Happy 62nd Birthday, Bobby Weir.   I saw Bobby 20 years ago tonight at the Brendan Byrne arena in East Rutherford, NJ, which ended up being an epic show.  -- Bobby is the ultimate road warrior and really cannot thank you enough... My fav Ratdog show was in July 2007 at Red Rocks.  Favorite Bobby screws up... too many to count. 

Umphrey's McGee has never played by the rules. Now, with the unvieling of their all-new Stew Art Series (aka, "S²") - an interactive fan experience where audience members "conduct" the band's live improvisations  - Umphrey's McGee continue to offer their fiercely loyal fanbase the most innovative musical experiences available.

Umphrey’s McGee’s S² debuted on October 3rd in Milwaukee – with another S² event recently announced for October 24th in Portland and additional date(s) this fall and beyond still to be determined.  Hosted as individual events before that evening’s already schedule show, Umphrey’s Stew Art Series is a crowd-sourced improvisation experiment, in which all the music performed by the group on stage will be entirely directed by S² audience members. Check out this S² video from the first event.

The inaugural S² at Milwaukee's Eagles Ballroom was received with overwhelming enthusiasm and to rave reviews. The sold-out crowd of 50 fans submitted their ideas by texting descriptive words, phrases, and pop culture references (pretty much whatever came to mind), to the Umphrey's Mozes mobile interface.  The suggestions were then filtered by the band's long time Sound Caresser Kevin Browning and projected on a screen for the band to digest and turn into the next phase of the jam.  The band's music varied stylistically with suggestions ranging from "an afternoon bus ride in Jamaica" to "drinking pina coladas...in a hurricane". As one elated fan commented after the show, "S2 was the coolest thing I have ever been a part of. It's always been a dream of mine to meet the band, and the opportunity to participate in leading the Jam for the band was a dream come true as well."

As highly skilled improvisational musicians known for using a complex set of signals on stage to prompt spontaneous musical changes, S² is proving to keep the band on their toes as they navigate through the audience’s prompts. S² events also include a Q&A session providing an opportunity for fans to ask about what they’re witnessing (or ask anything else for that matter). As part of the ticket (which will actually be a custom laminate that will be different for each S² event), every attendee will receive an autographed CD of the Stew Art Series they attend - minutes after the event has concluded. To be clear, each S² show is a TOTALLY separate event than the scheduled concert date and will be sold as a separate ticket - getting a ticket to S² does not get you into the show later that night (and vice versa). The S² experiment is just that, an experiment. Keyboardist Joel Cummins explains, “The improvisational elements of our show have always been one of our favorite parts about playing together - and we think the audience feels that way, too. That’s our inspiration for the S² series. It’s also a great way to stay on top of our chops.” S² events take place in the early evening before the respective show start times. Prices and ages vary from show to show - which should last one hour (with Q&A).

This is not the first time that Umphrey's McGee has taken new approaches to delivering their music to the fans. Before their latest studio recording, Mantis, was released in January of this year, the group made the album available for pre-order in an interesting way. Fans were offered more free bonus content the more Mantis pre-orders were received; as the fans "unlocked" levels of content by getting more of their friends to pre-order the album. The idea was to give the fans incentive to help spread the word about the album, and to offer a totally unique music experience.

But it's always been about experiencing Umphrey's McGee on the concert stage, and the group recently announced a string of fall dates, including some final festival stops of 2009 - Jazz Aspen Snowmass Festival, moe.Down, and Telluride Blues and Brews, plus a special Halloween performance in Yosemite, California. And to get yourself in the right frame of mind for the upcoming tour, you can check out the recently-released live DVD, Umphrey's McGee - Live. Recorded during their 2007 performance for PBS's Soundstage, Umphrey's McGee - Live is offers an incredible 13-song set on DVD, including six favorites not shown during the PBS broadcast, which premiered last February.

2009 has been one of Umphrey's McGee's busiest years yet, and as evidenced by their upcoming tour and one of a kind S² shows, they refuse to slow down. The band's complete list of confirmed appearances is as follows:

October 21 Knitting Factory Spokane WA
October 22 Showbox Seattle WA
October 23 McDonald Theatre Eugene OR
October 24 Crystal Ballroom Portland OR*** [S² show that day]
October 25 Eureka Theatre Eureka CA
October 27 Crystal Bay Club Crystal Bay NV
October 28 McNears Mystic Theatre Petaluma CA
October 29 House of Blues West Hollywood CA
October 30-31 Las Tortugas - Dance of the Dead IV Groveland (Yosemite) CA
November 11 The Opera House Toronto, Canada
November 12-14 Higher Ground Ballroom South Burlington VT
November 15 Port City Music Hall Portland ME
November 17 Northern Lights Clifton Park NY
November 18 Water Street Music Hall Rochester NY
November 19 Mr. Small's Theatre Millvale PA
November 20-21 9:30 Club Washington D.C.
December 10-14 Caribbean Holidaze Runaway Bay
December 29 Vic Theatre Chicago IL
December 30-31 Aragon Ballroom Chicago IL
March 21-23 Jam in the 'Dam, The Melkweg Amsterdam

A family member of ours has a shortwave radio that we have all been messing around with. We had been using it for sound effects and noises when one day it was left on in the studio. Keyboardist David Phipps’ daughter Aya was playing around with the dials when all of a sudden it stopped on this voice on the super low frequencies of the spectrum. It was a woman’s voice, artificial we later found out, counting off numbers in a very clear and concise way. We became obsessed with what we had heard and for weeks we sat behind the dials trying to find more voices.

