I'm Tonya Roe. I'm 20, and I'm a third-year at the University of Virginia. (That's a junior anywhere else. At UVA we have first-years through fourth-years, the campus is called Grounds, and no, I can't explain why.) I live in Charlottesville, the town where the Dave Matthews Band got started in 1991, and this summer I saw them nine times in three states. My mother would like everybody to know that I also waited tables forty hours a week and passed a summer class. Both of those things are true!

This page is about the band, the albums, my summer, and the tapes. There are no lyrics on it. The songs belong to the guys who wrote them, and anyway you should be singing them yourself, loud, on a blanket, while the sun goes down.

Fall of 1994. I was fifteen, in tenth grade in Roanoke, and my best friend's big sister came home from Charlottesville for Thanksgiving with a cassette she said everybody up there was playing. It was Remember Two Things, the record the band put out themselves before any label signed them, dubbed so many times it hissed like a radiator. We played it in her car until she made us get out.

That winter What Would You Say was on the radio and on MTV, and Under the Table and Dreaming was in every Walkman in my high school, and I got extremely smug about having heard them first. (I had not heard them first. Half of Virginia had heard them first.)

My first show was the summer of 1996, at an amphitheater a couple of hours from home. I was seventeen. My dad drove me and my friend and sat in the parking lot for four hours with a newspaper and a thermos of coffee. He says he could hear every note and it was "fine." Last Christmas I caught him humming Crash Into Me while he carved the turkey. So.

Then I got into UVA, and I would like the record to show that I did not choose a university because of a band. Mostly.

Charlottesville is a funny place to be a fan. Everybody in town over twenty-five has a story about seeing them for a few dollars in a bar before anybody knew who they were. Dave tended bar here back then, and if you believed every person who says they used to hang out with him, he'd have had to be in every bar on the Downtown Mall every night of the week. I love it anyway. It's like growing up in the town where the circus spends the winter.

If you only know them from the radio, you know about a third of them. The records are great, but live, the songs are different every night. One night a song runs five minutes and the next night it runs twelve, because Boyd and LeRoi got into a conversation in the middle and nobody wanted to interrupt. Carter will do something on the drums that makes the whole hill turn to each other and go what WAS that. They change the set list every night, so you never know what you're going to get. That's why people go to nine shows. Or ninety.

And then there's the lawn. The lawn is the cheap seats, the big grassy hill at the back of the amphitheater. You spread a blanket, the sun goes down orange behind the stage, the band starts, and the whole hill stands up at once and stays up. I have sat in real seats. I like the lawn better. You can dance, and the sky's included.

Remember Two Things (1993). The one they put out themselves. Where it started for me, hiss and all.

Under the Table and Dreaming (1994). The first one on a big label. Ants Marching, What Would You Say, Satellite. Basically the soundtrack to tenth grade.

Crash (1996). Warmer and darker at the same time. So Much to Say won them a Grammy. This is the one I give to people who say they "don't really like that kind of music."

Live at Red Rocks 8.15.95 (1997). Two CDs from the outdoor amphitheater in the rocks outside Denver. If you've never been to a show, start here. Then go to a show.

Before These Crowded Streets (1998). The serious one. Long, dark and gorgeous, and it went to number one. Don't Drink the Water, The Stone, Crush. Listen to it start to finish with the lights off.

From May to August I waited tables five nights a week at a restaurant on the Downtown Mall and put every tip into one envelope marked GAS & TICKETS. My roommate Natasha came to seven of the nine shows, which makes her the best roommate in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Three nights in a football stadium in Philadelphia the week exams ended. A weekend that went from the hills outside Pittsburgh to Virginia Beach overnight. A three-show swing through Charlotte, Raleigh and the country out past Manassas. And the last one in Hershey, where the whole town smells like chocolate. Nine shows, three states, about 2,600 miles on my Civic, and one sunburn I'll be telling my grandchildren about.

Here's something a lot of people don't know: the band lets fans tape the shows. There's a tapers' section where people set up microphones on tall stands, and as long as nobody sells the tapes, the band is fine with it. So fans make copies for each other and trade them through the mail. That's how I've ended up with about 160 shows, a little over four hundred hours, in milk crates under my bed.

I don't tape, myself. My friend Danny does, and he's the reason six of my nine shows from this summer are on their way to me on cassette. (Danny, I love you. Danny, it's been a month.)

These are my rules. Well, they're everybody's rules. I just wrote them down.

My trade list is going up as soon as I finish typing it in. It's long. In the meantime, e-mail me what you're looking for and I'll check the crates.

Neighbors on the Strip who also drive too far for shows: Steve's Springsteen Page, three nights at the Meadowlands. Different band, same disease.