Interview: Umphrey's McGee

Over the course of their 25-year career, Umphrey’s McGee’s praises have been sung by countless critics and musicians. But few have been as dear to the Indiana improv-rock group’s heart as those of Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead cofounder who took the band under his wing early on. “I’m not so much paternalistic,” Lesh once told an interviewer, “as I am jealous that I can’t play with these guys all the time.” 

“Phil was a creative genius, somebody we looked up to,” Umphrey’s keyboardist Joel Cummins said of their musical mentor, who passed away last October. “He kind of embraced us, and not only sat in with us, but also tapped us to open for Phil and Friends a few times. It was an incredible honor.”

In an early December interview, Cummins fondly recalled the first time Lesh joined Umphrey’s onstage. “We were at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, which is kind of a classic venue for our scene, and we got word that he was going to come out to see the show. So we, of course, invited him to come play with us, and he came backstage during the break and looked through our covers list, which back then must have had 300 songs on it,” laughed the keyboardist. “And he’s going, ‘Man, I don’t know any of these,’ until he comes to [the Dead’s] “Franklin's Tower,’ and he goes, ‘Well I know THIS one.’ So Phil sang and played bass, and (guitarist) Jake (Cinninger) was busting out his best Jerry [Garcia] chops for Phil, who was just loving it. He was so amused. It was really special.”

Like many groups on the jam-band circuit, Umphrey’s McGee still takes a page from the Grateful Dead playbook when it comes to lengthy onstage improvisations and a seemingly endless supply of live recordings. 

Many of their concerts are available online the morning after the show, while a string of live albums are rivaling the frequency of the Dead’s archival “Dick’s Picks” releases. Take, for instance, the band’s 18-track “Hall of Fame” collection. Released in November, it clocks in at more than 17 minutes per track, for a combined running time of 4 hours and 20 minutes.

But when it comes to the studio, both bands have leaned toward a more economical approach. Umphey’s McGee’s 2022 release “Asking for a Friend” averaged just four and a half minutes per song, the same as The Grateful Dead album “Go To Heaven,” which was met with a mixed reaction from longtime Deadheads.

“I don’t really think about the length of the song,” Cummins said. “For me, it’s like ‘What are we trying to accomplish in the writing process?’ But we're going to be turning that on its head a little bit with the next studio recording. It’s going to have multiple tracks that are over 15 minutes long.”

The group will also release an album of recordings based on “improvisation themes” that audience members texted in real time during the band’s annual UMBowl show. Examples of the prompts, which were projected onto a large screen above the stage, include “Mongolian Throat Singing Meets Meshuggah,” “Who Dosed Debussy?” and “Dark Industrial Dance Party, Berlin, 3AM.” And if all that weren’t enough, the band organized a “pilgrimage” for hardcore fans to go see the band perform a just-completed three-night run in Morocco in mid-April.

All of which is a far cry from the band’s humble beginnings, when they went six months without having monitors. “Other than the vocals, you were able to hear things pretty well,” Cummins said with a laugh. “So when we got monitors, that definitely opened up some new channels where we were like, ‘Oh, I can hear what you're doing now.”

A few years later, Umphrey’s McGee had another breakthrough after playing a friend’s wedding reception. “It was in the Jimmy Stewart Ballroom at the Renaissance Hotel in Pittsburgh and there was also a Notre Dame football game, and by the end of it, we were pretty loose,” Cummins recalled. “So we got the idea to go back down there to play. And when we got there, we thought, ‘Let’s turn the lights out, and then maybe they won't know we're here.’”

Probably not the most fool-proof strategy, but the front desk didn’t get any complaints, and the band played on. “We ended up improvising in the dark, and it was this big moment for us where we kind of realized that we could really trust in our ears,” Cummins said. “And I feel like that was kind of the advent of us having some really good moments of improvisation in our shows.”

Two decades later, Umphrey’s McGee, which also includes guitarist/singer Brendan Bayliss, bassist Ryan Stasik, percussionist Andy Farag and drummer Kris Myers, have managed to outlive the countless bands that have aired their breakup stories on VH1’s “Behind the Music:”

“It certainly hasn’t always been easy, but I think there’s a very brotherly love and support system there,” said Cummins. “We all care about each other, and we still want to go out there and have fun and create interesting music together. And then the other part of that is, I have no idea what the hell else we would do.”