Dave Matthews Band at the Greek

Reporting from San Francisco and Fresno - It was Aug. 19, 2008, and the Dave Matthews Band was mourning the loss of one of its own. LeRoi Moore, the shy saxophonist who'd been with the band throughout a nearly two-decade journey from tiny bars to stadiums and stardom, had died unexpectedly earlier in the day. He was at his Los Angeles home, recovering from injuries suffered in an all-terrain-vehicle accident, when he took a sudden turn for the worse. He died of pneumonia at age 46.

That night, the band played its scheduled gig at Staples Center anyway. Bass player Stefan Lessard didn't want to be there. Drummer Carter Beauford, who'd known Moore since childhood, needed to take his anger out on something and pounded away at his kit; he couldn't think of being anywhere else. The face of the band -- usually the jovial, two-stepping type -- crooned in front of the sellout crowd, and then he cried.

“It's always easier to leave than be left," Matthews said to the faces staring back at him, some of them wet with tears like his.

“No show before that or no show since will have the same significance for me," Matthews said last weekend, thinking back on the events of a year ago. “The fact that we played that show the day Roi died, there was no better thing we could have done."

It wasn't easy. Boyd Tinsley, the brawny violinist who also grew up with Beauford and Moore in the same Virginia neighborhood, sat in the back of his darkened tour bus before the group's recent gig at San Francisco's Outside Lands festival and cracked -- even still, a year removed. “I don't remember much, you know, other than hearing the news here on my bus, halfway to the gig," he said, before having to pause for a few seconds, the old tears welling up in his eyes again. “It was crushing to me, man."

But the experience also marked a new beginning for the bandmates. “The whole tragedy kind of helped us, in a weird way, to push through, to develop, to grow and mature as musicians and people," Beauford said.

DMB is gearing up for two sold-out shows at the Greek Theatre, beginning Wednesday, that mark the group's first return to L.A. since that Staples Center concert. “There's a bit of melancholy, I think, when you get back here," said Lessard, who now lives in Laguna Beach. “But he loved L.A., him and I were the two guys in the band, we just loved California."