The Boys of Summer

The Mudhouse, a cafe in Charlottesville, Virginia, that employs the pierced, tattooed and generally bohemian, is not the kind of place where you pay for your mocha with a $100 bill. To do so would be to invite a sneer that says, "Why not just go to Starbucks, you corporate asshole?" To do so if you're Dave Matthews, whose band got its start fourteen years ago playing gigs at a tiny restaurant a few miles away, would be even more gauche. This is a fact of which Matthews is well aware, and when he opened his wallet on a balmy mid-May morning and saw that the only currency it contained was the Benjamin he'd been given as his per diem a few nights earlier, he panicked. "I had to borrow five dollars from my daughters' nanny," he says in a deep, gravelly monotone. And five dollars barely covered his mocha, which he takes with four shots of espresso.

Matthews is not just the biggest rock star in America -- since 1993, Dave Matthews Band have sold more than 30 million albums and 10 million concert tickets -- he is also one of the richest. DMB's new disc, Stand Up, sold 460,000 copies its first week, and the group is expected to rake in more than $40 million during its summer tour, which began June 1st and will roll straight through September. Even so, Matthews is loath to flaunt his riches. To buy coffee with a $100 bill, he says, would be like "making out in a room full of lonely people."

"I have my extravagances," he admits the following night, busying his hands by folding and unfolding the corners of a piece of paper. His posture is, as usual, hunched, and his brow, as usual, furrowed, creating two sharp pleats in the middle of his forehead. We are seated in the dining room of Haunted Hollow, the sprawling house -- with 140 acres of land and its own lake -- that the bandmates have converted into their private recording studio. Everyone in the group has homes in the area -- violinist Boyd Tinsley's got two -- though Matthews and his family currently live in Seattle, where his wife, Ashley, is studying holistic medicine. "I got land, I got a big bathtub, and I travel easy," he says, that last part referring to the private jet he uses from time to time. "But what the money hasn't changed is the fact that we're still determined to kick ass. There's not a lot of bands that can say they've been together fifteen years and working as consistently. We got where we are in a pretty honest way and built the wall with our own hands."