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Band History | Dave Matthews | Boyd Tinsley | Carter Beauford | LeRoi Moore | Stefan Lessard
David John Matthews was the third of four children born to John and Val Matthews in a suburb just north of Johannesburg, South Africa on January 9th, 1967. Dave had been moving around his entire life as he had lived in three countries since he was born, which helped him develop an interesting and original appriciation of music and also a rather original accent. A couple years after he was born, his family moved from Africa to Yorktown Heights, a suburb of New York. There, his father John Matthews, worked as a physicist for IBM until Dave was seven years of age, at which time the family moved to Cambridge, England. They stayed there only one year before they moved back to Yorktown Heights, NY.
When Dave was nine years old, he began taking guitar lessons, but he claims he was a poor student. Although there were no musicians in the family, there was always music playing in the house which helped Dave develop an appriciation of music. His tastes varied from music like Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and Jethro Tull to folk music like James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Joan Baez, and Buffy St. Marie. But, he feels "I think the person that inspired me most when I was a teenager was Bob Marley."
In 1977, Dave's father, John Matthews, died of lung cancer, at which time Dave and his family moved back to South Africa to be with the rest of their relatives. However, it wasn't long before they came back to the States. Dave moved back first at the age of 19 to avoid the draft shortly after graduating high school in Johannesburg. He got a job at IBM working in the same research center his father once worked in. After about a year, he moved down to Charlottesville, Virginia to join the rest of his family who had resided there. He began working at Miller's, a musical bar, as a sandwich boy and bartender. It was at Miller's he first met up with his good friend Tim Reynolds. Over the next few years, Dave sat in with Tim's band TR3, which helped strengthen the relationship. You can now occasionally find these two on tour together as an acoustic duo. In addition, Tim sometimes makes guest appearances at DMB concerts and on Dave Matthews Band albums.
In 1990, Dave began writing songs thanks to some encouragement from his friend Ross Hoffman, who was a local recording studio owner. Later Ross became Dave's personal manager and helped him persue the other band members to record a demo. By the end of 1990, Dave quit working at Miller's and began spending a lot of time working on his song writing. It was around thistime that he sucessfully pursued Carter Beauford, Leroi Moore, and Stefan Lessard to do some recordings. Despite the fact that they were not trying to start a band, after the demo was done, they decided to continue as a live band. DMB played their first gig on a cold and windy April 22nd, 1991, as the final band at an Earth Day festival.
Bio written by Jim Powell
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