Since 1990, the group 311 has shattered musical boundaries and sold 8 million-plus albums with its power-blended mix of rap, rock and reggae; it's built a following that has made its annual "Unity Tours" one of the most popular on the amphitheater circuit and it's performed for five hours straight on special March 11 ("3-11 Day") shows. Last spring, it even headlined its own 311 Caribbean cruise for fans (which set sail on 3-3-11). And this weekend, the five-member band takes a bigger leap into the pop-cultural waters by hosting its own, three-day music festival, the 311 Pow Wow, today through Saturday at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park near Live Oak.
Along with two nights of performances by 311, the festival will feature 15 bands including Sublime with Rome, Deftones, G. Love, Ozomatli and others playing on two stages.
And the event, which also features comedians Doug Benson and Graham Elwood, five DJs, a "Chill Zone," weekend camping and other draws, puts the Nebraska-formed band on the same level as such other groups as the Allman Brothers Band, which hosts its own Wanee Festival at the same location in April, while offering fans experiences they can't get elsewhere.
"It's a big thing," said 311 drummer and co-founder Chad Sexton. "We've been on the road for a while now but this is a kind of new thing for us still. And what we realized with the 311 Days or any of our specialty event shows ... is that our fans really enjoy when we play a little bit longer and dive into our book of songs that goes back to 1988 at this point."
To that end, the band will play two sets each, starting at 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with no songs played more than once and a performance of its fourth album, "Transistor," played in its entirety, including all 21 tracks.
"That'll be just a special thing at the festival," Sexton said. "Some of those songs (from "Transistor") we haven't played in years, like there's one song I know we haven't played in 15 years," he said.
While its core members began playing together in the late '80s, 311 officially formed in Omaha, Neb., in 1990 with the nucleus of singer/rhythm guitarist Nick Hexum, bassist Aaron "P-Nut" Wills and drummer Sexton later joined by lead guitarist Tim Mahoney and Doug "SA" Martinez on vocals and turntables.
And from the start, the band 311 honed a blend of hard-edged sounds rounded out by hip-hop vocals, dollops of reggae and other melodic vibes for a hybrid sound that catapulted its 1995, third CD, "311" (often called "The Blue Album") to ultimate sales of more than 3 million copies and introduced such hits as "Down."
"Transistor" further solidified the band's approach in 1996 — when it entered the Billboard Top 200 at No. 4 and launched such hits as "All Mixed Up" and the title track.
"We've been [mixing rock, reggae and hip-hop] since the late '80s, when it wasn't too common to do that," Sexton said. "But, luckily, now it's more acceptable because that's our style obviously and we love doing it and trying to blend it to where it's seamless and actually goes together in a song rather than it being hard-core left turns or something."
Other bands on the 311 Pow Wow, including Deftones, which performs at 10:30 tonight, and Sublime with Rome and Reel Big Fish (which both appear Friday starting at 5:30 p.m.) and G. Love and Ozomatli (which perform Saturday starting at 5:30 p.m.) represent individual facets of such sounds and together illustrate how they can complement each other.
"We're real excited about the lineup," Sexton said. "We've worked with G. Love before so it's going to be exciting to see G. Love again. And we played probably our first show with The Deftones in 1994 in a show in Berkeley where it was 311, Korn and Deftones in this small club.
"And then there's a whole slew of bands, Ozomatli, Murs, Dirty Heads, Sublime with Rome and many others, so we're trying to cover a variety of music; Deftones [which are] really, really heavy, to reggae bands and sort of jam-band styles like G. Love has to offer."
To that end, the band picked the name "Pow Wow" to illustrate a coming together of styles if not a tribal-like collective of simpatico approaches.
"We're big variety guys, and so we like to bring in a bunch of different music styles, bringing together different tribes, basically," Sexton said. "Having a ‘Pow Wow' is just more based on the concepts of healing and vibrational energy.
"And since we're here, on the North American continent with Native American philosophies and traditions and relating to music and vibration, those two concepts kind of pushed together and there you go."
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20110804/ARTICLES/110809913/1006/NEWS?p=all&tc=pgall
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