At heart, he’s a real family man

As he sits and talks on the shaded commissary patio at NBC Studios in Burbank, Dave Matthews seems every bit the Tom Hanks of rock -- an approachable, unaffected everyman who’s managed to stay unsullied while rising to the top of a rough-and-tumble profession. And like the actor, Matthews is widely viewed as nice-guy bland.

After all, the complex but hearty music of his primary group, the Dave Matthews Band, is an eager-to-please concoction that has made the DMB the spiritual leader of rock’s thriving “jam band” subculture.

But when Matthews released his first solo album, “Some Devil,” late last year, we had something more complex on our hands. Intimate and reflective, the music sheds the Matthews Band’s hard-edged, high-definition hooks and regimented, unison riffing.

Its musical landscape is marked by weblike textures and loose-limbed rhythms, laid-back funk and reggae, string quartet passages and stark moments such as the title song -- a troubled self-evaluation played as a dark, midnight blues, just Matthews’ longing vocal over the sliding chords of his guitar.

The contrast between these two sides of Matthews was displayed even more sharply on the brief solo tour he mounted this month. His Staples Center concert contained gentle, subdued moments that simply couldn’t exist in the world of the Dave Matthews Band.

Opening act Emmylou Harris, whose bassist Tony Hall and drummer Brady Blade form the foundation of Matthews’ solo sound on the album and the tour, came out and sang Dylan with him, and then Daniel Lanois joined the party. Matthews has had classy associations in the past, but this night put him in a new light, if not an entirely new league.

You’d think this disparity might set off an alarm for Matthews, or at least trigger some reevaluation about his career path. Maybe more dates with this side group, which also featured another jam-band star, Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, and Matthews’ longtime guitar buddy Tim Reynolds, would be nice. Twelve shows don’t really give it a chance. How about “Son of Some Devil”?

Not right now. Something else has really got a hold on him.

“I don’t think I’ve been as excited about going into the studio with DMB and writing with DMB in years, maybe since the first or second record,” Matthews, 37, said during his stay in L.A. the week of the Staples show. “Because I did this project where I went in a different environment and faced different things.

“I recorded ‘Some Devil’ and then after it was finished went on tour with DMB, and I think it was our best tour in years. I was hearing really differently. I think maybe it’s going and standing in a different place, looking from a different perspective, being forced to behave and act in a different way and then coming back to what in certain ways had become somewhat habitual -- suddenly it’s not habitual anymore.... The more you go outside of it the stronger it is when you come back to it.”

It doesn’t really figure that Matthews would mothball the DMB just because “Some Devil” perked up some critics’ ears and gave him a musical buzz.

Not only has the band made the South Africa-born, Virginia-based performer wealthy, having sold some 25 million albums over the past decade and become one of the world’s top concert draws, but it also rewards him and his bandmates with an unusually intense devotion from an audience that has coagulated into a subculture usually identified as neo-hippie, one that cultivates the free-spirited values of the Grateful Dead and other ‘60s-era bands.

Matthews regards the DMB’s “jam band” stereotype as “dismissive,” an easy way for critics to categorize uncategorizable music. But at NBC Studios in Burbank, where he’ll be performing on “The Tonight Show” in a few hours, it’s clear that this all comes down to more than a simple career coin-flip or even artistic choice.

“I think that there’s something so solid about how I feel about DMB that the idea of breaking up, doing anything dramatic and childish like that, is sort of absurd. That feeling allows you to go do something like a solo project. If I have an opportunity of going and learning something, it’s only gonna improve my relationship with the family that I’m in.... It’s wonderful to do things on my own, but it’s also great to be able to come home and say ‘What’s for dinner?’

“I can’t imagine not wanting to play music with DMB. We’ve had times when we’ve been at each other’s throats. We lived in the van together for five years. The fact that we could live through that is witness to the commitment.... If it had required the band to end for me to do a solo project, then that would have been -- I can’t imagine that world. I wouldn’t want to be faced with that alternative.”

So it goes in Dave Matthews’ perfect world, if it all works out. The family is waiting, and so are other possibilities down the road.

“I wouldn’t want to do a solo project right now, so it’s hard for me to really indulge the fantasy,” he says. “But when it becomes something that warms my loins, then I’ll start thinking about it -- when I feel like it, when I have stuff that seems inappropriate for the band, or if I have a new idea, or if I want to do an album of intestinal sounds that may not require the entire band. I like to keep it a little bit open.”