But you know who doesn’t care about cool? The 31 million Americans (and counting) who have bought Dave Matthews Band albums. My many friends in high school who got to first, second, and third base for the first time on the lawn of Lakewood Amphitheater in Atlanta while DMB ran down “Tripping Billies” onstage. And people in towns across the U.S. who got hand-me-down Allman Brothers, Genesis, and Steely Dan albums from older brothers instead of records that put you on the shortcut to cool like Fugazi, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.

By Jerry Shriver, USA TODAY

BOSTON — The band leader wanders into a hotel lounge for an afternoon appointment sounding groggy and hoarse, sporting a thick dark stubble, craving coffee and seeming to validate all of those clichés about a musician's life on the road.

But Dave Matthews' condition can't be blamed on cruising the city's underbelly until the wee hours. On the eve of the first of two sold-out shows at Fenway Park last weekend, the famously normal singer/songwriter and father of three was in bed, where he would "roll and read, roll and read," fretting over the reception that awaited the retooled and re-energized Dave Matthews Band and the material from Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King, the group's first studio album in four years, out today.

'BIG WHISKEY': Read the review

It's a strange and improbable fusion of folk, jazz, funk & rock that has made the Dave Matthews Band one of the most popular groups of the past two decades.

"We're still pretty strange in the whole picture," Matthews said. "Not a lot of people sound like us."

But it can be good to be strange. Forty-two-year-old Dave Matthews is frontman, lead singer and songwriter of the group that bears his name, a bar band born in a college town that's become one of the icons of arena rock.

But after 30 million records sold and four number one albums, Matthews admitted to us, the band was in trouble.

Saxophonist LeRoi Moore of the Dave Matthews Band was a famously taciturn man. Moore, who died last August at 46 of complications from injuries suffered in an off-road-vehicle accident on his farm in Virginia, never spoke onstage — not at any DMB show I saw, anyway — and declined to be interviewed for stories about the group. When I wrote about the Dave Matthews Band for a Rolling Stone cover story in 2002, Moore avoided even saying hello. A founding member of one of America's best-selling bands, he was also spectacularly successful at minding his own business.

The Dave Matthews Band’s new album Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King (out June 2) is a tribute, in large part, to saxophonist LeRoi Moore, who passed away last August at the age of 46 following injuries incurred in an ATV accident. Just a couple of years ago, however, relations between the group's members became badly strained. "As far as our friendships, we’d not been in top form," admits frontman Dave Matthews. "And in the last few years we have taken the time to rediscover each other, so to speak." After the break, Matthews talks about Big Whiskey..., how the band dragged themselves back from the brink, and his fond memories of Moore’s foul-mouthed

Entertainment Weekly: "Grux" was LeRoi’s nickname. But where does the "Big Whiskey" part of the CD's title come from?
Dave Matthews: LeRoi certainly liked “big whiskey.” But that came from a drunken harmonica player walking down the streets of New Orleans when we were recording the album who would play harmonica and then announce that he needed a “big whiskey." That was his way of courting cash. We thought Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King had a sort of a grownup fairly tale-sound to it.