String Cheese Ends Ski Town Tour With Old-School Three-Night Run In Nevada [Photos]

String Cheese Incident finished up the last run of their intimate Winter Carnival 2017 Roots Revival tour this weekend with three nights at the Crystal Bay Club in Crystal Bay, Nevada. I think we can all agree that this tour has been something special for fans and musicians alike, letting Cheese play the small ski-town venues that helped the shape the band as we know it today and giving fans a rare chance to catch the full band in a really intimate setting (plus, many of us can agree that an ideal day involves hitting the slopes in the morning and seeing some our favorite musicians at night).

Rather than stalling out, String Cheese Incident consistently heated up throughout this final run, ending the tour with a bang at last night’s performance in Nevada. Friday’s performance was a heater, hinting to fans who made these Crystal Bay shows that they were in for an old-school Cheese showing for this final weekend with rarities “Remington Ride” and “Deal” landing during the first set as well as “Indian Creek” opening a show for the first time since 2002.

Saturday night kept up this energy, and fans were buzzing to see how the weekend would continue to unfold. Again, String Cheese was really tapping into the “Roots Revival” theme of the tour with a first set chock full of bust outs, including the first time “Eat My Dust” has been performed since mid-2015, followed by “Walls of Time,” a Peter Rowan & Bill Monroe cover that hadn’t been seen since summer of last year until it worked it’s way back into their setlist rotation at the Fox Theatre in Boulder earlier in the tour, and “Late In The Evening” sung by Michael Travis, to name a few. Plus, second set ended on a cover of the Talking Head’s “Nothing But Flowers,” and the boys brought out Bob Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn” for their encore, getting the crowd amped for the tour’s final night.

Thus we arrive at last night’s final performance, and String Cheese Incident tour down the house. With the show kicking off with “Lester Had A Coconut,” the crowd was beyond primed when “Resume Man” was busted out as the second song in the first set, marking the first time the tune has been played since November of 2014. “Dudley’s Kitchen” followed, solidifying the final first set of the tour as something special.

The second set was similarly fiery, with “Dirk” kicking things off before segueing into a slowed down “Sand Dollar.” The new Billy tune off their upcoming album Believe called “Flying,” which live debuted in Telluride last week made it’s way into the second set, already beginning to feel more solid as it makes it’s way into Cheese’s live rotation. To close out second set, Cheese ended with a “Rollover” sandwich, one of the best renditions of the song in recent years, which house “Cold Sweat” and a fat extended jam within it, before closing out the show with a final encore of crowd favorite, “Jellyfish.”

You can check out setlists from Cheese’s tour-closing weekend below, as well as an extensive gallery of Saturday night’s festivities, courtesy of Michael Pegram Photography. If you’re getting a hankering for Cheese before they hit the road again later in the year, you can pre-order their new album, Believe, on Pledge Music here, and get a bunch of goodies along with the new album, including an unreleased live show from the tail end of their Fall 1999 tour.

Setlist: String Cheese Incident | Crystal Bay Club | Crystal Bay, NV | 3/17/17

Set One: Indian Creek, Way Back Home > Joyful Sound, Think Of What You’ve Done, Remington Ride, Deal, Outside and Inside > Smile

Set Two: Let’s Go Outside, These Waves > Djibouti Bump, Rhythm of the Road > Sirens, 45th of November > Rivertrance > Desert Dawn

Setlist: String Cheese Incident | Crystal Bay Club | Crystal Bay, NV | 3/18/17

Set One: Miss Brown’s Teahouse, The Road Home, Cottonmouth, Eat My Dust, Walls of Time, Late In The Evening, Falling Through The Cracks > Beautiful

Set Two: Just One Story > Search, Until The Music’s Over, My One And Only, Hi Ho No Show, Turn This Around > Nothing But Flowers