There was only one more to be found, the voice we sampled for the beginning of the song “Central”. After a bit of research, we found that these were numbers stations, thought to be coded messages various governments use to send correspondence to spy’s overseas. This of course isn’t publicly acknowledged by any government, even though in 2001 the United States tried the Cuban Five for spying using information they supposedly received and decoded by broadcast from a Cuban numbers station.

STS9 has always been fascinated by numbers; finding this transmission captured our imagination so much that we had to see if there was something more to what we had found. Immediately we enlisted the skills of a crypto-hacker friend of ours to see if she could find any relevance to the sequence we had recorded. When she ran the numbers as coordinates corresponding to a map of military bases in California, she came up with an exact location in Big Sur. We immediately went to check it out and sure enough there was a trail about 10 miles back off of Nacimiento Road, just south of the park that led to this old abandoned bunker type structure. It was crazy. We were all looking at each other in disbelief but there we were. We crawled through a hole at the bottom of the fence and walked inside. There we found a rusted metal box that had a few pictures, documents, patches, passports, and a knife in it. The first picture was of a document from Allen Dulles to J. Edgar Hoover on brainwashing. The second was of two men standing over a map of the Middle East. That image became the cover of our first single “Atlas,” off the upcoming release Ad Explorata. One of the patches we found was the most intriguing of our finds. It had this physically impossible symbol on it that looked futuristic next to all of the older documents. It’s the symbol we’ll lay over top of every image you will see for the album. In doing some research, we later found an old book of ‘black ops’ military patches at the Prelinger Library that had a brief description of this patch. It was thought to be for a secret unit that first used satellites to gather SIGINT (signal intelligence) from other countries during the Cold War. The story is that this team actually gathered signals from another civilization in our galaxy. Their motto was ‘Ad Explorata, Forward into the Unexplored.’

We’re not ones for conspiracies but sometimes the truth is stranger than anything we could imagine. With this, we present to you STS9’s newest studio release Ad Explorata due out November of 2009, inspired by the idea that there is always more to be discovered, manifested by the belief that you can always push towards the unknown and unexplored, and created by the will and desire for constant artistic evolution, expression and change.

Available digitally at Itunes and elsewhere beginning October 6^th, Umphrey's McGee releases a dub remix of "Turn & Run" - remixed by Michael G. of the famed reggae collective, Easy Star All-Stars (Lonely Hearts World Tour 2009, Dub Side of the Moon, Radiodread). "Turn & Run" originally appeared on Umphrey's McGee's latest studio album, Mantis. Listen to the remix here: http://www.umphreys.com/home/news.php?newsId=571

Look for Umphrey's McGee on tour now.  The band's complete list of confirmed appearances is as follows:

October 7  City Opera House  Traverse City MI
October 8  House of Blues  Cleveland OH
October 9  Orbit Room  Grand Rapids MI
October 21  Knitting Factory Spokane WA
October 22  Showbox Seattle WA
October 23  McDonald Theatre  Eugene OR
October 24  Crystal Ballroom Portland OR
October 25  Eureka Theatre  Eureka CA
October 27  Crystal Bay Club Crystal Bay NV
October 28  McNears Mystic Theatre  Petaluma CA
October 29  House of Blues  West Hollywood CA
October 30-31  Las Tortugas - Dance of the Dead IV Groveland (Yosemite) CA
November 11 The Opera House Toronto, Canada
November 12-14 Higher Ground Ballroom South Burlington VT
November 15 Port City Music Hall Portland ME
November 17 Northern Lights Clifton Park NY
November 18 Water Street Music Hall Rochester NY
November 19 Mr. Small's Theatre Millvale PA
November 20-21 9:30 Club Washington D.C.
December 10-14 Caribbean Holidaze  Runaway Bay
December 29 Vic Theatre Chicago IL
December 30-31 Aragon Ballroom Chicago IL
March 21-23 Jam in the 'Dam, The Melkweg Amsterdam

Legendary on the live music circuit, Chicago-based Umphrey's McGee has perfected the art of progressive improvisation.  With swirling guitar textures, multi-faceted arrangements and their signature blend of power and finesse, the sextet brings jamming to a new level.  During the summer of 2007, Umphrey's McGee came home to Chicago to record a special live performance for the award-winning PBS music series Soundstage at WTTW's Grainger Studio. UMPHREY'S McGEE - LIVE features over two hours of dazzling music presented in High-Definition and mixed in 5.1 Surround Sound, plus two bonus tracks (including "Made to Measure" off their most recent studio album Mantis).  A visual showcase of the band's spontaneity and innovative prowess, UMPHREY'S McGEE - LIVE, is a must-own for all music enthusiasts and progressive rock fans, and is available now in stores and online.

Summer is officially over.  According to the calendar, it happened several weeks ago, but in my mind it happened last weekend - the day Red Rocks Amphitheater finished their concert season.  At this point in the year, the weather becomes too unpredictable, and more importantly too cold, to continue sitting outside late in to the night, even for the noble cause of seeing live music.  This year, Flogging Molly closed out the concert season, bringing So Cal acts Hepcat, and Fitz and the Tantrums along for the ride.