2009-10-30 Festival 8 I

So after a bit of real-life traveling, I got back into town a few days ago, ran a half-marathon (like we do), and then last night finally got a chance to sit down and block out the drudgery of doing some web design by listening to the first night of Festival 8 for the first time. I made the mistake of reading its generally negative Phish.net reviews before listening, and so I was prepared to add the first "workmanlike show" to my Fall '09 Tour Rundown List. In reality, though, while there's not a lot to recommend in this show's first set-and-a-half, there are a few high-quality jams toward the end and a slow-burning "Hood" that makes the second set at least worth a listen.

I suppose starting off the festival with "Party Time" was an apropos decision, and at the time it was probably a fun Phish moment for those in attendance. On tape, this version is a flub-filled disaster, and though Trey and Mike (!) tack on decent solos at the end, this is clearly the band stumbling out of the gate. "Chalkdust" is a nice recovery, though: not only is it a fiery version, it features a somewhat atypical jam. It's nothing like, say, the IT "Chalkdust," of course, but there's some mode-shifting (I think) throughout that makes it a little darker and more interesting than any other version so far in 3.0.

The next few songs are nice choices for setlist flow, but nothing else worth mentioning happens until the "Stash," which again serves as a great first-set jamming launchpad as it has for most of the year. Where the jam in "Stash" has lately generally tended toward the tension-and-release side of things with a huge, sloppy side order of whale pedal, this version manages to mingle tension and bliss jamming pretty interestingly and is definitely worth a listen.

The rest of the first set, though, is really not. It's a pretty standard series of straight-up songs, played...umm...straight-up. I really like "Beauty of a Broken Heart," and this is one of the more flub-less version they've played thus far, but otherwise, there's nothing here that you haven't heard before. The set-closing combo of a slow, muted "Ocelot" and a particularly messy "TTE" definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd love to see more of the jamming style that features in the last few minutes of the "Stash," though. Maybe that'll happen later on in the fall?

Anyway, second set starts off with a rocky by energetic "PYITE," which makes the first of many great second-set segues into "Disease." The "Disease" clocks in at 13:00, but it definitely doesn't make the best of that stretch of time. Up until the last two or three minutes, in fact, it's a Trey wankfest, and while it's not a bad one (he slams some great blues-rock riffs into the fucking ground), it's just average-great Phish. The last two minutes fade into some interesting ambient territory, for sure, but it fades quickly into "Caspian." Again, here, the segue is excellent, but the results are underwhelming. "Caspian" is very heavy on the whale, to less-than-stellar results. Fortunately, it fades into a great little outro jam led by Page and Mike, which transforms into another great segue, this time into "Wolfman's." And, finally, shit starts to get real.

The "Wolfman's" jam begins, interestingly, with Page on his piano, leading the charge, rather than the funk we've become accustomed to. Trey stays out of the jam, chording around in the background for the most part, until 8:30, when everything comes apart (in the best way). The guys bring back that abstract soundscape they teased earlier in "Disease," but here it's way weirder, and way better. There's about three minutes of this wonderfully rhythmless, abstract shit before "Piper" fades in organically from the morass of sound that's built up. It's wonderful, and on top of that, "Piper" ain't half bad, either.

Before the lyrics come in, Page plays the "Piper" piano riff a few times with a weird 80s synth tone (still leftover from the ambient jam), which is a nice touch. Once the jam takes off in earnest, the band goes straight back to space, before eventually landing for a few minutes of what I labeled in my notes as "transdimensional elevator music." This two-song sandwich is one of my favorite soundscapes of the year so far, right up there with the Red Rocks "Boogie On," the Gorge "Sally," and a few others I'm sure that I'm forgetting.

And then there's "Joy."

We get a heavy dose of Page on the "Bowie," too, and while this isn't necessarily top-shelf material, it's solid enough that it doesn't smudge the shine of the "Wolfman's" > "Piper" pairing. "Hood" is a long, slow, 15 minute build to a rather muted peak, but the fist-pumping "Golgi" that follows provides the punch its end is lacking.

