Phish C/D

"rocky top" at the right placement and the right speed is a blast. "ginseng sullivan" def the best bluegrass cover

If I see a "Tela" I'm about 10 times more likely to press play on a show

"tela" RULES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JykBMI_U4-Y

happy to have found video for the next show i'm listening to (7/23/99) if only just bc i've always wanted to see the lightning storm that apparently goes off during the second set's "ghost" > "free"

7/23/99: i actually own this show and have listened to it before, but couldn't quite remember anything about it. OH YEAH, this second set. what differentiates '99 phish is, idk, they are absolutely out of their fucking minds? cf. the "ghost" > "free" > "birds of a feather"; video above adds a lot because you can see trey getting super amped about the heat lightning flashing all around them while he's soloing in "free"

the first set struggles to find a rhythm but the renditions of "ya mar," "punch you in the eye," and "back on the train," and "possum" are all very strong. i reiterate that the second set is absolute fucking nonsense in the best way

Meatstick would be one of their better late-90s songs if not for the lyrics being about burying a Meatstick.

ilx user peace, man is correct about this one

Watched the whole Polaris set on the tv last night. They needed a camera that shows what Trey is gawking at throughout.

funnily enough the only time they panned out to the crowd i was like "pls never show the crowd again" and the 1999 camera crew must've heard my request through a portal in time

lol

7/23/99: i actually own this show and have listened to it before, but couldn't quite remember anything about it. OH YEAH, this second set. what differentiates '99 phish is, idk, they are absolutely out of their fucking minds? cf. the "ghost" > "free" > "birds of a feather"; video above adds a lot because you can see trey getting super amped about the heat lightning flashing all around them while he's soloing in "free"

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Friday, July 16, 2021 9:08 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lmao at Trey cracking up at that "boing" sound effect that Page keeps triggering during "Birds"

otm youtube comment:

Eamonn Geraghty
3 months ago
I wonder what it sounded like to Page because he looks like he was out of his gourd at this show 🤪

7/31/99: wanted another '99 show to get a more complete idea of the year and picked this one because the setlist is weird; turns out, like the polaris ampitheatre show, it's a fitfully interesting first set and a second set born and raised in hell. ok actually the 25-minute "bowie," one of the best i've heard so far, is really pleasant and so quiet it at one point goes silent. this show also has one of the best encores of all time, nawang khechog joining them for a freeform horn/vacuum jam (i normally hate when fishman brings out the vacuum but this is kind of cool) out of which the most gentle and gorgeous "brian and robert" forms. afaict page's voice is shot for the whole show which unfortunately throws off literally every attempt at vocal harmony

12/11/99: y'all stop what you are doing and listen to this immediately. is this the best phish show? if you want a first and second set that turn you inside out in different ways and contain only good songs (well aside from "cavern," as usual.... it's fine)... this is it. it's like '97 phish traveled two years into the future for this night, and also the time travel turned their brains into black holes that connect to the end of the universe. the bootleg i have is murky but you can still tell, the energy in the room, the way the crowd just straight up howls at every awesome development, how no one told me "scent of a mule" was this cool live, how they splice a gorgeous "simple" jam AND "i am hydrogen" into the most furious fucking "mike's groove" ever????? the "ghost" that is fully a tour of a rotted space station???? this is it!!!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q0U8biL6ak

dear phish, please release a soundboard recording of this show and i will send it to all the phish haters i know with a note that says "see haters, here is a show that rules from top to bottom, this band is sick and i'm not embarrassed about liking them at all"

farmhouse: seal "gotta jibboo" in an iron coffin and sink it to the ocean floor

unfortunate it features some of their best ever studio jammimg lol

which is maybe a natural byproduct of how little of a real song it actually is

this album sounds GORGEOUS btw, and i still really like "bug" and, unlike almost every phish fan on earth, the (admittedly overworked) studio "twist," plus "dirt," the strongest evidence anyone has for phish being able to write astonishingly beautiful songs with STRINGS. i think "piper" doesn't make a ton of sense as a studio song even though it is the best phish song ever, and the album just kinda slips through my fingers after that, "first tube" excepted

the studio "piper" did make me feel very emotional about the approaching end of 1.0 in this project

