Rock stardom doesn't shelter you from reality. The Dave Matthews Band found that out when the group was sent reeling by the recent death of bassist Stefan Lessard's 3-week-old daughter, Asian, of unknown causes. The band immediately canceled 11 shows and is just returning to action.
"I don't know what happened, but it's a terrible, early departure," Matthews says of the baby's death. "(Fate) snaps its fingers and suddenly everything else vanishes for a while. And what really matters takes over. You wake up and everything's changed."We didn't have a meeting or anything," says Matthews. "Everything just stopped - and that's the way it should be. We didn't want to sit down and say, `Well, what should we do now?' It was very evident what we should do. And that's to cancel. Because there's no way we could have continued playing. There's no way we could have had a replacement.
"We're a family. There's not even a consideration of anything else. It's just, `We have to stop.' Stefan has had a tragedy. We've had tragedies before in the band, and it's been the same thing. There's no plan. And what has it done to us? It devastates us because this is our brother, but he's more devastated because this is his child. If it's done anything to us, it's brought us together. When death happens, it reminds everyone of what really matters, and that is life and love and family. Those are the things. And our brotherhood. So we'll just get back on the road and carry on."
The tragedy interrupted a phenomenal summer for the band. The group has done boffo numbers at the box office and is expected to draw 37,000 during two nights at the FleetCenter (the first show is sold out). All of which is a blur to the modest Matthews, who was raised in South Africa and is now based in Charlottesville, Va.
"It's always well above my expectations, so I never know how to react to it," Matthews says of such high attendance. "It's not something I've made a point of thinking about until it happens to us. I just feel like I'm going to my office and my office is on stage with a guitar. I go and do that, then go home and go to sleep until the next day or go on my bus, which is my home, until the next day. So it's hard for me to have anything but surprise and gratitude about it. It feels great, but it amazes me and leaves me a little bewildered at the same time."
Maybe it's best not to analyze it, he's told.
"You definitely don't have to worry about me analyzing anything too much," he says. "I certainly go with the flow more than anything else."
Speaking of which, Matthews says his group still achieves its keenest results through go-with-the-flow jamming. "Our shows change, but they sort of change by themselves. The music changes around the songs," he says. "But I can never predict those things. That's just the way it's always been."
The band's jazzy, funk-rock sound comes from the "brotherhood" chemistry of Matthews, Lessard, violinist Boyd Tinsley, saxophonist LeRoi Moore and drummer Carter Beauford. The group's rhythmically complex but danceable sound broke out with the 1994 album, "Under the Table and Dreaming," and has continued with the latest disc, "Crash."
The band's shows also have been spiced with occasional cover tunes such as Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" ("It pops its head up all the time and it changes radically," says Matthews), Bob Marley's "Exodus" and the Beatles' "You Won't See Me."
Matthews' latest original hit, "Too Much," is a parody of conspicuous consumption. "It's where excess has taken over, where your appetite has taken control of the narrator," he says.