Time Capsule: The Samples, The Samples

My mom has taught me many things, but one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from her is to chase the music. It was 1993 when she was my current age—23, and anxiously post-grad—and she spent that summer running up and down the Jersey Shore to catch her favorite bands at 200-cap venues. She had been doing this for years, since she was 18 and had to mark up her yellowing driver’s license to read 1967 instead of 1970 so she could get into clubs, building up a sort of rolodex of bands she vehemently followed. There was the wild ska group Hyperactive, who hosted release parties at Rutgers frat houses and the Stone Pony, and an elusive alternative band called On Air that she would try to meet up with during ski trips to Aspen. But 1993 was the year that a Colorado jam band called the Samples had their eponymous, 1989 debut album re-released, and it was a bright and environmentally hopeful (re)introduction to a world of end-of-the-decade optimism that took my mom, and the other hippie concert junkies of her generation, by storm.

The Samples started in Boulder in 1987, getting their name from their main source of sustenance when first starting out—food samples they managed to scrounge up from grocery stores. Vocalist Sean Kelly grew up in Vermont, dropped out of high school and moved to Colorado to start a band and “find a place inside the wind.” The Samples was the band’s debut full-length release, and the one that I was introduced to in the backseat of my mom’s giant minivan when I was a kid. She would queue up “Nature,” the closing track, and her tan, leather-lined Honda Odyssey would fill up with the lull of crickets, pond splashes and gentle guitar strums. “Nature, it’s all around me,” Kelly observes, his voice cracking with awe. “Nature, it’s so astounding.”

I would giggle when she put “Nature” on,” the song’s simplistic lyrics and unbridled love for the environment as inspiration for a song seemed silly to a younger me. Listening back now, there’s something comforting about Kelly’s appreciation for the great big world around him, something sweet about the abundant world that’s painted through the polished reggae groove, muted electronic guitar solos and breathy flutes that sound like something Peter Gabriel would have cooked up 10 or 15 years earlier. It feels nice to flourish in a track that just appreciates its surroundings, something that enticed the Samples’ green-thumbed college campus audience that lived in the environmental justice boom that was taking off during the ‘90s.

The Samples is a collection of these hopeful, “save the Earth” messages that were commonplace in the decade, after the IPCC’s first assessment report in 1990 suggested that we would need to start taking climate change very seriously. Jimmy Cliff took to the Woodstock ‘94 stage to ask us to “Save Our Planet Earth,” and Michael Jackson pleaded for us to consider the children and elephants on 1995’s “Earth Song.” Over a blend of soft rock, jam band-adjacent reggae and bluegrass-tinted folk, the Samples build their own awareness of global warming, senseless war, oil spills and animal welfare all throughout their music. “Ocean of War” is a downbeat piano ballad that speaks to the banalities of endless fighting: “Nothing was learned from that lesson before / We’re a traveling mass with a memory loss.” Kelly sings, exhausted but still longing, with a voice of force that knows its message will have an impact. The Samples is still convinced that something can be done to reverse these plights with a strong “love conquers all” motif, as “Could It Be Another Change” alludes to exactly that. “You can’t love anything / ‘Till you can love yourself,” Kelly repeats over a lush, New Age soundscape complete with tittering bongos and fluttering acoustic strings. The Samples, and their arrangements, ache for something better—a better path for the newborn decade, with music as their weapon.

The Samples’ messaging was really effective, at least for a certain era. There was a time, as my mom attests, where the band’s name was inescapable—from college campuses in Colorado to the East Coast, to spots on the H.O.R.D.E. festival lineup next to fellow jam artists like Blues Traveler and Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Dave Matthews Band, frequent openers for the Samples in the early ‘90s, even covered “Nature” once. Similar to how their lyrics capture a moment in that decade’s collective consciousness, their once-bustling career is a time capsule in itself—standing as a meeting place between all that came before them in the jam circuit and all that was to follow.