6/14/00: one of the first phish shows i ever listened to, you can see me advocating upthread for it as a good intro to phish for people who hate phish, which, yes, it is, but now that i've listened to a ton of phish shows... man. what the fuck. the mood is almost scarily contemplative, like they are staring over a precipice right down into the void within. the take of "cities" moves at a somnambulant pace, and this is an already-slowed-down cover of a fast song, so the fact that it holds together at all is fucking mesmerizing. you would think phish, of all bands, playing at this sluggish pulse would kill the energy, but it's just a different kind of energy, or at least it reminds me of how i fixate on the wider emptiness between beats on something like a dub techno record. their jams have never sounded more like they're literally mutating after being exposed to radiation, how else to explain the dark and grim place that "gumbo" goes to immediately? also none of the jams contain elements that are remotely 1) beautiful or 2) rockin', and there's usually a lot of both at phish shows. this show is all-gnarled, all-cosmic-drifting all the time, its limbs are octopus limbs, and in fact when i hear this show i feel as high as the band were at the time they were playing it. (i'm not.) never forget that phish sounds like this sometimes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht520QVJYRc

alternate review: this is the phish show that makes me feel the drug-sweats-iest

9/14/00: it is time for both phish and me to take a break bc it's getting a little painful to hear highly imperfect versions of "reba," even though i feel weird complaining about that because "reba" is a complicated song and i'm sure playing it well sober is a great achievement and playing it high is probably like executing a drum solo underwater. so i'm not really complaining, but you can tell the burnout has set in and it's not 1994 anymore. fortunately you wouldn't be able to tell by listening to the jams, all of which are out-of-body experiences at this show; i'd get into them but this is a very early livephish release so i feel like if people know, they know, but i specifically love the "carini" and the extremely fucked up "drowned" jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DpKS6V3X8M

one of the reasons i'm listening to the "last" show, 10/7/00, is i found video of it

it is a really really great show

Some previously-unseen '91, audience-based, video camera footage has debuted over on phish.net. Originally intended as part of a Gamehendge CD-ROM project that never saw the light of day.

https://phish.net/blog/1626683534/lost-gamehendge-cd-rom-footage-released-30-years-later.html#comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCO2ZOAikUw

Ooh, thanks for that! I'll definitely be digging into that at some point.

10/7/00: two developments i've noticed in '00 phish, one of them maybe dating back to late '99: 1) trey starts using the loop pedal to solo over himself a ton (cf. the opening "first tube"), creating this spacey light-trail effect; 2) mike is singlehandedly trying to bring back the slap bass as a thing in the year 2000. he will not succeed

very strange energy at this show. none of the jams really call attention to themselves, most of them just slowly plugging away at a single idea, but that ends up making "bathtub gin" really chill and lovely and "2001" very disco. vocal jam at the end of "yem" was ominous and weird-sounding like an atonal cluster of voices you'd hear around an obelisk

and that's it!!!! 1.0 is done!!!!!!

1.0:

