Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King was not intended by Dave Matthews Band to be a tribute to LeRoi Moore, their saxophonist, but it somehow ended that way. Moore died in an ATV accident while the band was halfway through recording the album, and the band members reacted to the loss by turning the album into their tribute to their longtime friend and comrade. The death of LeRoi somehow brought the band back to how they sounded in the 90s– rough but clean, dark but warm, edgy but smooth.
You can sense how the band feels about the sudden loss of LeRoi in many of the album’s songs, like the way Matthews declares in “Why I Am’” that he is ”still here dancing with the GrooGrux King.” In “Funny the Way It Is” there’s a line about ”soldier’s last breath“. ”Doesn’t everyone deserve to have the good life? But it don’t always work out,” he asks in the song “Spaceman”. In the song “Squirm” Matthews confronts death directly with these words, “Out there, no food, no drink/How many days do you think you’d last… If kindness is your king/Then heaven will be yours before you meet your end.”
But despite the tinge of gloom, the band managed to put in some touch of humor in the song ”Shake Me Like a Monkey” with lines like this, “I like my coffee with toast and jelly/But I’d rather be licking from your back to your belly.”
The album has a jammy feel, which is a relief from the kind of musical stance that the band has adopted lately. I missed the jammy atmosphere of their earlier albums and now Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King is giving the old feeling back to me.
These line from the song “Why I Am” gives us the overall tone of the album: “We’ll be drinking big whiskey while we dance and sing, and when my story ends, it’s gonna end with him/Heaven or hell/I’m going down with the GrooGrux King.”
This album should be part of your collection.
