Dave Matthews Band Jams Into The Rock Hall

Dave Matthews Band
Portrait of the Dave Matthews Band at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, Illinois, March 16, 1995. Left to right, Dave Matthews, Carter Beauford, Boyd Tinsley, LeRoi Moore, and Stefan Lessard. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

Emerging from the fecund college scene of the University of Virginia in the early 1990s, Dave Matthews Band has spent more than three decades brewing a unique stew that’s proven poppy enough for radio, musically interesting enough to draw critical attention and enduring enough to create fans ever eager to hear what’s next.

The band’s eponymous lead singer and guitarist was born in South Africa and bounced from his home country to England to New York before settling in Charlottesville. He’s largely self-taught on his instrument of choice, which results in chord fingering and strumming techniques that have confounded the formally-trained ever since he took the stage for the first time in the early ‘90s. Unfettered by orthodoxy, Matthews’ reliance on efficiency of motion and ease of transition allows for a grooviness and smoothness that is the foundation for his band’s sound. 

His voice  — itself an amalgam of all the places he’s lived — is a map of the world, an auditory adventure that can growl and shriek and swoon and purr in rapid succession.

When he formed his band, he knew the usual instrumentation wouldn’t do. Having drawn from an expanse of musical traditions — a groovy, funky, folky sound is dashed through with African rhythms and broadened with jazzy improvisations — he needed a band to reflect it. So he brought on a saxophonist and a violin player. In addition to Matthews himself, the band’s current iteration includes two other original members: bassist Stephan Lessard (who was so young when DMB began, he had to be snuck in and out bars for gigs) and ambidextrous drummer Carter Beauford, whose roots are in jazz fusion. Saxophonist Jeff Coffin, multi-instrumentalist Rashawn Ross, keyboardist Buddy Strong and longtime Matthews collaborator and guitarist Tim Reynolds round out the lineup.

DMB has been successful as a recording act, selling more than 33 million records, and producing songs that are of such cultural ubiquity they play in the background of movies and TV shows, between innings at baseball games and as bumper music on broadcasts. But Dave Matthews Band is, undeniably, a live juggernaut. When Pollstar commemorated its 40th anniversary in 2022 and calculated the best-selling acts of the Pollstar Era, we found that DMB trailed only U2 in tickets sold with an astonishing 23,279,056 for a gross of nearly $1.1 billion. 

But there’s more: the captivating, never-the-same live shows have cultivated an audience of intensely loyal repeat customers and the band has consistently used the success that’s brought for a cavalcade of philanthropic efforts through their Bama Works Fund, Farm Aid appearances, partnerships with The Nature Conservancy and fundraising for the Bridge School as well as public schools in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere.

“Beyond their impressive ticket stats and album sales, I’m really proud of how they’ve done so much philanthropic good in the world — raising over $65 million for a wide variety of causes in their hometown and around the world, planting over 5 million trees, and always stepping up to the plate in times of disaster relief,” says Red Light Management founder Coran Capshaw, who has steered DMB’s career since launching them from Charlottesville club Trax in 1991.