A dozen years ago this summer, I wrote one of the more impactful columns of my life. Not that it was necessarily impactful on the world — though it is something I still get asked about — but it certainly altered the course of my career. “Is Phish A Great Band?” was the headline. It’s funny how controversial that seemed in 2013, given the recent run of lengthy profiles in prestige publications about the band. Back then, “Is Phish A Great Band?” qualified as hackles-raising clickbait. But for me, it signaled a change of direction in my life as a writer and listener.
The column was about more than Phish, at least subtextually. It was also about my growing interest and engagement with the jam-band world. Before I wrote it, I had been dabbling in that space privately for years, naturally starting with the Grateful Dead before moving on to the vastly more polarizing Phish. My rationale, as I wrote at the time, started with the realization that my knee-jerk dislike of Phish was predicated more on tired “dopey hippie” clichés than any real knowledge of their music. How could I “hate” a band when I couldn’t name more than one or two of their songs? With the assistance of my friend Rob Mitchum, I started sampling their voluminous collection of live shows, and to my surprise, I discovered I liked them way more than I expected. Yes, they played long improvisations that I was initially unprepared to process. (It took me a while to develop the proper “jam ears” where I could begin to understand, and then enjoy, 30-minute instrumental passages.) But Phish also operated like a long-lost classic-rock band, playfully mixing up crunchy riffs reminiscent of FM warhorses like The Beatles and Zeppelin with excursions into funk, bluegrass, fusion jazz, and psychedelia. They were hardly a “normal” rock band, but they were a lot closer to what I liked than a lot of the indie-rock and pop acts I was struck writing about in the early 2010s.
My interest in this stuff was sparked by two forces, one cultural and one personal. This might be hard to appreciate now, but in 2013, it really did seem like recorded music might be in the midst of an extended and inexorable decline. Not that I thought that it would go extinct outright, exactly. But in that window of time between the proliferation of online piracy in the aughts and the rise and dominance of streaming that took hold in the late 2010s, you could envision a different paradigm potentially arising. “Live music endures — it can’t be mass-produced, diluted, or ‘shared’ in a digital realm,” I wrote. “If artists no longer have the means to make records, the concert stage will become their primary canvas.” And in that paradigm, I reasoned, it was very much worth taking Phish seriously, given how they “presented an alternative model in which memorable live experiences mean at least as much as iconic songs, and high-grossing tours measure an artist’s reach as well as chart-topping albums do.”
That was the broader cultural force pushing me to jam bands. Meanwhile, on a personal level, I was a music critic in my mid-30s, and I was feeling a little burned out — mostly by the churn of cyclical discourse and the media apparatus propagating it. This was amid poptimism’s hostile takeover of music writing, when on any given day you might see the critic for the New Yorker publicly challenging a thinkpiecer from Salon.com to a public duel over his allegedly offensive criticism of Taylor Swift, triggering a massive and tiresome social-media pile-on. I started to look over the fence at a lustrous green lawn populated by musicians and fans ignored by most music writers. This is slightly less true now, but back then jam bands were deemed unworthy of any even passing critical consideration, a sign of disrespect that was actually an accidental blessing. That world was below the media’s radar, but to my eyes, it was above the fray. I imagined it as a mini utopia where people simply “liked music for the music.” Sounds corny, I know, but it was preferable to being hammered by a theoretical agenda expressed in increasingly hectoring and annoying fashion. Liking Phish was about as far away from that caterwauling circus as you could get.
Now, clearly, I was wrong about a lot of that, though I wasn’t completely wrong. Recorded music is still very much a thing, obviously, but it’s also true that live music is more important than ever — “being good live,” as it were, has gone from being a driver of record sales to the cornerstone of most performers’ livelihoods. Ultimately, I think it’s fair to conclude that, in 2025, “memorable live experiences mean at least as much as iconic songs” and “high-grossing tours measure an artist’s reach as well as chart-topping albums do,” if not more so.
As for me, making the decision to interact deeply with jam-band culture transformed me in a number of ways, starting with my status as a kind of “jam guy” pundit. I hosted a popular Grateful Dead podcast for a few years and I occasionally write articles that annoy people on Reddit. (You can also see my blurb on the back cover of this excellent recent oral history of ’90s jam-band culture.) But more than that, listening to the Dead and Phish changed how I listen to all music, no matter the proximity to jamminess. In my spare time, I probably listen to bootleg recordings more than proper albums, by a wide range of artists. And I’m much more likely to factor in those listens into my overall assessments of those acts as I am their “official” releases. (I don’t think I would be co-hosting a podcast on Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” if hadn’t written that Phish column.)
But about the utopia thing… my experience with jam-band fans has been more mixed. The fact is that the happy-go-lucky “dopey hippie” image I had going in was the most pernicious cliché of all. Jam fans in reality are, hands down, the most opinionated listeners I have ever encountered. And their takes are typically unsparing and resolute. The idea that they are drug-addled pushovers happy to accept any guitar solo that comes their way could not be farther from the truth. They are, at times, too critical even for me, a guy paid to criticize things.
