Few bands have mastered the balance between growing as artists and keeping their fanbase engaged as successfully as the String Cheese Incident has over the last 15 years of making music. They’ve taken their originally bluegrass-based music and meandered into the realms of electronic jams, trance, and even heavy dubstep. This transformation is less evident in their studio records, but is epitomized during their epic three-day live runs.
I first saw SCI live at the Bluebird Theater in Denver in 1996 while going to school. At the time, the band played small venues in Colorado dressed in sandals, t-shirts, and running shorts, as if they had just got done rafting a river. They sang largely bluegrass songs about things like the Anasazi ruins, the mountains, and waking up with hangovers. Fast forward almost 10 years, and the String Cheese “Incidents” have become spectacular productions, and their summer Horning’s Hideout runs, are arguably the climax of their summer shows. This year in conjunction with Madison House, they pulled out all the stops!
Thanks to some help from Ben and Jerry’s, Mopho, and BAMM.tv, we rented a U-Haul trailer, loaded the ice cream cart and drove from San Francisco to Portland, where we stocked up with 1000 pieces of ice cream and 250 pounds of dry ice from the Portland Ice Cream Co., before driving in to the woods west of Portland. Horning’s Hideout is a idyllic expanse of private land with a lake, ponds, streams, several fields for camping, and dozens of peacocks roaming freely. As you pull off the main road and start to descend down a dirt road into the woods and ferns, you can’t help but feel like you are entering another world. Too add to the already fairy tale surroundings, several art installations were scattered throughout the grounds, and the forests were lit up in changing colors at night.
In keeping with the tried and true SCI 3-day recipe, Friday night was a warm-up night with a healthy sampling of favorites on the set list, Saturday’s sets were a psychadelic masquerade party with fire dancers, acrobats, and spaceships, and Sunday was a relaxing evening set to close out the weekend. The major difference for this year’s Horning’s Incident was the addition of over 30 Madison House artists playing on four stages throughout the Hornings’ woods. Bands like Toubab Krewe, Beats Antique, Soul Rebel Brass Band, The Pimps of Joytime, Scott Law, Eric Krazno, and performance troops like Lucent Dossier, Kazum, Fou Fou Ha!, and Liquid Fire Mantra. And as if that wasn’t enough, all day Thursday was a run of the SCI “Scide” projects: CB3 w/ Michael Kang, Kyle Hollingsworth Band, Emmit-Nershi Band, and EOTO. Highlights of the weekend included a Saturday night cover of “Eyes of The World” to celebrate Jerry Garcia’s birthday, a latenight backstage pickin’ session with Bill Nershi and Scott Law, and free rice bowls from the fried-rice vendor for bailing him out of a dry-ice bind!
So it’s official… The String Cheese Incident hiatus is over. There are two shows left this year, the Hulaween shows at the Hampton Coliseum. After that, we’ll just have to wait and see what the always-evolving band has in store next for their fans.