All in all, there're a few standout moments in this show, but the only really consistently quality section is the second half of the second set. The "Stash" is one of my favorites (if not my favorite) so far, and the "Wolfman's" > "Piper" pair is representative of the best kind of '09 jamming. You could safely listen to those alone, though, and not be afraid that you're missing anything.

Exile is next!

Late Summer '09 Wrap-Up

So, just like I did at the end of Leg One, I'm doing a wrap-up post for Leg Two that includes a brief, few-sentence write-up for each show and a list of that show's highlights. Almost exclusively, this list focuses on the interesting improvisational moments of each show, not because I'm entirely about the space jams, but because if I was to highlight every single noteworthy moment from each show, including each and every extra-hot Type I jam, this list would contain something like 1/3rd of all the songs played in summer of '09, which sort of defeats the point of a best-of, doesn't it?

Anyway, here's the list, with a few extra fun songs thrown in since this leg was quite a bit shorter than the previous leg.

7/30: Better than pretty much any Leg One show, except maybe Camden. Highlights include "Stash," "Ghost" > "Wolfman's."

7/31: Quite possibly the best front-to-back show of the summer for me. Gorge I would be the only other contender that's probably better than Camden or Alpine. "Melt," "Drowned" > "Crosseyed," "Tweezer" > "Number Line" > "Fluffhead" -> "Piper" -> "A Day in the Life." Yep. Pretty much the entire second set.

8/1: Great show by Leg One standards, but pales in comparison to Red Rocks I and II. "The Curtain With," "Rock and Roll" > "Disease."

8/2: Weakest show of the run, but really only because of a Bill Kreutzmann sit-in that goes awry. The jamming is actually quite good and if Bill's ham-handed drumming doesn't bother you, then this will be an obvious improvement over night 3. The "Boogie On" is best-of-summer stuff, too. "Reba," "Boogie On," "Seven Below."

8/5: Really uneven show in terms of energy and flow. In the context of Leg Two, you wouldn't be missing much if you skipped it. Decently spooky "Disease" and quirky "Cities" > "Maze" pairing.

8/7: Gets off to a slow start, but the interesting jamming starts in the middle of the first set, and stays consistently interesting through the rest of the show. Minus the "warm up" songs, this would probably be the best full show of the summer, for my money. With them, it's probably second to Red Rocks II. "Stash," "Sally" > "Cavern," "Light" -> "Taste," "Hood."

8/8: Doesn't stand up overall to the previous night, but the song-based parts of the show are stronger, and there's a monstrous "Rock and Roll." "Antelope" is also interesting-good in a year of solid "Antelope"s.

8/11: Another "saggy" show after the great Gorge run. A lot of energy, but the setlist doesn't really cohere and in this case "energy" often seems to mean "flubbing." Also, little to no improvisation to note. The only legitimate "meh" show of Leg Two.

8/13: "Workmanlike," as I described a few shows in Leg One. It holds together better than 8/11, but there still isn't much here to sink your teeth into. "Drowned" > "Caspian."

8/14: Easily the best show since the Gorge, but heavier on Gamehendge fun and old-school antics than any real improv. "Forbin's" > "Mockingbird," "Stash," "Piper," "Ghost" > "Psycho Killer" -> "Catapult" -> "Icculus."

8/15: Workmanlike, well-played show except for "46 Days," which is one of the standout jams of the summer.

8/16: Victory lap show, mostly. Really fun, high-energy, mostly song-based playing that's a good cap for a long tour but isn't really that satisfying on its own. "Number Line" > "Twenty Years Later."

I'm out of town for a few days doing business-y, professional stuff this week, but I'm hoping to dive into fall starting with Festival 8 this weekend. Exile on Main Street is one of my all-time favorite albums, and somehow I've just never sat down and listened to this entire set before. So this should be a blast...

