Monday Jul 21, 2025
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About the Book.
The wild, untold oral history of the unlikely rise of Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, and numerous other bands that helped define the 1990s jam band scene.
Sharing in the Groove is the untold oral history behind the unlikely rise of Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, and numerous other bands that helped define the 1990s jam band scene — a scene that paved the way for modern-day cultural institutions such as the Bonnaroo Music Festival, as well as kept the Grateful Dead ethos alive. It was also a scene with its own values and its own unique interactions with fame, record labels, MTV, drugs, and success.
As a veteran music journalist, Mike Ayers has been to more than 130 Phish shows, 20 Grateful Dead shows, and countless others by the bands profiled in this book. In the mid-90s, he stumbled upon a job working backstage for Phish as a prep cook in exchange for all-access passes for the night’s show, and ended up doing this for years. Later in the decade, he dabbled in the taping scene and recorded numerous shows that are still circulated online today.
Filled with anecdotes and stories directly from the musicians, promoters, managers, roadies, producers, label executives, and fans that lived this scene, Sharing in the Groove is a fun, fast-paced oral history that will appeal to music lovers everywhere.
About the Author.
MIKE AYERS is a seasoned music and culture journalist, with work published in Billboard, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, Reuters, Uproxx, and Relix. His first book, One Last Song: Conversations on Life, Death and Music, was published in 2020 and picked as one of Variety‘s Best Music Books of the year.
About the Moderator.
Dean Budnick is the co-author of concert promoter Peter Shapiro’s The Music Never Stops: What Putting on 10,000 Shows Has Taught Me About Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Magic. He previously worked with Blues Traveler frontman John Popper on the memoir Suck and Blow: And other Stories I’m Not Supposed to Tell. His five other books include Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. He has reported on live entertainment for Billboard, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
Budnick, who is the editor-in-chief of Relix and the founder of Jambands.com, directed the documentary Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Rock Club, which screened at SXSW, earned film festival laurels, opened nationally via First Run Features, and then aired on the Sundance Channel. He is the creator, writer and host of the Long May They Run podcast. Season one, which focused on Phish, was selected as a top podcast by the New York Times and reached #1 on the Apple Music Podcast charts.
Dean holds a JD from Columbia Law School and a Ph.D. from Harvard’s History of American Civilization program, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on the life and legal struggles of Hollywood silent screen star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.