Check out the beginning to this great Relix article about Indie Rockers who are shadily Phishheads and Deadheads.  Best Part: Yeasayer’s Ira Wolf Tuton played in The Ally….  Uhhh The Ally were a Penn Band! I think I smell “Penn Band of The Week.” 

Smells Like Hippie Spirit
Relix uncovers indie rock’s true jamband roots
Mike Greenhaus
2009-06-09

Though the indie rock and jamband scenes often seem worlds apart, members of many of today’s most popular hipster buzz bands actually cut their teeth on seminal jambands like Phish, Widespread Panic and the Grateful Dead. For the June issue of Relix, Executive Editor Mike Greenhaus sat down with Vampire Weekend, The Decemberists, The National, MGMT, Animal Collective and other indie elite to figure out why indie rock is more of an outgrowth than a reaction to the jamband scene.

The Thursday night of Manchester, TN’s four-day, multi-genre Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival is traditionally reserved for some of the year’s most blogged about bands and the spring of 2008 was no exception. In the span of only four hours, the overflowing This Tent played host to such indie elites as African-influenced pop stars Vampire Weekend, instrumental weirdos Battles and synth-rock royalty MGMT. The tent and its surrounding areas are filled with the usual mix of early arrivals: college kids, industry reps, groupies, journalists and fellow musicians—and the Olsen twins aren’t far behind. But instead of the disaffected industry chatter one might expect at an indie showcase, the conversation backstage has turned surprisingly, um, heady.

“We discussed playing a 45-minute version of ‘China Cat Sunflower,’” said MGMT guitarist James Richardson with a straight face shortly before his set, sporting a well-worn tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt. “I think pretty much everybody in MGMT secretly loves jambands—well, not so secretly. We always have.”

A few yards away his bandmates are catching up with Vampire Weekend drummer Chris Tomson, who despite his band receiving an impressive 8.8 ranking by seemingly devout hippie-hater website Pitchfork, is proudly decked out in a T-shirt that meshes the Phish and the Philadelphia Phillies’ logos. “When it was announced and the band’s names were listed, I remember thinking that everyone was going to playing there,” he reminisces about his experience at the first, more jamband-oriented Bonnaroo in 2002.

Vampire Weekend’s Chris Tomson represents at Bonnaroo 2008- photo by Julie Schnee

But, shortly after that gathering of the tribes, something started to change. As the jam scene started to fragment stylistically, indie rock continued to mature musically and a generation weaned on Phish and Grateful Dead began to grow older while a younger generation began to look at other genres given the sudden dearth of arena-sized jamband draws.

“Too many bad imitators of Phish ruined that whole thing—everybody really wanted to be ‘indie,’” Richardson muses.

Indeed, though both the blogosphere and the mainstream media are quick to make it seem like hipsters and hippies are as different as hair gel and hemp, in reality some of the day’s most popular “indie bands” have at least one direct tie to the jamband world—not they’re openly citing String Cheese Incident as they’re favorite band on Facebook. Yeasayer’s Ira Wolf Tuton played in Disco Biscuits’ associates The Ally, Band of Horses’ Bill Reynolds was a member of jam-friendly roots rockers Donna the Buffalo, Brazilian Girls’ Jesse Murphy had another life in John Scofield’s Uber-Jam, Leslie Feist sang on The New Deal’s Gone Gone Gone, New Deal’s Dan Kurtz doubles in the electo-pop band Dragonette, all three members of the Lake Trout spinoff Big in Japan serve as the backing band for UNKLE and even the members of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Interpol have name-checked Phish.

Portland’s The Decemberists, who stress lyrical nuance over instrumental virtuosity, boasts two alumni of the ‘90s jamband Calobo: keyboardist Jenny Conlee and bassist Nate Query. “Calobo helped me with my technique and how to listen because when you’re improvising you always have to be aware of what is going on around you,” Conlee says.

So despite being often cast as diametrically opposed, the sound of a surprising number of popular indie rock groups is not just a reaction to their Phish and Dead-influenced youth, but rather a natural extension of the millennium-era jamband movement. In the other words: When did skinny jeans and songcraft start replacing tie-dyes and epic jams?