08-05-2021, 09:09 AM
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#12570
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Re: Random dmb thoughts that don't need their own thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by TypicalBilly14
Did Peter leave the band due to touring issues or something else?
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From an interview in 2000 ( https://nancies.org/news/2000/09/griesar-interview/3/):
Quote:
So it came as a surprise to many fans when, on March 23, 1993, Peter Griesar played his last show with Dave Matthews Band. There's that nagging question again: Why?
Griesar pauses, assembling his thoughts. He looks tired, far away, as if he's preparing himself for a great effort. With a deep breath, and a bit of sadness, he haltingly explains.
"I was...I was tired. My mom was sick. I was...there was...I felt, like, a breakdown in communication between me and David. Personally and...I have very little patience for that because I'm a personal person. And so I decided...and I wasn't having any fun, and so I decided to stop. And do something else. I wanted what was happening to stop. So I made it stop. I needed it to stop. I had to stop for my own health, for my own sake of well-being. That's all. I left because I needed to grow. That I was my deficit. I needed to grow. I considered that to be my need.
"I was young, I had been through a lot of experiences, this was a really great experience. I had a great time doing it up to that point, and I knew that the joy that I found in it, the joy that I derived from what I was doing was dwindling. It was turning into something else, from my perspective. In this day and age, if it had been another time, a year later, a year before, a week before, a week later, things might have been different. But at the time, I was in the moment, and I thought 'If I don't stop doing this, I'm not going to grow anymore.'
"I'm a good sideman. I know how to make someone look good. I think that's what I did to Dave. I made his guitar playing sound better by mirroring it on the keyboards. And I made Boyd sound better by helping him learn melodic lines and training him into them. By the time I left the band, David learned how to play rhythm guitar and Boyd had learned all the melodic lines and Carter had learned all the backup harmonies. So all of the three jobs that I had were useless. They really were. If there was any intellectual reason that I left, it was that. My time was done, I had done my job. And that's the best job anyone can do.
"[I knew that] the band was much larger than me. That what we were doing was much more important than me, and I knew that, and that my leaving would go almost unnoticed, in a way, in the sense that I would leave on a Tuesday and they would be playing on a Wednesday. And I knew that at the time, I was expecting that. I didn't expect the world to stop. I wasn't quitting the band to make a statement. I wasn't doing it to make a stand. I was doing it to, literally, simply, to duck out. I didn't want to continue under the circumstances because I needed to grow. I'm not much of a regretful person."
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