ROANOKE TIMES Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times DATE: Thursday, February 6, 1997 TAG: 9702060005 SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
Dave Matthews is in the middle of an acoustic tour, but don't think his fans have quieted down with him.
When the spotlight turns on the South-African born singer, people holler, whistle, howl - the works.
"They're like, `Whoa, it's Dave! Hey Dave, I can see you! Hey Dave. Talk to me!''' said Tim Reynolds, who shares the stage with Matthews on the six-week tour that stops tonight at Virginia Tech's sold-out Burruss Auditorium. "There are usually about 10 minutes of the audience going, `Wow, hey, it's Dave!'''
It may be that way when the full band tours, too. Matthews wouldn't know. Because during those tours, Matthews, 30, shares the stage with four other people and "a whole bunch of stuff," Reynolds said. And if the fans are hollering (they are), Matthews is making so much noise himself that he drowns them out.
When it's just Reynolds, Matthews and two guitars, the singer, whose voice can go from growl to lullaby in six seconds, tends to stand out. And he can hear everything.
So it takes a few minutes before the audience calms down and Matthews begins to sing: Acoustic versions of songs the audience knows, a few covers, a few new songs he's testing out. Reynolds, who played as guest guitarist on all three DMB releases, improvises during each tune, occasionally playing a song he has written himself.
"It's closer and more intimate," Reynolds said during a telephone interview last week from Connecticut, where the duo was performing. "When we start playing, it's the same, like it's always been."
Reynolds and Matthews began playing together in Charlottesville in the late 1980s. They met at a club called Miller's, where Reynolds played guitar every Monday night (and still does when he's not touring) and Matthews tended bar.
The condensed version of the story is this, Reynolds says: The shy bartender approached him one day and proposed a jam session in his mom's basement. The only witness was a four-track in one corner of the room.
"We played more hard rock then," Reynolds said. "We did it for fun. I had a band that was doing its own thing. [Matthews] eventually got his band together. Some smart people helped pick the lineup, so they immediately started going places."
In 1994, the Dave Matthews Band moved from Charlottesville clubs with lines out the door to stadium stages they shared with the likes of Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Last October, the band headlined at Madison Square Garden and sold out two nights in a row.
By November, more than 2 million copies of the band's most recent release, ``Crash,'' had been sold. "Under the Table and Dreaming," released in 1994, has sold more than 3 million copies.
"I hope it doesn't seem ungrateful, but to think about it too much is overwhelming," Matthews recently told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "We just do what we do, and that's play every night, with a night off here and there. Obviously, the traveling conditions have improved and our comfort level has gone up since we first started."
Reynolds' band, TR3, has been going places, too, though on a smaller scale. Since the band formed in 1984, he's been traveling across the country and playing clubs and campuses. He tours by himself, too, trying to jazz or funk things up a bit.
"I'm always into different music," he said. This spring, he is planning a solo tour, then studio time for another CD. "I want to start from scratch, be a little more spontaneous."
A few months ago, Reynolds and TR3 played two nights at Blacksburg's Cafe at Champs.
"We get a heavy student trade for him," said Joe Nazare, the club's owner. "The Dave Matthews/Top 40 crowd."
Each night, TR3 drew more than 100 students. The performance with Matthews at Tech sold out 2,882 seats in six hours. Tech offered the tickets to students first and planned to sell them to the general public if there were any left. There weren't.
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Reynolds, 39, got his first performing experience in a Pentecostal church.
"My dad wouldn't let me do anything else, and I wanted to play music so bad it was the only place he'd let me do it," Reynolds said.
When he was 18, he ran away from home for two weeks. He returned to his father's house, and they established a mutual understanding. "My whole life was music," Reynolds said. "I had to get into his head I wouldn't be Mr. Church Music Guy."
Today, though his father isn't thrilled with Tim's Buddhist leanings, their relationship has smoothed out, Reynolds said. "My dad is way cooler than he was in the '70s. We've all grown up over a couple of decades."
Here Reynolds takes a break to open his hotel door for room service. It's 1 p.m., time for coffee.
Coffee is always a part of Reynolds' and Matthews' downtime between shows, along with shopping at the local mall, checking out restaurants, reading the newspaper.
Reynolds breaks up most days with a long walk "to defuse the spaced-outness you get from being on the road."
People usually leave the duo alone as they stroll along Main Street in a small town in Rhode Island or New Hampshire. It is after the shows, when they're headed to the tour bus, that people vie for their attention.
"Last weekend, Dave and I just hung out and ate food and giggled a lot. It was kind of like old times, actually," Reynolds said. Old times at Miller's place always meant a supportive audience where the musicians played because they wanted to, not because there was much money in it.
Well, for most people.
For Matthews and his eclectic mix of musicians, it's a different story.
The band's ardent following has left them all comfortable - enough for Matthews to spend $500,000 for a house and land in the mountains near Charlottesville, where his family still lives. His dream is to start some sort of artists colony there for his friends.
According to December's Rolling Stone, Matthews had spent only two nights there in the last six months.
DAVE MATTHEWS AND TIM REYNOLDS: Sold-out performance tonight at Virginia Tech.
LENGTH: Long : 114 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Tim Reynolds (left) and Dave Matthews began playingby CNBtogether in Charlottesville in the late 1980s. color.