There is also, among a small but vocal online minority, an “eff you if you can’t take a joke”-type of trash-talking that can come off as weirdly aggressive and incredibly obnoxious, especially when coupled with knee-jerk “get off my lawn” dismissiveness of seemingly… everything. As the author of multiple books about specific bands and scenes, I have encountered all kinds of fan bases. The vast majority of amateur, self-styled experts are kind, smart and welcoming. But when it comes to the extreme one percent, the jam world has produced some of the coolest people I’ve ever met and pretty much all the most insufferable trolls.
But, again, that’s online. Every now and then, it helps to touch grass. And seeing the “jamgrass” superstar Billy Strings live this weekend was a truly refreshing “touch grass” experience.
As I wrote in 2024, “I am a recent convert to the church of Billy.” For years, I respected his undeniable talent as a guitar player; He’s so good that he can call himself “Billy Strings” without it seeming ridiculous. (If he were 10 percent less great, his name would be reverse engineered into a sarcastic putdown.) But I didn’t come around to being a full-fledged fan until last year’s Live Vol. 1, his first “official” live album after countless releases on the jam-band streaming platform Nugs.net, as well as the numerous bootlegs collected on Internet Archive. On that record, I wrote, his playing is “exploratory, mesmerizing, and frequently surprising. But above all, it’s the combination of physicality, energy, precision, and curiosity that dazzles.”
I finally had the chance to see Strings in person last Saturday at the Target Center in Minneapolis, and he didn’t disappoint. I also came away impressed by his band, particularly Billy Failing on banjo and Jarrod Walker on mandolin. It’s extremely difficult to write about this kind of music without leaning on “chops,” “virtuosic,” and other adjectives that make it sound like you’re writing for Musician magazine in 1988. (Let the specificity of this reference indicate my love for reading back issues of Musician magazine from 1988.) But watching these guys shred for two-and-a-half hours is enjoyable in ways that are both musical and athletic. On extended workouts like “All Fall Down” and “Turmoil And Tinfoil,” they place their fluid instrumental lines in the overall mix with the grace and precision of the ’90s Chicago Bulls running the triangle offense.
On the other hand, Billy Strings is just an exceptional down-home picker, which explained the sizable contingent of cowboy boots mixed with all the tie-dyed shirts. Jam bands often have insular audiences composed largely of fans who like other jam bands. But Billy Strings exists as much in the country lane as the jam one, an especially fortuitous skill given the dual explosions of both genres this decade. Along with Sturgill Simpson (who, like Strings, performed as an opener at the recent “Dead 60” concerts in San Francisco), he’s been able to triangulate a huge audience from the overlap of jam and country’s concentric circles. (The third point of the pyramid, I can safely say after Saturday, is “weed enthusiasts.” Touch grass, indeed.)
While the extended jam vehicles are the showstoppers, Strings also has a developed knack for writing relatively compact country-folk pop songs like “Be Your Man” and “I’m One Of Those.” Their crisp acoustic leads and understated but insistent choruses remind me of the disciplined and sturdy songwriting of Gordon Lightfoot, whose music is practically part of the atmosphere in regions just north and south of the US/Canada border this time of year. He’s also a gifted interpreter with Catholic tastes who’s capable of covering George Gershwin, Bob Dylan, J.J. Cale, and the experimental banjo player Danny Barnes in a single set.
But what really sets him apart from other jam-banders is his voice. A Michigander somehow gifted with authentic twang, Strings’ vocal ability comes through on record but really shines in person, given how rare it is to hear a genuinely great vocalist in a context like this. The highlight in that regard occurred in the second set, when Billy ceremoniously removed his guitar, stepped up to the mic sans band, and sang a knockout a cappella rendition of the old 18th century hymn “And Am I Born To Die.” A highlight of his shows going back to the late 2010s, this standard popularized in traditional music circles by Doc Watson silenced the otherwise dancing and partying hordes, as Strings’ stirring tenor soared into the Target Center’s mostly empty rafters.
In that moment, I was reminded of what I love about the jam-band community. The degree to which the audience was locked into that song — receiving it and absorbing it and feeling it — is rare for an arena show. There was a purity to it. They really were there for the music. It felt transportive, like Billy had briefly paused his roots-music psychedelia extravaganza to travel hundreds of years into the past, plunging us all into an American tapestry of generational loss, upheaval, and (possibly) redemption. It was, frankly, the sort of thing that Jerry Garcia used to do in buildings like this back in the 20th century. It not only moved me, it also wowed me in ways that not even Strings’ fleet-fingered playing could match. I felt nourished, like I was enjoying a great meal. In that moment, I was part of the grateful living.