- the white tape ✓
- colorado ‘88 ✓
- junta ✓
- 8/26/89 townshend family park, townshend, vt ✓
- lawn boy ✓
- 10/31/90 armstrong theatre, colorado springs, co ✓
- 7/12/91 colonial theatre, keene, nh ✓
- a picture of nectar ✓
- 11/19/92 ross arena, saint michael’s college ✓
- rift ✓
- 8/26/93 arlene schnitzer concert hall, portland, or ✓
- 12/31/93 worcester centrum theatre, worcester, ma ✓
- hoist ✓
- 7/8/94 great woods performing arts center, mansfield, ma ✓
- 12/19/94 providence civic center, providence, rh ✓
- a live one ✓
- 6/19/95 deer creek music center, noblesville, in ✓
- 11/14/95 university of central florida arena, orlando, fl ✓
- billy breathes ✓
- 11/2/96 coral sky amphitheater, west palm beach, fl ✓
- slip stitch and pass ✓
- 7/21/97 virginia beach amphitheatre, virginia beach, va ✓
- 8/10/97 deer creek music center, noblesville, in ✓
- 11/21/97 hampton coliseum, hampton, va ✓
- 11/22/97 hampton coliseum, hampton, va ✓
- 11/23/97 lawrence joel veterans memorial coliseum, winston-salem, nc ✓
- 12/11/97 rochester war memorial, rochester, ny ✓
- 4/4/98 providence civic center, providence, ri ✓
- bittersweet motel ✓
- 7/29/98 riverport amphitheater, maryland heights, mo ✓
- 8/1/98 alpine valley music theater, east troy, wi ✓
- the story of the ghost ✓
- the siket disc ✓
- 11/11/98 van andel arena, grand rapids, mi ✓
- 7/23/99 polaris amphitheatre, columbus, oh ✓
- 7/31/99 fuji rock festival, japan ✓
- 12/11/99 first union spectrum, philadelphia, pa ✓ (BEST SHOW EVER)
- farmhouse ✓
- 6/13/00 drum logos, fukuoka, japan ✓
- 9/14/00 darien lake performing arts center, darien center, ny ✓
- 10/7/00 shoreline amphitheatre, mountain view, ca ✓

Loved following you on this journey Brad, it's been a genuine treat!

I can't wait to follow you through 2.0, I was largely tapped out during this era. Never caught them live and just followed whatever studio or official live albums they released. Wasn't until 2010 that I finally started seeing them again and fell back in.

next up, probably after i take a break for a week:

hiatus 1.0:
trey anastasio
plasma

2.0:
round room
the victor disc
12/31/02 madison square garden, new york, ny
IT
11/28/03 nassau coliseum, uniondale, ny
undermind
headphones jam
6/19/04 saratoga performing arts center, saratoga springs, ny
6/20/04 saratoga performing arts center, saratoga springs, ny

(please recommend me more 2.0 shows)

Good lineup so far. I would add Mike's 2003 solo album Inside In, which I really dig but ymmv. It has kind of a Soul Coughing-goes-country vibe and the songs are solid. Also don't skip 2/28/03, which was released officially and has one of the best Tweezers. The whole show is absolute fire start to finish

thank you! exactly what i'm looking for

i relistened to 12/11/99 tonight just to see if it holds up as my favorite show. it does

trey anastasio s/t: the last two tracks of farmhouse were "sand" and "first tube" and this album takes them as a blueprint, almost every song is groove-based and light on its feet, and while this makes for a fun listen, there's not a lot of meat (lol) in the songwriting department—the only song that reminded me of the level he was writing at circa ghost is "flock of words," maybe to a lesser extent "drifting." but hey, the horns sound great

plasma: ok this RULES, replicates the feeling of phish with horns but with really surprising and huge jams. you can tell trey was listening to a lot of fela kuti at the time. it looks good on him

reading about "sand" made me aware of the existence of... the boredoms... covering... "end of session" and "free"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZsSET1hIvM

Brad, can you (or another Phish head itt) explain exactly why Phish fans are so down on 2.0? The, uh, phans I know talk about it like it's the Dead in 1995 or something. But the words I've heard people use to dismissively describe this period - ambient and "aimless" - make it sound like it might be the Phish era for me!

i won't know for sure until i get there, but my impression is: trey was really deep into opiates at that point, so a lot of the composed songs are full of mistakes (sooo many phishheads are really anal about this and i both get it and don't) and sometimes the jams don't really come together? again, i don't really know about the latter, the only 2.0 i've heard so far is a clip from live in brooklyn and idk it sounded pretty good

my other impression is that the true phish ambient era is 3.0

Got it. I'll keep checking in here!

