Dave Matthews Rocked The Mic Like A Vandal, Baby!

Dave Matthews took over Cameron Friday night with a ferocious leap off the drum riser, limbs thrashing in the air until he landed squarely and resoundingly on spread legs. And the building would not stop shaking for another two hours.

Dave and his band delivered an inspiring, illuminating concert, turning inside-out the usual anatomy of a standard rock show.

For example, the saxophone solos of Leroi Moore: more than just a perfunctory measure or two, the band allows Moore minutes on end to weave his way through various musical passages in such a way that you feel his instrument is actually trying to communicate something to you.

Or the playing of violinist Boyd Tinsley, the largest stage presence in a band that's already got presence up the wazoo. Tinsley rarely moves from his corner of stage right. He doesn't even have that much to play, relative to the nonstop bass (Stefan Lessard), drums (Carter Beauford) and acoustic guitar (Matthews).

But he's mesmerizing. He enters another dimension when he plays, and he's so far gone that nobody even thinks to laugh at him for looking like he's doing a Ray Charles impersonation.

Throughout the show, the band seemed aware of its rocketing Buzz Bin status, and took pains to steer clear of pulling out all the expected stops. Instead, they served up a terrific variety of their hits, rarities and earlier works, playing four songs that have only been recorded on bootleg and avoiding "What Would You Say?" and "The Best of What's Around," two of their hotter singles. But they did oblige the audience with the now-standard "Satellite" and "Ants Marching," with Matthews handing over vocal responsibilities to the crowd for a couple lines on the latter.

Of course, DMB is at its very best when it just jams. Matthews admitted such himself, when towards the end of the concert, he announced, "Just `cause we can, we're gonna fuck around a little bit and try out this new jam we've been working on." The freestyle instrumentations of "Dancing Nancies," "All Along the Watchtower" and "Jimi Thing" were the show's high points, cancelling out the inherently sub-par acoustics of Cameron and demonstrating for us all what it is to be a damn good band. During "Jimi Thing," my hand to God, I would have believed you if you told me the building had been uprooted from its foundation and was spinning towards outer space.

I wish I could say the same for Big Head Todd and the Monsters, which played before DMB. They sound alternately like a sedated Hootie and the Blowfish or a really tired Hootie and the Blowfish. The stadium's amplifiers were cranked considerably higher for the Big Head Todd set than they were for DMB, because a) BHT's sound is not one-tenth as nuanced as DMB's, and b) they therefore needed to find some way to make you listen to them. There is nothing specifically bad about Big Head Todd, I just couldn't find anything in their set that struck my fancy.