Released as part of Dave Matthews Band's 2002 album Busted Stuff, "Bartender" is an epic jam song that, as far as I'm concerned, is the best song the band will likely ever produce.
It isn't one of their released singles. Unless you know the band, have attended or listened to one of their concerts, you probably have no idea it even exists. The funny thing is, Busted Stuff itself is, among the band's fans, a notable album insofar as it was material that was almost scrapped in favor of Everday, which was recorded later but released earlier, until it was decided to pursue what was becoming known as "The Lillywhite Sessions" again.
"Bartender" features some of Dave's most impassioned singing, and overt religious references, and the kind of concentrated lyrics you might not otherwise associate with the band's output (aside from all that pop aesthetic present on the Everyday album, and even in the rest of Busted Stuff, although at a more somber key), ultimately culminating in an extended although highly focused jam, a cathartic expression of the song's desperate mortal yearning.
Today, the band is a phenomenon mostly among its own fans, although twenty years ago it was one of the biggest bands in the world, a part of the last major wave of pop rock to enjoy significant mainstream success. "Ants Marching," "What Would You Say," these are songs you'd definitely know if you heard them. As rock's profile has sunk, so too has the band's. Where there was once a visible market for aging rockers, including the kind of push Prince got late in his life, all the way to the Super Bowl (which had become a kind of old rocker's home at that point) half-time show, now Dave is as invisible as modern rock itself. "Rock is dead." Well, it isn't, but as far as a lot of people are concerned, it might as well be.
But put "Bartender" on and you will feel it all over again, the primal, visceral effect rock at its best always delivers. There are no real comparisons to anything else in the band's catalog, and you have to look among the very best, most treasured of anyone else's to find them.
Simply put, in a hundred years, if anyone remembers the Dave Matthews Band, "Bartender" is likely to be the reason. This, for me, is the only real selling point for pop culture, if it will mean something to generations long removed from its original release. Anything can be popular in the moment. A lot of things can be enjoyable. But what next? What happens when everyone else isn't telling you to like it? What happens when it's just another artifact?
At their best, songs, whether in the rock genre or otherwise, are just waiting to be sung. In our era we think the whole composition is key, and as such we treat it like we do classical music. The old Stephen Foster folk songs are lyrics people know. Even if there were original recordings possible, would they, at this point, replace singing "Oh! Susanna" or "Camptown Races" yourself? Everything, eventually, becomes a folk song.
"Bartender," as glorious as it is as Dave sings it, as it's played around him, it was already one of those songs that I just had to sing, knowing that half of it that I loved so much was missing, would never be there except in my head as I sang. I had stopped playing the violin years before the song was ever composed, but it's the one song I always wish I were still playing that violin to help fill out. I knew how I would do it. There's this neat trick where you can have two strings hitting the same note, and it's one of the things I've always wanted to do, play "Bartender," because of that, because it would be so interesting to hear it coming from an instrument in my own hands.
So many critics knocked the film Yesterday because, they claimed, the Beatles songs couldn't possibly be popular today, released today, and maybe because I know the songs so well I just couldn't fathom it, loved so much, even as sung by Jack Malik, but I think the critics were idiots. Good songs will continue in the popular consciousness the way good poems have. It's the reason Bob Dylan has always been so celebrated, because at heart he has always been a poet, and a song is just a poem that sometimes has someone singing it brilliantly (and I'm sorry, but Dolly Parton lost all claim to "I Will Always Love You" when Whitney Houston chose to record it, make it truly immortal).
No one knows how things end up lasting. Shakespeare got salvaged from the scrapheap of history not because everyone remembered his plays so warmly, but because of the folios that reprinted the scripts, after his death. We still don't know who Homer was, or if he even existed. Melville ruined his career by publishing Moby-Dick. Eventually, critical appreciation recognizes genius. Students in classrooms bemoan having to learn about all the old things, but that's the culture, that's the sum of human greatness, whether it's fun or not.
Someday, "Bartender," in someone's recording, will be described, in its origin, as a traditional, no creator credited. It will still be a treasure. Twenty years is just a drop in the bucket for this one.