lmao, j. sam, thank you for telling me to listen to the mike gordon solo record, i was expecting very little and i kind of love it?????????????????

plasma was so good i added a full trey concert to the list (10/25/02). gonna put it on at some point today

i'm also listening to the vida blue album and it's lovely. not sure i love page's voice out of phish context strangely enough

xp haha I'm glad you like Inside In. It's such a fun, unassuming record

round room: very frustrating album tbh, functionally their st. anger, recording their rehearsals in a blatant attempt to put together an album that was looser, rawer, and more related to who they were live, and... it sure sounds like it, for better and worse. marshall's lyrics are getting, how do you say, too dense. mike gordon should be prevented from writing lyrics for this band, even though both of his songs are very good. "mexican cousin" is a terrible song. "seven below" is a perfect phish song, down to only having one verse. trey sounds like shit. really the whole thing would be improved from being just slightly more produced. then again, not sure "slightly more produced" would allow for the transformative jams that "pebbles and marbles," "walls of the cave," and "waves" all morph into. it's also 80 minutes long. ugh. the millennial a picture of nectar (even though it's better than that record)

the last three tracks of round room on their own are prob the best studio phish i've heard yet tbh

unfortunately they are attached to another 50 minutes of album

the victor disc: overwhelming feeling is i didn't have to listen to this, and i get why they didn't release it. someone needs to edit down these jams into siket disc form, and no one has, and as they are they just kind of sit in place for a while until they're different. sometimes it gets interesting? idk. it's so long

For a number of reasons my family ended up spending Friday night at a remote cabin with no internet or cell service where the only kid-friendly media was a DVD of "Scooby Doo and the Loch Ness Monster" which we of course ended up watching with my 6 year old and it had this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85UdckcI2uc

A couple friends in our group chat were kicking around the idea of rallying for Deer Creek, but nixed the idea when reminded that the tour kicks off this week in three straight states with the some of the lowest vaccination numbers in the country (Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia). Really hoping this doesn't turn into a super spreader tour.

Couch tour time.

thankful that my show is outdoors but yeah

Yeah I mean, I'm not shaming anyone for hitting an outdoor show, it just makes me nervous for a big tour to start down there.

12/31/02: first set: holy stage rust batman. i should be really down with a 15-minute “piper” as an opener but it doesn’t ever really work or go anywhere interesting, and it sort of feels like the band are out-of-sync, to the point where i wouldn’t call it “loose” or “shambolic” as much as “sluggish.” i know the rehearsed a lot before this show but i think it’s evidence that taking a two-year break from what was a pretty nonstop fifteen-year endeavor kinda makes it hard to get the engine going again. and whereas 1.0 was marked by constant development, even as they were running out of gas in 2000, 2.0 starts off sort of recalling ‘97 through thick gauze. it’s funky but it’s also just a little too blurry to focus on. also playing the cast away clip before “wilson” is soo corny and a momentum killer extraordinaire. highlight: the “bowie” is short but good

second set: oh this is more like it. “waves”!!!! it’s so good and the jam lives up to the potential sketched out on round room, and it leads right into a really fun “divided sky”

set three: i think i have a lot of trouble with the new year’s shows, the momentum is always so faltering, probably bc it’s always three sets and the first two are always a little stocked with goofy phish songs (pls correct me if i’m wrong, i’ve only listened to 3.5 new year’s shows). this third set is the closest they get to 1.0 phish at its stride and it’s largely bc they finally achieve focus. “seven below,” “taste,” “walls of the cave,” all pretty awesome jams, “taste” especially finding its way into a fugue that recalls both ‘94 AND ‘97. really incredible. as much as i found this show frustrating it’s sorta like they regained flexibility in a limb over the course of three hours