2009-08-16 SPAC

Well, here we are. The end of summer tour '09. As I was at the end of Leg One, I'm a little surprised that I've made it this far. When I started this project, it was to try to get a sense of Phish's evolution throughout 3.0 as a whole, to try to reconcile the amazing shows I've seen live and the few I've heard on tape with the general internet-whining that frames 3.0 as a total embarrassment and waste of time for "real" Phish fans.

I don't really want to spend an entire blog post at this point arguing for the relevance of 3.0 or even '09 in particular, but I'll just quickly say that I've had as much fun listening to this tour as I've ever had listening to any other Phish tour, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only metric that really counts. This shit is great, and as I've never listened to any of fall or winter '09 before, I'm absolutely stoked to follow the band later into the year. '09 so far has been much more weird and experimental than I expected, and when the experiments flop, in general the band's playing on non-jammed songs has actually been more solid than it typically was anywhere between, say, '95 and '04.

With all that in mind, I'll say that SPAC is a fitting tour closer for a tour that, as far as I'm concerned, was much better than any of us likely expected in early June '09. It doesn't feature a lot in the way of improv, but it's got some fun antics, a good mix of old and new songs, and an energy that makes it clear that this is a victory lap for the band that we last saw at Coventry before this all got (re)started.

We get a surprise "Llama" opener, but it seems like it's as much a surprise for the band as it is for the crowd; Troy falls off a cliff early and things never really recover. It's like a bust out that shouldn't have been busted out. "Moma" is a great redeemer, though: it's a song that the band pretty much always seems to nail, and Trey especially attacks this version with great relish. The energy carries over into a surprisingly early "Guyute," which melts into a lovely ballad bust-out in the form of "Anything But Me." Page gets a great legit piano solo here, and infuses a bit of lately-rare jazz into the night. "Cars Trucks "Buses" has a bit of stop/start fun in it, but the remainder of the middle of the first set is pretty pedestrian up until a "Possum" that's unexpectedly Page-led.

The guys continue stringing together another marathon first set with an "Ocelot" that features a bit more shredding than Trey usually includes in the usually loping jam section, and things end on a high note with a well-played "Antelope" (which still isn't anywhere near the upper echelon of excellent "Antelope"s already played this year).

"Number Line" is the night's go-to second-set monster jam. It jumps off the rails at about 10:00, heading immediately into a tail-chasing guitar jam of the type that was such a big part of some of the wilder jams in the Red Rocks run. Page takes the lead with some spacey organ madness at 12:00 while Trey recedes to the background, chopping out some nearly atonal, sinister-sounding chords. The bottom falls out in a good way around 16:00, paving the way for a few minutes of abstract madness of the best kind, and setting up a slow, patient segue into "20 Years," which features a whale-y Trey jam that falls flat and goes for way too long.

"Halley's" > "Rock and Roll" is another great pairing, with the ">" between the songs being less of a transition and more of a stop-on-a-dime direction change executed by all four band members at once. It's a great moment, and the "Rock and Roll" itself ain't bad, either. It stays pretty standard type 1 until the final minute (9:00) or so, though, and then enters a similar space as the end of the "Number Line" jam just long enough for a dissolve into "Harpua."

The "Harpua" kicks off the "victory lap" part of the show in earnest: there's a fun narration, Fish singing the shit out of "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry, "HYHU" heading into some more "Harpua," and then a fluid "YEM" (because what else do you play as the last song of your comeback tour?).

The fun continues through the encore, which features "Grind," the only Joy tune to not be played live yet, "I Been Around," and a surprise "Highway To Hell."

The "Number Line" hangs with some of the better jams of Leg Two, but there's not a whole lot else in this show that stands out when compared to the earlier shows in the leg. It's by no means a bust, like, say, Shoreline or Toyota Park. It's a nice wrap-up, and the effortlessness with which the band bounces from song-based playing, to improvising, to pulling 90s-Phish-like hijinks one last time strengthens the case for the relevance of 3.0 while leaving some room for more growth later in the year.

