Over the past nine years, I’ve seen Umphrey’s McGee perform 52 times, at 29 different venues in 10 states across the country (once in Jamaica). I’ve seen the Chicago sextet rock dank clubs, ritzy ballrooms, historic theaters, intimate amphitheaters, and a diversity of festival sites — a wind-battered stage in the middle of the Everglades, on the shores of a Caribbean beach, at the bottom of a mountain, in a Chicago park with the city’s skyline at their back. I’ve seen them play in Florida 13 times — Gainesville, Ft. Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Live Oak, Big Cypress — but only once in St. Petersburg, on their last stop here more than six years ago. Saturday night’s show at Jannus will make it twice.
It started in Hotlanta, an essential travel destination for Florida music lovers since that’s as far south as many artists are willing to venture. On a Saturday in late July of 2004, my now-husband and I made the easy eight-hour drive to the ATL to see Umphrey’s share a co-bill with Steve Kimock at Variety Playhouse. Months of reading message board hype about their performances and listening to live UM recordings prompted the trip as much as our need for something bright and positive to break through the shadow of doom that Phish’s impending break-up had cast over us. Umphrey’s offered the perfect reprieve.
I spent most of Kimock’s set slumped sideways in one of the venue’s theater-style seats, groaning softly to myself as the greasy quesadilla I’d bolted before the show tried working its way back up, and horrifying visions of my future self spewing in some foul public bathroom (or right there on the floor) cycled over and over in my head. One setbreak later, Um hit the stage and spent the next two hours entertaining and astounding me out of my nausea and self-loathing.
They delivered 15 original songs, some with strong lead vocals and tuneful four-part harmonies, some strictly instrumental, the genre-leaping mix of sublime melody, explosive aggression and danceable grooves even managing to touch on classical music, as in the epic “All in Time,” its climactic close a riff on Boccherini’s Menuet. The two-hour set also included a dub-space psych-percussive cover of The Police’s “Walking on the Moon,” an extended tease of “Regulate” by Warren G., and a jam on Miles Davis’ “It’s About that Time.” They displayed impressive musical prowess, were excellent and entertaining showmen, and when I wasn’t standing and gazing at the stage, mouth agape, I was howling like an asshole, pumping my fist, illness forgotten. By the show’s end, I felt great, was buzzed on adrenaline, wore a shit-eating grin that split my face and hurt my cheeks, and was primed and ready to see them again immediately.
I got the chance that December, in Atlanta, where I returned to see Um headline a Variety Playhouse that was bursting at the seams with warm bodies. The fire marshal did not approve, and the band had to ask some fans to leave the show (full refund included), or else it could not go on. “We thought they were joking,” guitarist/vocalist Brendan Bayliss told me when we chatted about that night in a recent phone interview. “We had to literally apologize for the venue, ’cause it wasn’t our mistake — we’re not booking tickets and letting people in. So, it was a really bad spot to be put in … but it’s also a really interesting problem, to have to have to ask people to leave a concert.”
Maybe their popularity was due to Phish fan overflow — we were guilty of this initially — but it was also due to the momentum Umphrey’s had been building throughout the year with the release of a well-regarded studio album, Anchor Drops, nonstop touring and buzzed-about performances that included an unforgettable appearance at Bonnaroo, and some high-quality, heavily circulated live recordings.
While Phish blew open my mind, possessed my heart, and completely changed the way I listened to music — not to mention introduced me to some artists I’d never knew, cared about or had taken the time to recognize — the musicians of Umphrey’s were from my generation. I was attuned to their influences, could more personally relate to them, grew up listening to the same classic rock staples, ’80s metal, ’90s grunge and hip-hop. Their heavier tendencies appealed to me, and their unbridled and dizzying method of genre-jumping from one song to the next, or multiple times within the same song, spoke to my short musical attention span.
“From the beginning, that was something we talked about and really wanted to do,” Bayliss said. “So, at some point, you’d play something for everybody in the crowd; if they didn’t like the pop song, maybe they’d like the jazz song, if they didn’t like the jazz song, maybe they’d like the rock song. I think that comes out in the songwriting, too, because you’re listening to all those different styles and so you’re going to reflect that. You are what you eat.”
Um jams, called “Jimmy Stewarts,” added another intriguing element to their music, as they were premeditated. Bayliss explained: “We look at it more like we’re trying to compose something on the spot; an A, B, maybe even a C section, sometimes vocals as well. It’s almost like watching the writing process. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but when it really does, we’ll walk off and we’ll be like, ‘You know what? That’s a new song.’” Mostly Stews are strategically placed, but Bayliss admitted, “Sometimes they just pop up, a mistake happens and you have to roll with it, then all of a sudden: new ground …”
Though Bayliss said the band is getting a lot better at being able to listen to each other, Stews don’t work without hand signals to make sure everyone’s on the right page. “Throwing up the letter ‘C’ real quick, everyone knows ‘OK, we’re about to switch keys.’ Tighten up, that’s just a fist. If one of us rubs our nipple, it means milk it, because whatever we’re doing is really good and we should milk the moment … If someone gives the middle finger, it means ‘chaos,’ it’s an old Frank Zappa cue.”
Um helped broaden my progressive rock palette to encompass artists such as King Crimson and Genesis, refined my appreciation of dual guitar interplay and technical excellence in music overall, and proved to me once and for all that prog-rock could be warm, fun and funny. The humor in music I’d learned to love in Phish, Ween and Zappa was fully present in Um’s spirited, clever and sometimes absurd songwriting, their own style flavored with cheeky-cocky Midwestern attitude and juvenile mischievousness. “I think humor definitely belongs, because it keeps it more childlike and you’re back in the garage practicing for the first time. If you take it too seriously, you get jaded.”
Carefully planned setlists with selections inspired by pop culture headlines, news and holidays are not uncommon. “There’s a lot of downtime on the road, so you’re sitting around backstage, and sometimes a healthy and productive way to pass the time is to look at the calendar and see what you can come up with.” They try to keep it in good taste. “When it’s something that’s funny, we kind of roll with that sentiment. When it’s serious, we try to be appropriate and poignant with it.”
Even though I don’t get to see Umphrey’s perform nearly so much these days, I cherish the memories I made and am so grateful about the places I got to visit when I followed them around. It’ll be nice, however, to get my brain tweaked right in my backyard.
This article appears in Apr 11-17, 2013.