The Dave Matthews Band is on tour, as they have been every summer, except 2020, for the past 30-odd years. Like the Grateful Dead and Phish, so-called jam bands with which it’s often lumped together, Dave Matthews has a deliriously passionate fan base that follows the band from city to city, reuniting with fellow disciples at preshow tailgates, showing off devotional tattoos, trading live recordings. In the early ’90s, when I arrived for my first year at the University of Virginia, Dave Matthews was a local celebrity. It would be years before the stereotype of Dave Matthews fans as “pot-smoking, tie-dye-touting former frat bros fawning over craft beers in parking lots between cornhole games,” as Perri Ormont Blumberg puts it, would become a widely understood social designation. We spent the next four years not going to Dave Matthews Band shows together.

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Persons: Dave Matthews, preshow, ”, Perri Ormont Blumberg, ” Ben Sisario Organizations: University of Virginia, The Times Locations: Virginia