2009-08-15 Merriweather Post Pavilion

Well, this one was a pleasant surprise. I went into it after reading a bunch of nasty reviews on Phish.net, and so I wasn't expecting much, so maybe that's why I was happily surprised. It's a very song-based show, and so I can understand how you might dislike this show if, say, it was the only show of the tour you managed to catch and you were hoping for something a little deeper, but as one show in a leg that's already featured a surplus of standout jams, it's hard to fault MPP for being mostly by-the-book, especially when the one time the show goes off-script it lands in what's easily one of the best (if not the very best) jam of 3.0 so far.

If you have any inclination toward song-based sets at all, this first set is a delight. Otherwise, it's going to leave you feeling flat. For me and my lowered expectations, it was a great mix of new songs ("Crowd Control," "KDF," "Faulty Plan"), rare songs ("Party Time," "Ha Ha Ha," "Esther") and Page songs ("Beauty of a Broken Heart" and "Strange Design"). It's a little weird (and maybe purposeful?) how none of these songs even hint at going deep, though. Maybe the boys are tired of stretching out in the first set, as they've been doing it a lot lately? Even "Foam," "KDF," and "Tube" are light on what are normally already small amounts of improv. It's certainly strange at this point in a pretty amazing run, but, like I said, if you like the occasional song-based first set, this one's solid in terms of pacing and song choice.

The second set leads off with a fiery "Tweezer" that stays pretty well within its usual confines but has a little bit of extra bounce to it. Around the 10:00 mark, it seems like the song's about to break into some new territory, but maybe things were just falling apart, because Trey makes a decent segue into "Taste," and it's a version that keeps the momentum from "Tweezer" going. Even the "Alaska" that follows is a bit swingier than usual. The "Let Me Lie" comes along. "Let Me Lie" and "TTE" in the same show? Does Phish actually enjoy the sound of jaded vets whining? Anyway, this setlist faux pas should be forgiven because the "46 Days" that follows is an absolute monster. It takes a turn into ambient territory right away, at about the 5:00 mark, and the next 5 or so minutes is some of my favorite Phish (and quite possibly my absolute favorite Phish) in 3.0 so far. It's really hard to describe exactly what goes on in those magical five minutes, so I'd recommend you just go listen for yourself, since there appear to be a massive shortage of YouTube videos from this show.

The set wraps up with a standard "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'!" and an average-great "Hood," and then there's the obligatory (but always satisfying) "GTBT" > "Tweeprise" finish.

Anybody who professes to like Phish should check out the "46 Days" here, but I maintain that the rest of the show doesn't deserve the bad rap it seems to get. If you like songs as much (or even almost as much) as you like jams, the first set is a master class in how to pace a song-based show (save for the "TTE"), and the "Tweezer" > "Taste" is offers a solid 20 minutes of danceable rock.

2009-08-14 Comcast Theatre

As we wind down Leg Two, it's really turning out to be a sort of winding-down (at least so far): things started off mega-hot in Red Rocks, continued to peak at the Gorge, but everything since has been not quite as good (while still managing to be largely better than all but a handful of Leg One shows, admittedly). Comcast manages to be the best show since the Gorge by virtue of its well-roundedness; however, the one thing that keeps it from being a truly excellent Phish show in the vein of, say, Camden or Gorge I is a lack of any deep improvisation to speak of.

Let's get this out of the way first: in the way of much of Leg Two, the first set is easily the best of the two. "Punch You in the Eye" is played with great momentum, and it rolls right into a "Bag" > "NICU" that features a great Trey solo (in "Bag"). Then we get some more old-school setlist choices that, in retrospect, should have clued me in to the fact that this was going to be a well-played but non-improv show. "Forbin's" > "Mockingbird" is gorgeously played, and there's a nice, early-90s-sounding melodic jam in "Mockingbird" that I salivated over a little bit.

