THE RTW CANON: "TEXAS" BY THE STRING CHEESE INCIDENT
In 2025, Texas Monthly published a ranking of songs titled "Texas". My favorite band is the String Cheese Incident, and they have a song by that name, so I was curious where it would land. I did not imagine it would come in high, because, having enjoyed jam bands for a long time, I have no illusions about how people generally feel about them. Still, my flabbers were well and truly gasted to see it placed 69th out of 71.
The full text of the entry reads as follows: How’s your tolerance for endless guitar noodling and boring drug narratives? If it’s extremely high, well, you might enjoy the nineties jam band’s take on a bad trip to Texas. The song is part of a category called "Songs That Are Hard to Listen To."
If you read something like that about a song that literally changed your life, I imagine that would be pretty Hard to Listen To as well.
First, I have to address some of the inaccuracies and glib dismissals here, or I won't be able to move on. The String Cheese Incident is a 90s jam band insofar as they began in the 90s, but they're still touring. I saw them six months ago. It's kind of like saying Pokémon was a 90s fad. It was, but it also endured long afterward, maintained a steady popularity, and accomplished a lot more than one big breakout moment would suggest. I also often take umbrage to the term noodling; it's just another way of saying something is boring, which is a criticism I always try to avoid, because it tends to say more about the person saying it than the thing it's being said about.
I could maybe concede that it is not the most exciting narrative. It is a little more than a "bad trip through Texas"; it's a true story, about the band getting stopped in Fredericksburg on their way to JazzFest in 1995. They used to tour (and, for some of the band members, live in) an old bus named Bussy, a name I used to be able to say without wincing, and I guess it was a little hard to handle and they took out an awning with it. Guys on mushrooms cause minor property damage: not terribly exciting. And in light of what I've learned about privilege in the decades since I first heard the song, it kind of sours the final lyrical stinger that they ultimately got away with no more than a fine. Not so sure a band of Black performers would have gotten off so easy as to be sent on their merry way "minus eighty bucks in cash." (Cops being stupid is eternal, though.)
The part I have the hardest time with, though, is "Songs That Are Hard to Listen To." In 2002, this was indeed a hard song for me to listen to, but not in the way that Texas Monthly means. Rather, it was hard to listen to in the way that is understood by people who acutely remember what having dial-up internet was like.
The studio recording of "Texas" is 8 minutes and 46 seconds long. Even at 17, enduring a song of such length was, for me, a trivial ask. My first favorite band was Dire Straits, and they had already made me plenty comfortable with the idea that a song is a journey, not a destination. What was not trivial was getting a song that long to successfully download over a shaky dial-up connection. There was every chance in the world that the person I was getting it from would dip, or someone would need to make a phone call and run me off the connection.
Being the days that they were, I was grabbing the song from Kazaa, which had a preview function that would play as much of the song as you had downloaded. Even at just 1 or 2 percent, I wanted to see what I was in for. And from that first lick that Billy Nershi cracks off, I was hooked. Immediately it was like nothing I'd heard up to that point in my life. Everything about it seemed unique. I wanted more. Every time the progress bar crept a few percentage points forward, I listened anew from the start. If you want a song to activate a shitload of new neurons in your brain, listening to the first 5 seconds, then listening to it again for 5 more seconds than that, then listening to it again for 5 more seconds than that, etc., is a pretty good way to do it.
I think it took something like 3½ hours to download that song. The download succeeded, which was a great relief. It was quite common for downloads to fail at the last second on those old P2P file-sharing apps. But at the end, I had what, after all that effort, had felt like finishing a jigsaw puzzle. And what a glorious puzzle it was. I couldn't stop listening to it even after I'd spent hours listening to it piecemeal as a partial download. It was, as of 17.5 years on Earth, the coolest thing I'd ever heard in my life. It still is one of them.
One way "Texas" is uniquely special to me is that I went through a progression with it that I never did with other songs. At the time, I was burning a Random Songs mix any time I allocated about 75 minutes worth of new music; I think "Texas" ended up on the third such compilation. After the fifth one, I burned Random Songs Live, which had live cuts of songs from the first five Random Songs mixes. The Carnival '99 cut of "Texas" closed out that disc. Then, the same year I got into String Cheese, they started rolling out the On the Road project. Starting with the 3-night run in Austin that kicked off their Spring 2002 tour, they released (almost) every show they played as a 3-disc set in a lovely cardboard digipack. My local Hastings (God rest that wonderful store's sweet, sweet soul) had the Texas dates, and I was drawn to the one that had "Texas" on it. Playing "Texas" in Texas? Sounded like a natural fit! I didn't know any of the other songs. I hadn't bought any of their other albums yet, and I didn't know there were some that existed only in a live context. But I relied on "Texas" to ease me in, figuring if it was good, then the rest would follow, and from those three discs, I learned the sound of each band member's voice and instruments, and I developed a deep appreciation for their interplay.
I still consider the path from studio "Texas" to Carnival '99 "Texas" to Austin 2002 "Texas" an incredible walk. The speed with which String Cheese grew and their sound matured is astounding. In a span of just six years, they leveled it up from a smoky but shy loiterer into a huge, sprawling, 20-minute epic, with a lavishly expansive midsection that feels like taking the "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer" journey, but through a single song. I consider this particular cut to have three distinct sections: the lyrics that run through the first seven minutes; the desert journey that goes to just shy of the 14-minute mark, the perfect aural representation of red sand under an even redder sky, with some guitar moves from Nershi that for me personally evoke, of all things, Zelda II; and the climax that builds through the remainder of the song, which descends into a kind of demonic chaos that gets incredibly filthy incredibly fast and marks most of the best jams of that era.
"Texas" wasn't actually the first String Cheese song I ever heard. That would be "Come As You Are", which hails from their second studio album, 'Round the Wheel (I'm really not kidding about "Texas" changing my life), and which is very much not a Nirvana cover. That song didn't land for me at the time: I couldn't wrap my mind around the sound, which I distinctly remember causing the word klezmer to run through my head, despite the fact that I may not have actively listened to any of that genre up to that point in my life. But it must have made enough of an impression to make me think they were worth a second chance, because I found "Texas" when just searching them out myself rather than relying on Kazaa's quite good recommendation algorithm. And eventually I did come back around on CAYA, as I often do with Cheese tunes that I don't vibe with on the first pass.
If I was completely insufferable about evangelizing to IRL friends and online acquaintances on AIM about String Cheese for the next two or three years, it was only because they felt like a discovery that was fully mine, and I was really, really excited about that fact. I have always felt a closer kinship to works that I feel like I discovered organically or came around to in my own time, and "Texas" could be the prime example of that. It's possible I will never go on that kind of an adventure with a song ever again in my life. And if any of it seems Hard to Listen To, well, I would submit, with tongue more in cheek than I want it to be, that maybe you just need to get better at music.