Rock N’ Roll history has a paper trail as long as the attempted glow-stick line on the lawn at the Gorge Amphitheater on Sunday of bands that go on hiatus and don’t return.  So Dave Matthews Band fans, who have taken the pilgrimage to DMB Mecca to celebrate over 50 shows now, were certainly hanging on every note as the final songs of the most recent three-night stand rolled out.  

“It’ll be Ants,” a fan shouted.  “It will be “Last Stop” another called back.  “Pig,” still another suggested.  

It seemed even Matthews, the setlist writer himself, didn’t know how he wanted to end this touring season, his 25th with the band.  All those late 90s jams were there at the end of a set that seemed to never end.

At around 11 p.m., the standard time for DMB to walk off stage around the country, there was no sign of stopping.  By the time “Ants Marching” closed out the main set and “Stay (Wasting Time)” wrapped up the encore, fans were exhausted.  Yet they avoided heading back to the campground while the band pleaded for them to stick around for a photo to celebrate the evening by teasing a second encore, that surely would have passed the midnight marker.  

Those last 45 minutes of music, punctuated by Stefan Lessard’s bass and a horn section that included special guest wind wood player Carlos Malta, celebrated the relationship the band and its fans have shared on every summer tour:  Themes of love found and lost, doubts about the world and man’s place in it, and living today as if it’s your last.  Critics have hammered DMB in the past for such sentimentality, but violinist Boyd Tinsley just kept hugging people anyway.  

DMB LLC has marched on, sticking true to its past while evolving with new members and electric sounds. Musical hugs and community bonding don’t happen with a lot of 21st century artists, which left some melancholy in the campgrounds during what has been dubbed “Labor Dave Weekend.”

Sunday night was the last hug for a while, at least as a full group.  Before the 2016 summer, the band warned fans 2017 would feature no tour. Tinsley will stay busy with up and coming band Crystal Garden, sax player Jeff Coffin just recently released a new album, and Matthews always has his hand in charities and benefit concerts (his next appearances will come at Farm Aid and Neil Young’s Bridge Benefit concerts respectively).  

Will the side projects become bigger than DMB LLC?  Not likely. The experience is still too perfect and financially viable for all involved to part ways permanently.  But people change during breaks.  Will that same energy return?  Will the same band members return?  Will the love of the adoring fans hold true with no new album or tour?  

Which brings us right back to that worrisome hiatus.  Even though Dave Matthews Band played new music on this tour, including unreleased material at all three nights of the Gorge run, there’s still a sense that “this could be it.”  

No sign was greater than when a caravan of cars made their way out of the amphitheater parking lot behind band members’ buses.  Amid honking horns and passionate waves from fans, each bus took a different direction on I-90, a visual representation of disjointed bands of the past.  It must have tugged at the heartstrings of fans who have traveled with the band, started families with the band, and are already hoping to get their fix in 2018.