Phish C/D

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

Lol all of these goddamn Phish posts lately and not one single comment on the tour opener?

^sarah huckabee sanders

2/28/03: wow, three months later and it’s like night and day, they’re phish again, surprisingly they’re as tight and as energetic as they’ve ever been, and they hit upon a perfect setlist here. all-time versions of “gin” and “back on the train” in the first set and… it’s difficult to isolate the highlights of the second set because it is all highlight, one huge flow. i criticized the new year’s show for not really giving us a new form of phish, which is probably an unreasonable expectation, but something is happening here, obviously using ‘97 as a jumping off point but working itself into strange ambient blinkings and hisses, cf. the… jams(?) that crown “round room” and “soul shakedown party.” apparently trey was getting sober for the summer tour(? this is information gleaned from youtube comments so idk for sure) and he’s just playing wonderfully. one of my favorite shows, thanks again j. sam

in other news i watched the IT documentary and thought “i absolutely have to hear the tower jam” which of course led me to decide to just listen to the entire festival, why not, lol

Diving deeper into Phish than I ever have (gee, thanks, Brad!) I have come to the not-very-controversial conclusion that I much prefer Phish when they dispense with even the pretense of having actual songs and just jam. That sounds meaner than I mean it to, as I love "Strange Design" and "Farmhouse" and a few others, but overall, I find I'm most amenable to Phish when I see a song on the setlist that is unapologetically a glorified launchpad for a jam, like "Tweezer," because I feel like when these guys improvise inside a "type II" jam, they're peerless among rock / jam bands.

But so many of the songs, ugh. I'm not nearly enough of a fan (yet?) to understand the songwriting division of labor when it comes to the specific tunes, but I think I may just strongly dislike Tom Marshall as a lyricist? Which may not be enough of a barrier to my becoming a phan. Though my aversion to "Stash" may be, as I'm not sure I could ever be a true fan of any band for whom this is like a a top 5 crowd favorite. I think I may even hate "Stash."

This is just a guess, but I'm pretty sure the lyrical division of labor is 95% Marshall, 5% other.

That makes sense. I like "Strange Design" enough to go read about it because it seemed like such an anomaly (especially lyrically) and sure enough it sounds like it's a Trey / Marshall tune in name only and was written by Trey. He should write more lyrics.

Though my aversion to "Stash" may be, as I'm not sure I could ever be a true fan of any band for whom this is like a a top 5 crowd favorite. I think I may even hate "Stash."

― Paul Ponzi, Sunday, August 1, 2021 7:51 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

hmmm maybe so maybe not

marshall is an uneven lyricist imo. i think the lyrics to like “limb by limb” are awesome. i also love that “sleep” is the exact same concept as “eid ma clack shaw” by bill callahan, tho it obv pales in comparison

the nonsense stuff that he wrote for phish at the start sucks though, and yeah the lyrics for “stash” are soooo dumb

anyway the deeper you get the less it matters lol

I'm definitely starting to relate to that

other good phish lyrics: birds of a feather, dirt, sand, brian and robert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUaL2eYwayM

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

my verdict is that 03 phish were goddamn fucking amazing, at least at this point. “ya mar,” a song i do not like, transformed and transcended

attn paul, re: your question about 2.0 upthread, the “waves” from the IT festival is an open-ended ambient jam

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

Yeah, I always thought I'd love the IT era. I recall roommates watching that DVD a lot back in the day and I remember having to concede that the Tower jam was especially sick, even as a Phish neutral person

I don't think I'm Phish neutral anymore, but I'm still choosing to proceed with caution. Like I've limited myself to watching only every third video itt lol

i relistened to that "waves" jam this morning, still can't believe it

Man, I'm impressed with this recent start. 4 shows in and they've already dropped in 3 massive jams. I haven't heard last night's "Tweezer" yet, but I was a big fan of the "CDT" from the other night and the kinda dark "Carini" from a few nights back. The "CDT" is up on YouTube for free, worth it.

i'm excited to check it out, especially since i just got really obsessed with the stretched-out "chalk dust torture" from IT

There is definitely some rust, if you are pressed for time I would just completely skip the first Arkansas show. The rest of had some rough spots, but the guys are clearly engaged in the jam again, which is great to hear.

