Jake Cinninger of
Umphrey’s McGee
By Corey J. Feldman

In January 2004, jambands.com users voted Umphrey’s McGee as the band to win over the most new fans this year. Lead guitarist Jake Cinninger took some time to tell Cityzen.tv how Umphrey’s went from being two different Notre Dame college bands to a nationally touring, two-time-Bonnaroo-featured jam band in just a few short years.

    “I think there were about 12,000 watching us at the time,” said Cinninger of Umphrey’s performance at Bonnaroo 2002. “It was gargantuan, and we were still kind of new to the scene when we played the first Bonnaroo, so we were camping out, roughing it. Now we’ll do the hotel thing, but we were still just kids.”

      Now featured as one of 70+ bands at this year’s Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, Umphrey’s has much more momentum than they did two years ago.
“Over the last few years a lot more people have been tuning in to what we’ve been doing,” said Cinninger. “We’ve been trying to write more music than ever, have just a huge slew of originals for the fans to sift through.”

      With about 80 originals and a repertoire of nearly 300 covers, this wide-ranging jam band uses every available resource to attract people to their music.

      “It keeps us from getting bored,” said Cinninger. “We hate playing the same thing over and over.”
Covers include The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” Metallica’s “…And Justice For All,” and Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” which they played in February at the Bowery Ballroom.
“‘Shine’ was a lesson for us on how to play less,” said Cinninger. “We’re up there playing a million notes in one minute, and something like that makes you step back and say, ‘Wow good rock n’roll does only consist of one or two notes.”

      Cinninger cites influences ranging from Blue Oyster Cult to John Coltrane to Yes, and even mentions “the black metal, you know, the dark Scandinavian metal.”
Their music is their most important outreach to fans, and they provide that even more efficiently with “UM Live.” With UM Live, each show is mixed 60% through the sound board and 40% through audience microphones. The end product is a high-quality recording of each individual show, sold to fans for $15. You get to walk out with the performance you just saw, and no two shows are ever the same.

      “There’s no better way to get your music out there,” said Cinninger. “That’s the big downfall of a lot of jam bands. I get their disc, and it sounds like there’s a microphone 500 feet away from the stage. We try to step it up a bit.”

      Umphrey’s McGee further stepped it up by releasing an interactive DVD. “I don’t think a band of our caliber, in our position has a really good DVD out,” said Cinninger. “And nowadays, there’s so much ADD in the world you have to have video for your audio. Even on our new record, we’re thinking of having a little interactive thing on there. It entices people to check it out, more than just the audio.”

Umphrey’s new album, Anchor Drops, is officially scheduled to release June 29th.

      “The goal is to have the new album packaged, ready for Bonnaroo [2004],” said Cinninger, "As for the name, well, it works. It’s all about if it rolls off the tongue right.”

     Umphrey’s McGee went through years of evolution to come to this point of national success, particularly in the jam scene. In fact, Cinninger was a delayed pickup for the band.

      “I was originally the guitarist in a three-piece band called Ali Baba’s Tahini,” he explained. (Tahini and Umphrey’s were college bands forming simultaneously at Notre Dame in 1997-1998.) “I’d go play with those guys, they’d come play with us…there wasn’t much else to do in South Bend. We were pretty much the music scene.”

      When they were still in college, Brendan Bayliss, Umphrey’s’ original guitarist/singer, was always welcoming to Cinninger.
“In the end it just kind of worked,” explained Cinninger. “My bass player didn’t want to tour, and I was like ‘I gotta get out of South Bend.’ Umphrey’s McGee was moving to Chicago and it was like my ticket out.”

      Several years later, UM’s drummer opted to go to medical school, and left the band looking for a new person to keep the beats.

      “When you lose a drummer it’s a problem, especially with our kind of music, which tends to get section heavy with a lot of data, a lot to remember,” said Cinninger.

     In 2003, Umphrey’s recruited their new drummer, Kris Myers.
“It went fairly quickly,” said Cinninger of Myers’ incorporation into the band. “He can hear something once or twice and spit it out, and that’s what we were looking for.”

      The process of finding the perfect drummer for an established jam band is hardly an easy process, but for Umphrey’s it was much easier than it seemed.

      “We had about 200 or so resumes and press kits from drummers from all over the place, and he was the first one out of the whole pile!” claimed Cinninger. “We were like, ‘Oh, shit.’ I was blown away right off.”

      He added: “It’s funny that we were getting press kits from overseas, east coast, west coast, and he was right across town: Palatine, Illinois.” Cinninger said that the internet helped in marketing the band, but that didn’t reduce any of the fatigue from their constant tours.

      “We tried to hit every market, and we were burning out,” said Cinninger. “We just started getting risky with booking. ‘Lets do a 4 week tour out west. Let’s do 10 shows in a row out east.’ Doing 150-160 shows a year at one point.”

       The band then changed their scheme. They figured out which cities they were doing best in, particularly on the East Coast and in the South. They focused on doing three to four shows a year in each of those cities.
“It’s better than going to Vancouver just to go to Vancouver,” said Cinninger.
Now, with a heavy national following, a new album on the way (June 29th), a quality DVD, and tons of live tracks floating around the internet because of UM Live, Umphrey’s McGee seems ready to tackle Bonnaroo 2004 head on.

    “The window of opportunity for a band now seems like 3 or 4 years,” said Cinninger. “That window of success is really small and the more music we can push out there, the more people we can tempt into coming to see our show, the better.”