It's very simple: the members of String Cheese Incident walk onstage, look at their amps, then look out at the audience of approximately 20,000 people, smile, and the crowd goes wild. String Cheese Incident has no major label, no MTV videos, no coverage in Rolling Stone or Spin. Yet the 20,000 people gathered in front of the Z-93 stage at the Music Midtown festival in Atlanta give them the kind of adulation normally reserved for Billboard chart toppers. Not bad for five guys who just six years ago were playing for dinners and drinks in Crested Butte, Colorado.

During their set the band is joined onstage by no less of musicians than saxophonist Jeff Coffin and Béla Fleck of the Flecktones. Despite the hugeness, to borrow a word from Spinal Tap, of the event, the band emits a very mellow, back porch feel, as though they were playing a neighborhood barbecue. The audience is with them every step of the way, from newgrass improvs to world music and Latin jazz jams. Each song gets a few verses sung before the band is off exploring other sonic possibilities.

When the set is over I meet with String Cheese Incident bassist Keith Moseley who tells me to follow him to the band bus for our interview. On the way he sees his aunt and uncle who came to catch the show. Their eyes are wide, jaws agape, clearly impressed at the size of the audience and the magnitude of the reaction their nephew just got. As his aunt and uncle begin discussing the size of the audience ("They say there's going to be 270,000 here over the weekend!" his uncle effuses), Moseley does an amazing thing -- he switches the conversation off of himself and the band and begins discussing routine family things: graduations, sick pets, visiting relatives in Oklahoma. You suddenly realize that String Cheese Incident aren't rock stars -- they're regular fellas!

In similarly un-rock star-like fashion the inside of the bus is devoid of the tattooed groupies I used to see in the Mötley Crüe videos (I'm kinda disappointed -- don't rock interviewers usually get some of those groupies, too?). Casually stretched out on the couch, Moseley indulges me in a good session of Q & A.

VOYAGER: So how did this band get started?

KEITH MOSELEY: We played our first gigs in ski towns in Colorado. We were all living in Crested Butte and Billy (Nershi, acoustic guitar) was over in Telluride. We started as a ski band, playing for lift passes and dinner and drinks sometimes until we got going. Then after playing for probably a year we decided we would get serious about it and try to make a living. We branched out and started playing the Boulder/Denver area, then ventured out to the West, Utah and California. We've been touring pretty constantly for the last five years.

VOYAGER: What was the...epiphany, for lack of a better word, that made you say, "We might be able to make a living at this?" Was it a particular show or set of shows?

MOSELEY: The turning point was when we got invited to be the opening band at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in `94, I guess it was. The band had just been playing together for about six months. Suddenly here we are on this big stage at Telluride in front of 5 or 6,000 people. We felt like we had a good gig and a great response from the people. We kind of looked at each other afterwards and said, "Gosh, this went over so well that maybe if we gave it some real effort and put our heads together and really committed to this thing we could make a living at it." So shortly after that we were able to work ourselves out of our day jobs and just play music.

VOYAGER: Was it more of a hardcore bluegrass sound back then?

MOSELEY: There has never been a banjo in the band and there was always a drummer so it was never really bluegrass, you know (Technically bluegrass bands must have the original Bill Monroe instrumentation of banjo, acoustic guitar, dobro, mandolin and fiddle -- Art), but we played a more acoustic-based style of music. After the band had been together six months or a year (Michael) Travis decided to get a drum kit. He had just been playing hand drums up to that point. From there on out we decided we were going to play dance music and get people moving.

VOYAGER: Where did the name come from? I can't believe I've never read the origin of the name anywhere.

MOSELEY: I was eating a take-out Chinese dinner and the name was inside a fortune cookie. I dropped it in a glass of water and it expanded to five times its normal size and it said, "The name of the band is The String Cheese Incident." That's a true story.

VOYAGER: I'm putting on my wading boots for that one.

MOSELEY: (Laughs, obviously astounded at how funny I am).

VOYAGER: Just out of curiosity, what were you all doing before blowing up as "rock stars," so to speak?

MOSELEY: Everyone was playing music part-time and living in Colorado doing the ski town thing, doing odd jobs, restaurants, carpentry, whatever you do in a small mountain town to get by and ski. We were brought together more by the place and the pursuit of the mountain lifestyle than by the music in the beginning. That was what we really had in common, living in the mountains and skiing in the wintertime and in the summertime hiking and biking. The music happened for us accidentally there.

VOYAGER: What interests me is that you guys have a rock audience out there, but there are no traces of Foghat or Foreigner in your sound. You've somehow avoided having any mainstream rock influences. How did that happen?

This is only a portion of this article. To read the complete interview, order a copy of

Voyager Volume 1, Issue 1.

Find out how here.