in most instances a clear marker of success in the pre-Napster era (though there was of course the ongoing concern, now understood to be largely silly and off-base, about “selling out”), but not only was it not the ultimate aim of most jam bands even then, it also is the least interesting element of any given jam band’s arc. Despite that, much of the book is taken up with the inevitable travails many jam bands suffered when trying to fit their square-peg operation into a record label’s round hole. There is likely an interesting tale to be drawn out of the disconnect between jam bands’ undeniable popularity with their audiences and record companies’ inability to understand and capitalize on that popularity, but the book’s oral history format leaves no room for editorialization, instead leaving it to the bands themselves to articulate and speculate about the reasons they eventually receded from their prime.
This is somewhat unfortunate, because the jam scene very badly needs people who can look at it with something approaching objectivity. Constructive criticism to hippies is like water to the Wicked Witch of the West, or at least they act like it is. They recoil from the mildest negative sentiment of any kind and blanch at the faintest suggestion that their notions of inclusivity and community might not be as utopian as they would like to think. A more traditional narrative could have carved out space to ruminate on systemic issues in the scene without the immediate kickback social media allows. By choosing the oral history format, however, Ayers absolves himself of the unsavory business of getting his hands dirty and actually engaging with the music and the community and the topic at hand. It feels less like he has a real stake in the scene and more like he saw a niche that was underserved in terms of literary market share and checked off a box in the easiest, most hands-off way possible.
Another problem arises from the book focusing on the time period that it does. There’s no reason to know this if you aren’t already majorly into the jam scene and its history, but the culmination of many of the things that are spoken of in this narrative occurred in the early 21st century—i.e., right after the purview of this book. By stopping where it does, a lot of the book’s big players get off somewhat easy. Phish in particular is allowed by the end-of-the-20th-century cutoff to only shine a light on their strongest years and hang onto their supremacy during that period without having to interrogate the factors that led to them going on hiatus in 2000. That in turn leaves out the very fascinating resulting development of how some of the less celebrated bands in the book attempted to fill that void, as well as the fact that a lot of those bands ultimately learned how to successfully navigate the music world without relying on major labels at all. Instead, it just sort of peters out at this “well, it was good while it lasted” point, not seeming to realize or care that there were a lot of bands for whom it started getting really good once the first digit of the year turned from a 1 to a 2.
Sharing in the Groove is also not likely to disabuse anyone of any of the usual stereotypes and preconceptions about jam bands. Earlier I said that one thing that makes selling people on jam bands difficult is convincing them that there’s more to them than the weed and the mushrooms. So, naturally, Sharing in the Groove takes every opportunity it can to remind the reader that people who are in jam bands love to smoke weed and eat mushrooms. Is all you really know about them that they play really long songs? You are also going to get quite a lot of commentary on how and why that happens. Very little trenchant insight here. I am kind of surprised, though, that I was able to update my decades-old impression of the Disco Biscuits specifically (i.e., that they are shitty pompous assholes) with no major changes.
There are a bunch of fun stories in Sharing in the Groove, and I got a few laughs out of the wilder anecdotes, but it’s hard to say who this book is really for. If you’re deep in the scene and know a bunch of bands beyond those that are covered in the book, you might appreciate remembering some of the scene’s general roots, if not necessarily your own. If you’re just getting into the idea of jam and you don’t know where to start, it’ll give you a lengthy streaming queue. But the post—Grateful Dead jam scene is still looking for its seminal work, it seems. An effective overview may prove surprisingly difficult: not only could each band in this book handily fill its own 500-page volume, but it will only become harder to efficiently sum up the years from 1990 to the present the more time passes. Whoever winds up penning a properly all-encompassing survey of the world of jam will have nailed a colossal accomplishment indeed. 💘
arrows of love 