Songs like “My Town,” a more traditionalist jam band anthem about packing up and leaving home, ring similar to the ska and British reggae attitudes of Sublime and the Police, but the Samples’ willingness to experiment with the genres orbiting surrounding jam music draws a lot of resemblance to how big stadium acts like Goose are performing live today. The first track off of The Samples, “Feel Us Shaking,” begins solemnly acoustic before unraveling into an airy folk harmony. “Pleasures be waiting by the sea / With a smile for all the world to see,” Kelly declares, looking forward with a pure and unwavering optimism that almost feels lost in music today. The single became one of the band’s greatest commercial successes.

As someone who was born three months after 9/11, it’s always fascinating to hear media from a decade of optimism. My mom always talks about this—“things just felt different, I worried less,” she said to me recently. I laugh, having never lived in a world I didn’t worry about. I try to not let the general doom and gloom surrounding my generation wear me down too much, but when I listen to The Samples, it’s clear that there is a sense of aspiration in our musical climate that’s been buried. Sean Kelly is singing about harrowing scenes of the burning sun, dolphin traps and oil spills polluting our drinking waters—imagery that’s similar to the ones my generation grew up seeing—over gentle, breezy reggae-inspired rock ‘n’ roll that’s holding space for a realistic solution.

Modern music that addresses these ideas sounds angrier and usually arrives over a post-punk track or pure, raging heavy metal. Perhaps it was a time where singing about stopping the wars with “all you need is love” fervor felt hopeful and not cheesy. There’s a belief present in The Samples—hope that something substantial can still be done if you sing about it enough. It’s still comforting, even after everything that has happened in my lifetime, to be transported into those blissful memories of being in the backseat of that Honda Odyssey, absorbing the tranquil sounds of “Nature.” Maybe we can simplify our worldviews, looking at everything with these pure eyes again. But the tides have shifted; 1993 might be too far out of reach, even in the world of the Samples. After the release of their self-titled, the band were picked up and dropped by record labels and experienced some faltering lineup changes.

The Samples most recently put out an album in 2019, but the project consists of Kelly touring solo across the U.S. nowadays. He takes to interviews with local papers to admit that he does not watch TV anymore, and that he feels “cynical” about the state of the world—though his reasoning is because of vaccine mandates and a belief that COVID-19 was “man-made.” Maybe it’s the literal changing of the seasons or an abrupt 180 of political focus, but the innocent, simplistic and strange dog days sung about in The Samples feel even stranger now.

My mom tries to keep the Samples’ spirit alive as well. She still has all of her ticket stubs from those Jersey clubs, and there’s even a photo of them sound-checking in Colorado hanging up in her bedroom at my grandparent’s home on the Shore. I used to stare at it when I was young, dreaming of following in her footsteps and adopting the local band groupie identity she wore proudly 35 years ago. It was a badge of honor I coveted in college, as I befriended a slew of local jammers and stood up front at all of their dive bar gigs.

Even though, as Kelly says, the “winkin’ days are through,” I try my best to rework what my mom loved the most about being a show-hopping 23-year-old. The bands I met in somebody’s basement during a college house show in upstate New York are now headliners at bigger venues in the city, but there is still a sense of community that comes from running into the same hippie townies at whatever bar the music’s spilling out of. Perhaps 20 years down the line, I’ll be penning internet posts that are ISOs for lost clips from these moments, just like the niche bracket of die-hard Samples heads today. Kelly and the band didn’t reach the desired mainstream attention that their peers like the Allman Brothers and Dave Matthews Band got, but online forums and podcasts of archival footage still try to keep the band’s intoxicating magic alive. “Listen to them if you want to hug a tree,” I saw one user on Reddit say on a post as they shared their 1997 album Transmissions from the Sea of Tranquility. The Samples were a staple of a carefree time for many of their listeners, especially for my mom, an era of twenty-somethings spreading love before life became so cruel, if it already wasn’t.