"Birds" is next, and it takes a left turn right away, leading into some weird, whale-y territory for Trey, a bit of minimal soloing that's supported by Mike underneath. The move from this into "Lawn Boy" is somehow made to seem natural (I'm realizing more and more how important pacing is in first set song placement), and then the improvisational highlight of the show comes up in "Stash." Like "Birds" before it, things get interesting almost right away here as the jam kicks off, with a sinister tone and some tension-y playing from Trey that eventually transitions into a droning section at 11:00, which Page sprinkles some melodic piano over. This jam doesn't necessarily stand up to any of the juggernauts of Leg Two in terms of quality, but it's easily the most cohesive piece of the night.

And excellently played and excellently paced first set ends up with a well-placed "I Didn't Know" with vacuum antics, then another take on Mike's "Middle of the Road," and finally a down-and-dirty "Zero."

It seems like the boys originally wanted the second set to be improv-heavy, but none of the jams seemed to really cohere around anything interesting. They start off with "Disease," which stays firmly in type 1 territory until the 9:00 mark, when it switches to the standard funk-strumming springboard they've been using to start really jamming from for a lot of Leg Two, now. They just sort of circle the runway for awhile in this mode, though, never really finding anything to land on until 11:00, when things open up briefly into a mini-bliss jam. The "official" Phish.net setlist notes a "'Reba' jam" here, but I'm just not hearing it. Nothing really coalesces and Trey finally blessedly ripcords the thing into a standard "Wilson."

"Wilson" features an ambient-noise segue into a surprisingly rock-and-roll "Slave," which has a much more drawn out peak than most recent versions, then we move on to "Piper," which seems to be the second attempt of the set to build a really interesting soundscape. It works a bit better than "Disease" did, but not by much. At about the 4:00 mark, the band switches into that funk-strumming springboard again (the same one they just used in "Disease") seemingly trying to get something interesting started. At 7:30, Trey finds an interesting, minimalistic soloing space inside of Fishman's fast-but-light drumming, but abandons it way too soon, opting instead for a few more minutes of standard soloing action before the final minute of the song, which actually features a really interesting, percussion-less (as far as I could tell) abstract space constructed primarily of Page's crawling organ work and Mike's sinister-as-hell bass tone. This is another one of those jams where I feel like it has enough interesting moments that it's likely a highlight on someone's list, especially with the weird, abstract close, but for me it sounded more like the band just casting around trying to find a good idea an mostly failing for about 12 of the song's 13 minutes.

They come out of the abstract space, though, with a perfect Page-led segue into "Water in the Sky," a strange second set choice. Then there's a 10-minute "Ghost," but this "Ghost" is just type 1 shredding action, and really just serves as a springboard for a great segue into "Psycho Killer." "Psycho Killer" features a "jam" section that's basically just abstract electronic noise from what sounds like Trey's pedal board, and this leads to some antics in which Trey seemingly tries to get the crowd to dance to this incredibly undanceable music, and then begins singing the lyrics to "Catapult" over the noise. This moves next into an "Icculus" that has Trey jokingly berating the crowd for never reading books anymore because they're obsessed with electronics and explaining how he was alive for the creation of "Pong," which prompts a callback to the noise loop shenanigans ("This is what 'Pong' sounded like"). To close out the set, there's a short(ish) but smooth and fast "YEM" that includes the "Pong" "jam" in the vocal section.

You can see most of this run of songs starting here, but you'll have to click into YouTube directly to find parts 2 and 3 of the video, for some reason:

All in all, it seems like the guys just couldn't get on the same page when it came to extended jamming for this show; however, it features a really well-paced first set with some excellent song choices and a great few minutes in the "Stash" jam. The second set is better off when they give up on the long jams and just settle into the antics (everything after the segue into "Psycho Killer" is just good old Phishy fun), and the running joke with the "Pong" sound effects is consistently funny and clever. This seems like it would have been a great show to be at, and though the effect is a little lost over the tape, it's still a good time, if you're into fun antics and good song selection, and don't absolutely need a show to "go deep" to enjoy it.