The String Cheese Incident | Tipitina's 1999
In which the band played until the sun came up
It is May 1, 1999. You do not own a cell phone and you are walking around New Orleans during Jazz Fest, carrying around a paper ticket that grants you access to the String Cheese Incident’s late night show at Tipitina’s. I am jealous of you, from the future.
This is one of those shows where you can almost smell the room just by listening to the tape. This is SCI doing exactly what they do best: having fun with their friends. I recommend you read the full recap from the taper responsible for this slick audience recording (linked below). The band comes on at 1AM and the room is obviously already raucous—it’s Saturday night at Jazz Fest and the band has promised to play till morning. What more do you want?
You can hear the energy building during the early-set Shine. It’s an excellent jam that gives a taste of what’s to come, petering out into a jazzy motif which turns into That’s What Love Will Make You Do. A party of a Birdland ends the first set. The New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, who are still playing around the city today, played during set-break.
Set 2 starts with Billy playing a few tunes (BOTWP and Sunshine Mountain Sky) with an old friend named Lisa Oxnard, and then all cheesy hell breaks loose. SCI plays grassy, then funky, then grassy again for maximum party effect, and they nail it (if not all of the changes). A cover of the Doors’ LA Woman hits pretty hard, as it does every time any band plays that song after midnight. Karl Denson comes out to jam Round the Wheel, then the stage erupts into a drumming fiesta featuring Liza Oxnard again and “Travis' roommates from The Double-Dig Ranch on various percussion instruments.”
Sometime near the end of the show (I’m guessing around 5:30am) a beast of a Land’s End features Denson again, and you should listen to it. There’s not much more I can say about this one besides the fact that there were two encores that ended sometime after the sun had risen. Allegedly, Travis started a post-show drum circle with the crowd in the neutral ground outside where a bunch of hippies started dancing and stripping until the cops told them to go home. Links below, enjoy the show.
Official Archival Release on Nugs (Good quality, missing significant portions of the show)