coming toward the end of the IT festival... and getting turned inside out by the 40-minute "46 days".....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQ9mPh6i-k

i'm so glad the one phish festival i decided to dwell on was IT, at least this little window of time contains a lot of the best phish improv i've ever heard

i think it's useful to compare a jam like this to the car crash-esque 30 min "tweezer" they included on a live one, where they were constantly collapsing into dissonance and struggling to tie anything they were doing together, whereas here they achieve kind of a continuous flow of dissonances

btw, for anyone who ever considered subscribing to livephish+: the app is very good, if a little buggy, however the desktop experience is godawful

first month was only $1 so my complaints are ultimately minimal

IT (documentary plus 8/2/03 and 8/3/03): these aren't the tightest or most perfect phish shows ever, but there's no question in my mind that this is the best music they've played in the span of time i've covered in this project so far; i could just be talking about the tower jam here but the actual sets are dense and overflowing jungles of sound themselves, only hinted at by the clips i've been posting itt, cf. the underwater pulsings of the "waves" jam are enjoined in a narrative between the (dissociated and strange) "discern" that precedes it and the (relatively normal in a "we've decided to land on earth" way) "david bowie" that follows. i have a few qualms—for instance set 3 of 8/2/03 is nearly perfect until they decide to play "spread it 'round," but even then they invert the good hippie vibes in the small jam it leads into, which is like a terrifying photonegative of the song; and set one of 8/3 takes forever to get going, and only wakes up during the massive "chalk dust" jam

but i think i have an idea of what distinguishes '03 phish, if not 2.0 in general, which is that it's the dreamiest they've ever gotten. set two of 8/3 speaks to my point, i think, from "ghost" to "mountains in the mist" to "pebbles and marbles," each of which is like advancing further and further through a fog-shrouded reality. the doc helped reinforce this, as it gives you a sense of the kind of immersive alternate reality they built here, from the temporary structures that constituted the "sunken city" to their decision to play an hour of totally improvised psych rock in a decommissioned airport control tower

i think i might be getting a distorted and overly-rosy impression of 2.0 because i'm only listening to the great stuff? i have considered listening to their "final" '04 shows at coventry bc legend suggests they are not good or fun, but i don't think i really have time for it, as i'm seeing phish in less than two weeks(?????!!!!!) and i'd like to get through as much of 3.0 as i can before then

btw pls recommend me 3.0 shows, i have no compass for any of it

Man 3.0 is so hard to recommend, to be honest. It's so wildly all over the place in terms of quality and ideas.

Off the top of my head, I'd def suggest checking out the full Baker's Dozen run from 7/21/17 to 8/6/17. Tons of great jams and interesting covers and tangents. Honestly, the spirit of those shows is the closest I've felt to the more "playful" old Phish (if that makes sense). Lots of other great individual shows. I like the Kasvot Vaxt Halloween show (10/31/18) and the epic "Tweezer" show from 12/30/19. Mostly more recent stuff, I'll have to think on this a little.

lol i was afraid someone was going to recommend me every baker's dozen show

Haha, sorry. I could probably whittle it down for you, I just found the high points (of which there are many!) to be so spread out. It's not was easy as naming 2 or 3 specific shows.

it's totally cool, i'm actually excited to listen to all of them, it's just... so much lol

+1 for Baker's Dozen. I'm not actually too familiar with 3.0 generally, but the Baker's Dozen was what got me back into Phish after mostly ignoring them for like a decade. That run of shows is just an incredible achievement in so many ways, and every show I've heard from it is loads of fun with quality jams, 7/25/17 being the clear standout imo

Also 7/14/19 is really great. Set 1 is packed with rare bust-outs, and set 2 has a "Ruby Waves" with one of the best jams I've ever heard

Yeah 7/14/19 is probably a good call, but tbh I just go back to the "Ruby Waves" and haven't heard the full show since right after.

this is all very good thanks y'all! i've figured out a few early '10s shows to investigate just from livephish comments, can already tell i'm gonna spend minimal time in '09/'10 from reading the setlists

Probably safe to avoid those years for sure. 2013 was when I really got back on board, 6/30/12 was my first Phish show in person since 1.0. It wasn't great, but I was shocked to see them covering "Golden Age" at that point. The following year at SPAC was when I really fell back in love with them again.

Was any of the IT festival ever released in a format other than DVD?