After writing a band an apology for calling them a jam band in a recent article, (they said they didn’t care what I called them as long as people were listening phew!), I started to get annoyed that the term “jam band” had become such an offensive insult. I wrote an opinion piece for the Westword which quickly accumulated comments from jam band haters saying we stink, and because jam bands suck. There were also some fantastic, valid arguments, some prefer the song craftsmanship of singer/songwriters over extended jams, others don’t like the fusion of genres. But the majority had the knee jerk reaction I spoke of in the intro. Here’s a link to the Westword article, the comments are pretty funny:
http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2014/01/jam-band_stigma.php
If you go to the Westword’s main page, they put it front and center next to an article about where to buy weed in Denver: http://www.westword.com/
The Minneapolis City Pages music blog Gimme Noise liked it so much they published it as well. There too, jam bands are hated on:
http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2014/01/why_do_jam_bands_have_such_a_stigma.php
The vitriol, it’s so amusing.
leslieloudspeaker 