RIDESHARE - Phish 07.26.98

RIDESHARE: Phish 07.26.98

i spun this one on tuesday, so i need to do it quick, lest i forget.

i've really been feeling the 97-98 phish lately; something about the wide open spaces of a drive through the southeastern washington desert lends itself to spacey, 30-minute
versions of “also sprach zarathustra”.  or the other way around.  or something.

anyway, setlist here.

on a five-star scale where zero is a pepperoni pizza and five is a five-cheese pizza, this show would be a three-and-a-half cheese pizza.

the highs were high and the lows weren't low...let's just say there were a few times throughout the show where i caught myself realizing that i hadn't been listening for twenty minutes because i was subconsciously finding the scrub brush more engaging than the music.

"birds of a feather" is a great song and a great opener, and this version was no different...though maybe it was a sign of the show's overall "too little of a good thing" feel in that this "birds" clocked in at about six minutes, about ten minutes shorter than usual.  then comes "better believe it baby", which i've heard a number of times already in various TAB shows and, no matter who plays it, i never like it.  same thing here.  rarely will i just not like a phish song (rather than just a particular night's interpretation of it), but that's the case with this clunker.  and it came on while i was puttering through colfax, no less.

there's something that draws me to "bowie".  i love the speed and precision of the intro section, especially in earlier years' shows, but then everything always just goes to shit for me in the middle.  i don't know why.  compared to other phish jams, i always find "bowie" jams to be loud, screechy, hard to follow and generally unpleasant...but the wait up to that last second pay-off somehow always makes me forget the middle section and want to bounce out of my seat (or car) at the end.  this one was no different.  the "frankie" > "reba" mashup is nicely mellow and hypnotic, while i was a bit let down by the first set closer of "funky bitch" (another one of those few phish songs i just don't like) and "good times bad times", which followed the zeppelin version a little too closely to be interesting.

the second set was marked by some pretty incredibly covers.  it opens with "la grange", which i didn't even know that phish ever played, and their version was wonderfully faithful to the zz top original, albeit with a hectic blues-rock jam in the middle.  this version of "you enjoy myself" takes a few extra minutes to get started, which i actually really liked...it was interesting to hear them jam out the beginning of the song a bit longer.  "albuquerque" was another song that i didn't know phish had ever covered, and as the song started i immediately thought to myself "hmm, this sounds like a neil young song".  and then it was and i was all "yeah!" and the guitar was all "skeedly deedly deedly!" and my car was all "vrooooom!"

so there's that.

I LOVE "SIMPLE".  that's probably pretty clear by now.

after "simple" was a great version of hendrix's "bold as love" and the show closes with four solid (there's that word again) but not really outstanding songs.

i'm going to go out on a limb and say that most phish shows i listen to or attend fall into one of two categories:
1) band starts out strong, falters near the end of the first set, tries too hard at the beginning of the second set, ends on a great note after recovering
2) band starts slow, slaughters everything for the end of the first set and the beginning of the second, and then ends the show on a decent, but not impressive note.

the first gorge show from last year was definitely a Type 1 show for me, while the second gorge show and this year's blossom show were both Type 2.  this tape definitely epitomizes the Type 2.

The Best Road Trip Slideshow Ever

so i just set up this cool new facebook/twitter/blog linky-thing, and it seems to be working.  on the off chance that it actually is, and to indirectly celebrate my 1200th post and 140,000 miles on my car, i thought i would post The Best Road Trip Slideshow Ever.

test post!

pretend i'm saying something interesting!

or, just check out this photograph of a monkey playing football:

big red and big blue ARE THE SAME THING

divided christmas sky traveler

i was just remembering the other afternoon how freaking blown away i was when i first started listening to phish and was SURE i'd heard the middle part of "divided sky" before.  eventually i figured out that john popper used phish's melody for his "christmas song", which has listened to every christmas obsessively for almost a decade prior.  incidentally, it's the best christmas song ever, pretty much.  evidence of awesomeness and synchronicity below.

full blues traveler song:


the relevant part of "divided sky" starts around 4:15: