Wax Banks

Who is the best interview subject?

Allow me to nominate

PRINCE

No shit

Miles and miles.

Herbie Hancock honours his mentor.
(from the wonderful Another Kind of Blue)

Kick, back to me.

Ever have that experience of listening to an album and realizing that you know the whole thing, all the way through, and have done so since you were eight years old or so? I'm having that experience right this instant with INXS's Kick, and being reminded in the process that the album is simultaneously (1) dead-simple and even 'unsophisticated,' and (2) basically a perfect pop album. I'd be a little embarrassed to play Kick right after Thriller or 1999 at a party, but that's just me and my anxieties, 'cause this is naked pleasure from first not to...

...oh my god 'Never Tear Us Apart' just came on, and since (notwithstanding the cheesiest sax solo ever recorded) we're close to the peak of Eighties pop here I'd better just stop typing and listen.

Whitney Houston.

What a voice.

Rest in peace.

Sample of Crowley's Little, Big audiobook; and James Ellroy, alas.

Heard it. Oh, no. I couldn't hear Crowley read the book on tape. Maybe live, to hear him experience the thing as we the listeners did; maybe that way. But judging from the sample, the audiobook is like so many others: it takes an unusually fluid, heightened-naturalistic text -- one that rings just right in the ear, nicely balancing flights of lyrical (and specifically literary) fantasy with the easy syncopations of American English as she is spoke -- and makes it into A Reading. Hard articulated T's between words, words proceeding at a sliiiiightly unnatural andante.

I hate to 'hear books,' but I like to hear stories told from books, as if from prompts. To me, the best audiobooks capture that energy -- particularly variation in tempo and dynamics. Jim Dale is one of the masters, no question. Hitchens too (he developed a writerly voice that more or less was his speaking voice -- no mean feat, whichever way the arrow points). I saw James Ellroy speak at MIT once, and he read aloud from one of his later, more 'telegraphic' books. ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. It was...wrong, in a way I could never put my finger on. I've never been so forcefully reminded that the Author isn't the god of the text -- and more to the point, that folks who write for a living shouldn't be expected to be master vocal performers too...

I bow at Crowley's feet but I couldn't listen to his Little, Big. Maybe not anyone's, come to think of it. And that's me for you. Maybe you could though? And bless you, if so.

Phish 11/21/97, Hampton VA.

I’m an unapologetic Fall ’97 booster, fanboy, partisan, evangelist, and myopic egotist – i.e. I insist that Fall ’97 is the best of all Phish tours, partly because it’s my favourite…though I also insist that it’s my favourite because it’s the best (see above re: ‘myopia’ and ‘egotism’).

But some things are worth going crazy over.

(The following is occasioned, of course, by the long-awaited official SBD release of November 21 to 23, 1997.)

The fandom responded ecstatically to the tour at the time, as you’d expect; among other things it represented a sea change in how the band approached show structure (never mind the pornographic music itself) – some folks were convinced that ‘there [were] no first sets anymore,’ and given that this show kicks off with a 20-minute funk workout, it’s easy to see why. Time has been kind to the tour as well. With the benefit of hindsight we can see how Fall ’97 began a darkly generative period for the band (their imaginative freedom nightblooming even as their technical command and professionalism began to falter amidst a rapidly decaying backstage/fan scene), while representing a historic peak of possibility and intensity. With only a couple of exceptions, the band was just absolutely there every single night, taking song after song to deep dangerous places.

It was a good time to be a Phish fan.

The best jams of 2011 – R’n’R at the Gorge, the Tahoe Light, the brilliant ‘elements’ set at UIC – seemed to draw some of the same dark energy that powered Phish’s late 90s music: layered textures, intricate polyrhythms, effortless group interplay, soaring ambient passages, guitars put to unholy new uses, keyboards much abused, drums caressed and then shattered. Above all, the music flows now almost as it did then, with extraordinary patience and organic inevitability.

But what’s missing from Phish 2011 is the black ice that became their premillennial music’s center: cool austerity of early ‘cow funk,’ anxious chaotic ‘space jams,’ the scary quality it had. (Hear the way Izabella comes roaring out of 12/6/97’s fog like an angry undead stowaway, or the teeth-gnashing mania of the Hartford Char0 > 2001. A lotta Hendrix in the air, then.)

For all the expansiveness and ambition of the band’s Fall ’97 work, the tour feels All of a Piece; it all belongs together, the maniacal Hampton/Winston-Salem stuff and the knives-in-blacklight Worcester jamming and the retro-dufus-turned-pornstar goodtimes in Dayton and the astral lullabies in Utah and, and, and oh those sorcerous goings-on and splashings-crashward in Auburn Hills (cloudpiercing peak of a deepwater volcanic island). The same can’t so much be said of the new music; ironically, as the band’s palette has grown to include more lived-in sounds (and whatever eerily the goddamn ‘storage shed’ jamming is, when it eerily ever is), they’ve lost the glasseyed focus of back-in-the-day. They might sound like any number of great bands these days, even Zeppelin a bit when the moon’s right, but there was something harrowing and deeply pleasurable about knowing (walking into a familiar room, strangers at close quarters in the dark) that the approach was gonna be, ready set go, THE METERS AND PINK FLOYD ARE TRAPPED TOGETHER FOREVER ON A DERELICT SPACESHIP ALL ECHOES AND GHOSTS AND ALONE AND THEY ARE SAVED FROM COLD DEATH ONLY BY THE WEIRD COSMIC FAVOUR OF PLUNGING SLOWLY INTO AN OCTARINE SUN, GAINING SPEED, FALLING, HOLD ON…

To the matter at hand.

Emotional Rescue isn’t a great choice of cover beyond its novelty/comedy value – the jokey falsetto and sparse texture wear thin some time before the jam starts – and the jam does feel like a show-opening warmup, which of course it is. But 17 minutes of shambolic Phish funk (climaxing in a transitional few minutes of lovely dark ambience) is a fine easygoing thing, regardless. And it leads into a very nice Split, for which we supplicants are naturally thankful.

Et cetera et cetera, and Caspian (a tune tailor-made for smoky indoor-venue AUDs, by the way) is a strange but appropriate choice for a first set closer: excellent version here, particularly Trey’s digital-delay offering to Hades in lieu of those closing rock chords from the album, which…

1. fondly recalls the beloved 12/31/95 Mike’s, and…
2. helpfully signals to the crowd that we are setting our course for darker night in Set II.

The show’s back half kicks off seven consecutive must-hear sets (next breather: 11/28 I). During Ghost the players bail on that song’s basic funk patterns in favour of a haunting spare passage typical of Fall ’97: minimalist assembly, assured group rhythm work, and a patient crescendo and sighing wavebreak into a wry, spry midtempo jog at the outro. 1997 is THE year for Ghost, but this performance trades its standard snap/pop/wah funk for something moodier and more meaningful.

Then yeah, a true segue arrow before AC/DC Bag, and get ready for this Bag. Less decisive and authoritative than the canonical 12/30/97 version, but also less linear, the 11/21 Bag takes a few minutes for somewhat clumsy I-IV thrashing (a climax too early, it seems) before settling into a deadly take on the introductory PYITE groove. Fishman slides over to the ride cymbal, Page leaps onto piano, Trey sprinkles some space-jam fairy dust over everyone, and suddenly we’re working a slightly ambivalent variation on that I-IV, posing as Triumph while whispering Collapse, Dissolve…and after a twinkling ambient passage, we return to ambivalence: minor-melancholy rock clatter and swerve, Page’s piano diagonals zagging at everyone else’s zig, or I guess vice versa. 25 minutes of top-shelf Phish, and another true segue into Slave.

Slave, as you’d expect after the foregoing 50 minutes of music, is devastating. Well, it’s a 1997 Slave; the mycological languour of late–90s Phish was well suited to tunes like this one.

More Stones to close, of course. They’ve always killed on Loving Cup. And is there a better, more coherent long-form composition in Phish’s catalogue than Guyute? Pure prog mayhem in the encore. Nice.

…

11/22 gets the press, 11/23 gets the ‘underrated masterpiece’ tag, and of these now-forever-conjoined triplets, 11/21 is the li’l sibling with – hey whaddaya know – some earth-shaking powers of its own. I think you can pass on this first set without feeling TOO bad, if you really don’t think you can spare that hour of your life, but that’s a swell half-hour you’re missing at the opener, and a ringading Caspian to close. The second set, meanwhile, is as good as Fall 1997’s usual, which is to say it’s a solid hour of deadly focused improvisation, favouring eventide melancholy and dissolution, crescendi desperately imploding or exhausting themselves in gouts of terminal noise, minimalist funk with a mischievous dancing step and slow poison on its blade, visible in the right kind of dark…

Ego-costumes aside, in the end it doesn’t matter whether Fall ’97 is the ‘best’ Phish tour. (One hopes the best is yet to come, right? What kind of person doesn’t hold that hope, or pretends not to?) Those are fun arguments to have, but it’s all just circles around imaginary selves, signs that read No Trespass: there’s no place for borders like those when the music begins. I’ll say instead, quite confidently, that on these nights 14 years ago, Phish reached the windblown jagged top of one peak, bringing thousands along with them; several other peaks would follow, as several had come before, but this one had a Weird light, and everyone why got up there saw something extraordinary. And would you believe it: it’s still there. Might I recommend heading up alone some night. Go on: follow the strange glow that won’t fade. The dark will keep you warm.

'Untitled 1' will do.

Thinking about (but not listening to) Vampire Weekend this morning, for some reason. The memory of the idea of their music playing in a club; or else the idea of the memory. Creepy: all those 30-year-old hipsters dancing to knockoff Afro-pop made by 18-year-old prep schoolers. Maybe the whole point of forming the band was So The Older Kids Will Like Us. But then when did a 30-year-old turn into a kid? Thinking back, I wonder (conversely) when I turned into an adult. My instinct is to say 'When we decided to have a baby,' or 'When we got married.' But shouldn't the answer be 'When I went off to college on my own' or thereabouts? I seemingly spent my 20's fucking and attending funerals; isn't that 'grownup stuff'?

Trying to synthesize years' worth of data regarding a particular observation: I rarely see well-off folks walking down the street yelling into phones or at other people on the street. What I take to be 'working-class types,' though, it happens all the time. Heavyset women in tracksuits with penciled-on eyebrows and heavily hairsprayed bangs telling their boyfriends DON'T CALL ME AGAIN I HATE YOU I'LL CALL YOU over cheapass cell phones.

Did I say 'types'? Do I say that? I do.

My baby is up and crawling about, throwing his rattle-blocks on the ground. His version of 'throwing' does not inspire Major League dreams. Not that I'd ever actually have those. He can be a doctor instead if he wants.

Phish in Denver CO, 4 September 2011.

OK, a brief experiment before we get to this wonderful show: grab your copy of the Jones Beach '09 Harry Hood - you do have one, right? - and listen again to the (inevitably disappointing) return to the I-V-IV jam after the blissful ambient passage. Note, in passing, how Fishman back then was aiming toward the kind of lightning-quick, frenetic wall-of-rhythm stuff he's doing now, but without his present insane level of chops. Note too Trey's much-maligned 'whale call' effect pedal. Aah, Phish 2009. How I don't really miss you anymore...

OK. Around 14:40 in the lovely SBD/AUD matrix recording floating out there (ahem), listen now to Trey's totally out-of-place insertion of 'Eastern' scalar runs in an otherwise conventional major-chords-all-over jam. Page tries to integrate Trey's statement into the texture of the jam but it's a weird fit, and what should've been a best-ever Hood weirdly kind of limps to the finish line.

What we didn't (couldn't!) know in 2009 was that THAT kind of playing - Trey's uncharacteristic (and clumsy, back then) harmonic experimentation, Page's instant responsiveness, the sheer density of the jam's texture, the awesome possibilities for tension/release latent in that kind of harmonic superposition - all that stuff was gonna blossom, in 2011, into the most interesting new Phish music since at least 1999, maybe even 1997. After the stunning ambient music the chaotichromatic stuff sounded like a flub...but it, not the free-floating bliss-space, was the future of Phish's jamming.

Part 2 of our experiment: grab your copy of the 8/15/11 UIC Light and fast-forward to the 4:10 mark (in the SBD). Check out how Trey's playing, over just a handful of choruses, swings from the majestic blues-inflected I-IV movement of the main Light jam, through some tense minor-scale passages, past a series of choppy figures, into a lightning-quick run beneath which PAGE MCCONNELL DOES THE COOLEST THING HE'S EVER DONE.

OK it's a small thing but let's take a breath, then a beat, and see what's happening here. Trey is playing a gnarly run that sounds like IIb or even a whole-tone scale a half-step offset from the usual Light key; Page responds by switching from I-IV-IV (the basic Light pattern) to I-IIb-Vb7, launching off from Trey's bluesy sustained third and chord-climbing even as Trey rockets skyward. It's not earth-shaking music, but the fact is, Phish don't play like this - or they didn't used to - and even if Page is secretly giving Trey a modulated I-IV to play with, it sounds so perfectly strange (and vice versa) that for a second it seems they can all of a sudden do anything they want to, again.

The whole thing takes four seconds. In just that much time Page and Trey blow open the sound of the whole jam. As if in celebration, Page hops onto the Hammond organ to fill the sky with Soaring! Technicolor! Noise! Mike, Fish, Trey, and Page get more and more noisy and tense and dissonant and FURIOUS - the light growing brighter, darker, deeper, more present, past and future in painful proximity like matched magnetic poles, the field strengthening...

At 5:40 or so the jam enters its next phase, a loping decrescendo above Fish's clanging cymbal pattern, and we can put down the phone at this point, moving on to 9/4/11. We just had to seed our listening first - to see how Trey's clumsy Jones Beach '09 maneuvers had mutated and matured in two years, how his bandmates were responding in new ways, how the off-kilter chromaticism Trey was reaching for had at last fully integrated into a Phish sound that had been, dare I say, a little predictable...

...

...and so OK here comes 9/4/11 Denver. But I'm not gonna talk about the patient Twist, the frightening 'storage shed' psychedelia in Piper, completely integrated 'plinko' section in this instant-classic Hood, thrilling Beatles/Guy Forget bustouts emerging from solid R'n'R and Ghost jams, funky Gin, or even how happy I am to hear this melodramatic but awesome version of Page's Halfway to the Moon. Nah, the hell with the usual happyhappy stuff. Let's just for a second talk about the Chalkdust that closes Set One.

OK. Preliminaries end at 2:40, at which point Trey begins his usual blues soloing, which stays 'inside the box' for just 30 seconds before he brings the volume down and starts a Stash-style tension/release routine. Nothing out of the ordinary for Chalkdust, really, and after a moment it's back to the usual stuff...but by 4:20 Page is rumbling low on the piano, throwing out new chords, Mike is acting a little silly down low, Trey starts with his minimalist patterns, Page is doing chromatic whoopsy-daysies up and down the keys...at 5:30 it's a lightning-quick 'Night in Tunisia' pattern from Trey and we're firmly into the Nü Tonalitas or Le Petit Dissonance whatever we pretentious jackasses want to call it...

Then SHIT at 6:30 the band pulls together for one of its patented 'Let Us All Climax Together Now' downbeats, only Cactus is NOT PLAYING BALL. And for a couple of choruses everything seems to hang together only barely, if at all, with Trey signaling Return and Mike responding with Maintain, Fishman bashing out Release, Page happily spraying Why Not over everything within reach of his (ahem) organ...

The end of the jam is such a colossal group orgasm that Trey manages to totally flub his entrance after the break, before nailing the final written lines. And instead of the grand set-ending major chord the song usually provides in this spot, Trey gives us a short, nasty dissonant minor-chord rogering at the outro, all industrial noises and weirdness, before a perfect unison hit to close things out.

It's not groundbreaking music; heck, no one aspect of this jam is unprecedented for Phish. It does come back periodically, as it must, to the bluesy peacocking that comprises 99% of all Chalkdust jams. But I'm not sure Phish have ever been able to integrate their melodic, harmonic, atmospheric, and stylistic ideas this well, this consistently, this effortlessly.

Yeah - I said 'ever,' as in, as perfect as Fall 1997 is in my mind, the density and well-roundedness of this music has no equal in Phish's gigantic live catalogue. How can I put this? I think they're playing now with a really unprecedented density of musical information, by which I mean that while they may still be drawing on templates they established a while back - particularly mid-90's spacy/spacious psychedelia, post-1996 funk, post-1997 ambient textures - the individual components are richer and more complex than they've ever been. The individual players' lines are certainly at peak intricacy and facility (excepting only Trey, arguably), but that's not all of it: there's just a palpable spirit of generosity and even bravery, which really brings up the level of all the music.

As if all four players trust themselves and one another so deeply, now, that they can throw out just not Weird and Stupid Ideas, nor Silly ones, nor deliberately Oppositional notions, but finally really Complex ideas...the obvious showcase in 2009-11 has been Light, with its involuted musical snarls and crosshatched tonalities, but jams like this Chalkdust show off just how much each player is offering the other four at all times.

I suspect it's a function of Mike's remarkable move to frontline prominence, but also Page's enormous gains in confidence and assertiveness (think of his leadership role in the Albany '09 Seven > Ghost!), and Trey's newfound directness and solo experimentalism. Not to mention Fish's restored chops, which are as good as they've ever been. (And by the late-90's he was one of the most skilled drummers anywhere.) But it's also a matter of the band having nothing to prove and no one to please but themselves. More and more, their best jams are starting to resemble their freewheeling soundchecks, where they've long experimented with sounds they were too reserved (in a weird way) to bring before the paying audience.

I imagine the (sometimes boring) Superball IX late-nite 'storage shed' jam was a turning point as well - a much-needed reminder of just how far we, the obsessives, are willing to follow Phish's experiments. They're bolder now then they've been in a long time...but their instincts for stage performance keep their experiments from the perversity of (say) their pre-1997 music.

My point here is that Phish have always been a fast-moving band, a brainy band, but having exhausted musical algebra they've moved into a realm where they can really PLAY with their many musical ideas: a deep ambient jam in Hood, a thunderous 'Endtroducing...' groove emerging from R'n'R, a self-devouring noise groove in Sneakin' Sally, chiming children's soundtrack music in Disease, dark rock'n'roll beats in the Waves outro, eerie chiming chords beneath Undermind, pure industrial noise drowning a funk jam in Light. And the crucial bit, the point I'm desperately trying to make, is that these deep experiments don't sound like experiments, nor accidents, nor exceptions...they're flowing seamlessly and joyfully from the textures of the songs themselves.

Every idea now seems copresent in a way it's simply never been. Phish 1997 could seemingly do anything they wanted do; Phish 2011 seem prepared to do everything, to allow all these musical possibilities not just to alternate or succeed one another (One Idea Per Minute) but to intermingle and cross-pollinate.

I'm so goddamn happy about this music right now. So excited to hear these men make such joyful and adult music. Maybe past the formalism and mere information I've been repeating these last N paragraphs, maybe THAT is the whole point of the thing. I wish most of all to tell you that it gives me joy, and I hope the same for you. In and through and with this music we've loved for such a long time, the ridiculous lot of us...to live so close to so rich and true a thing as this ever-growing music is a blessing, if that word means anything. This afternoon, at least, I'd like to believe that it does.

Or not, whatever. I mean it's just a concert review. Hey here's a summary DOWNLOAD THE SHOW ITS AWESOME U WILL LOVE IT THEY EVEN PLAYED A SOLID A- VERSION OF PIPER:):)

I TAKE THAT

Phish @ Ian's Farm, 21 August 1987.

[Also posted at the phish.net.]

Let me admit a personal bias up front: I've never gotten much out of Phish's pre-1993 music. I used to keep a December '86 tape around (decent Whipping Post as I recall?) but I've never replaced it with mp3's, and don't really feel any need to. In fact I only half a tiny handful of pre-1993 tracks on my hard drive at all. I'm not really in a position, therefore, to judge this show relative to others of its time. (@SlavePhan has done a superb job of this anyhow.)

Phish were a different band in 1987 from the institution they've become - freer in some ways, endlessly curious, arrogant like young guys tend to be, funny, brash, quick on their feet, and most importantly *new*...not a lot of miles on them, emotionally or otherwise. (This was only their second show outside Vermont, remember.) It's interesting, I think, to compare their late-80's material to their more fully-developed early-/mid-90's style - to try and hear the throughlines running between their immature music and what came after.

The first thing I notice about this show (v0 mp3 from hoydog23's spreadsheet) is the *sound*: Page has to rely on his early electric instruments, particularly the Rhodes(?), which muddies the ensemble texture somewhat. Really underscores just how far they came as collective creators over the years - and how not-really-rock they were in those days.

Quite a nice AUD all things considered though!

There's also the matter of the vocals, which are (as they say) 'cringeworthy.' Not for technical reasons, really: the problem is that they sing the entire show out of the sides of their mouths, as it were. Most of the lyrics here are stupid or silly, the musicians know it, and - crucially - they're compelled to apologize, in a way, by ironizing or parodying the performance.

It's hard for me to focus on the music when the band is delivering the songs with a smirk; this is a problem throughout the show. The Curtain's climactic vocals are undercut by cheesy falsetto and childish screaming; Trey sings Wilson in a totally misbegotten rube's accent; Golgi, Camel Walk, McGrupp, and (of course) Sanity are sung with Trey's weird early mix of sincere goofiness and a dose of self-conscious embarrassment.

When I say there were a comedy-rock band in those days, this is part of what I mean. The songs were part of it, extraordinary as they were and are.

The jamming too. Maybe most of all.

Trey has spoken many times, over the years, about his/Phish's early improvisatory approach, which was always *supplementary* to his compositions: to have each band member play at all times as if part of a single Great Chord, with everyone's ears tuned to the vibrations of the preceding, diabolically complex written music. This has the major effect of always pulling the band toward ensemble order: four-bar and sixteen-bar phrases, hard group downbeats to resolve rhythmic suspensions, diverging from and then coalescing around the going chord (progression), thickening and lightening the rhythm bed in close concert with one another, and of course their famous ability to change dynamics as one. They play like a flock of birds, nominally leaderless, all as one.

But in the early days they didn't have the same level of responsiveness, nor the mature ability to sit with an idea and let it dictate its own expression and evolution. If you've read 'The Princess Bride' you know what I mean: when the boy Inigo challenges the six-fingered master swordsman to a duel, it's over quickly without any uncertainty as to the outcome, but for a few seconds the master is terrified, because even in that hopeless minute the boy's genius shines through. That's how Phish jammed in those days: impetuously and impatiently, able to provide thrills without ever sending your heart soaring.

Even their funk grooves had air quotes around them.

Just listen to this version of Funky Bitch, which @SlavePhan has singled out for praise. I don't hear anything particularly wonderful here, quite the contrary: Trey doesn't seem to know what to do with the blues, his clever ideas (like building tension with a plodding triplet line in his third-last chorus) cut against the groove instead of flowing from it, and there's no sexiness or swing at all in his playing. (In a song called FUNKY BITCH, for Christ's sake!) He sounds like a tourist in someone else's genre. They play so well, but...why?

Same category of thing happens in Harpua, where the rhythm patterns sound overstuffed and clunky like one of the old space-filling Hey exercises instead of, y'know, a groove; in the modes-by-numbers solo on Curtain With; in the gradual breakdown of the Camel Walk jam; in the rote nature of the Flat Free playing, which is the kind of thing Phish fans like me have (for years!) inexplicably cited as evidence of Phish's 'jazzier sound'; in the related weird practice of playing a haunting song like Swing Low Sweet Chariot as bright midtempo swing.

...

...but...

...

The good parts are stunning, as they tend to be with Phish, though in a different fashion from what latter-day fans (like me) would think of as normal.

The show's highlights reveal a band about to break through an invisible musical barrier into something extraordinary. At this point Trey's band had picked for themselves an interesting musical problem: how do you fully integrate true four-sided rock-idiom improvisation into these complex, formally ambitious compositions without descending into pure randomness.

Their solution has become famous: the 'Hey' exercises, the Oh Kee Pah ceremony, the 'become one chord' style, the democratic musical approach, the really unprecedented level of group *listening* that all four musicians demanded of each other. At this point in their history, though, after just a few years together, their solution was still more proof-of-concept than emotional wellspring. But even after a quarter-century, just hearing the concept proven is still a *thrilling* experience.

Indeed, *thrill* is the emotion Phish have always been able to share: their own, their fans', the sheer joy of musical communication. This first show at Ian's Farm is genuinely exciting, even to me: it overflows with promise.

The jam out of Clod, for instance, is a perfect demo of Phish's improvisatory approach. The ear-boggling intricacy of the composition carries over into rich group improv, which grows in complexity and intensity without losing the basic Clod sound. The Skin It Back jam sounds like an attempt to harness the energy of a Dead/Allmans (or Trey Band!) improvisation without the benefit of genre cues: an experiment in shaping new music at high speed from scratch, not as solo statement or remembered social experience, but as stochastic sonic architecture. The aim isn't 'beauty,' nor is it 'fun' exactly; it's a bit like a private musical algebra, all about balanced group *sound*...

All the music is very very *busy*, of course, as Phish's jams almost invariably tended to be prior to 1997; even the McGrupp > gnarly Stir It Up jam provides little space for relaxation. (Y'know, a couple of generations of players came up revering logorrheic genius John Coltrane, seeming to forget that his most important mentor was lyrical-minimalist genius Miles Davis...) Trey can't resist the urge to insert stupid pseudo-Rasta 'rapping' into the long long reggae jam, but the onset of David Bowie restores the band to a more familiar order, and the song journeys far from its moorings while keeping to Phish's comfortable 1970's jazz-lite jam-rock milieu. The competence on display is impressive as always, but more exciting is the way the band is starting to surrender to (ahem) a musical energy much larger and more organic than their own identities. At its best moments, the music stays busy but doesn't seem it: it gets 'tight-loose,' containing lots of musical information while still moving fluidly. The long third-set jams point in this direction, which the band would explore in the mid-90's.

Indeed, for a couple of years Phish played seemingly effortless 'tight-loose' music every goddamn night, all night. Not in 1987 though.

Trey is a skillful melodicist but his solos usually stay away from traditional one-man 'here is what I feel' statements in favour of a sort of musical building-block approach: he's always trying to feed his playing back into the collective sound, the atmosphere, the groove. As much a rhythm player as a lead voice. That approach is already paying dividends at this early stage. The density and well-wrought quality of the jams is surprising; even if the band had yet to learn the value of space and sparseness, they were doing a lot of work in their own clattering early-maximalist style, led by Trey's fluent, voluble guitar playing.

But the fetish for musical order can get in the band's way at times. Quoting 'Tom Sawyer' in the middle of the Bowie jam makes sense given the patterns they're already playing, and that's exactly the kind of whole-cloth construction Trey delights in, but what difference does it make? Playing those off-time arpeggios later in the jam makes for a neat intervention, but hadn't 'Remain in Light' been out several years when this show was played? Weren't white minimalist art-rock nerds allowed to play music from and for the body at this point, rather than just the head?

It's still exciting, engaging music.

They say everyone's got 2,000 apprentice pages to work through before writing real poetry. This is apprentice work by Phish, even if their formal ambitions and extraordinary natural talents marked them as special from the start.

Yet you can't fault them for being who they are - now or then. The prickly brilliance on display at this show, in the third set especially (as (self-)conscious intention dissolves), would find its sensual and empathetic complements as time passed. It's certainly possible to take great pleasure in this music, as @SlavePhan obviously (and generously) does, but I find it a pleasant warmup to Phish's soul-searing mid-90's music, when the band's nervous edges and whipsmart self-referential intelligence started to take a back seat to a full exploration of their emotional palette.

All this said, I should listen next to some Amy's Farm stuff, which marks an intriguing creative midpoint between this band, barely old enough to drink, and the rock quartet that could bring a storm to Red Rocks and set off nuclear explosions night after night in 1993.

Thanks for spending time on this show, @SlavePhan - it's given me a lot to think about and I'm glad to have finally heard it, even if I'll never be a diehard 80's Phish fan.

Phish at UIC, 15 August 2011.

[Originally posted to the phish.net.]

While this show doesn't go as deep as 8/15 or climb as high as 8/16, it's a strong finish to a consistently enjoyable tour of unpredictable 'jamminess,' which offered unquestionably the most exciting, promising music since Phish's return. Indeed, the UIC run is stronger and more interesting, wall-to-wall, than any three-show series since, what, Berkeley 2010? The third week of October 2010?

2004?

Expectations: unless you're what's apparently known as an 'it's all Hood' fan - damn, I'm learning new terms all the time these days - you probably either thrill to see that footnote-heavy setlist (quotes! teases! jokes! Buffalo Bill! Page's house!) or feel skeptical about a sub-4minute Ghost and a Makisupa/Sleep/BBill trifecta deep in the second set. Justified either way, given the band's recent history. But this music is up to the high standards set by the first two UIC concerts.

Lots of mustard on the Divided Sky(!), Gin, and Maze in the first, but the meat's in the second half as always.

Big Crosseyed to go, then a really weird effects-laden ambient bridge into No Quarter. What a well-chosen cover given Phish's current strengths...it serves as a rich dark/aggressive space for them to explore without submerging themselves in ice-cold 20-minute jams a la the late 90's, and the instrumental/rhythmic texture of it is unusual for them, partly under the vocals. Phish do enjoy playing parts...

Quick CrosseyedTimber, but after what seems to be the final chord Trey kicks back into a variation on the song's guitar rhythm, for 30 seconds of connective jamming just begging to be drawn out into a full-length exploration. This segues nicely into an unexpectedly beautiful Tweezer - one of those jams that sweetens its funk chords with a shot of major-key delicacy without tipping fully over into, say, 7/2/97 Stash-style Happy Anthems. Phish do this kind of polychromatic (polytonal) thing ALL THE TIME now, and it's a sure sign of newfound musical maturity and attentiveness. A lot of that comes from Mike's increased prominence, I think; he's able to suggest chords in his bass countermelodies and bounce new kinds of light off Trey's (let's simplify) blues-based playing.

After a lovely outro jam, Trey starts up a brief Caspian, which bounces along at a mezzoforte before a genuine guitar-led segue into the evening's highlight, Piper. They waste no time getting into spacious major-key jamming, but still find a way to quote Crosseyed on their way to a lightning-quick funk break and ambient bridge to Ghost. There's a LOT going on here! The amount of musical information in Phish's jams, for lack of a better phrase, has never been higher in all the time they've been playing together. When folks talk about a renaissance, a new peak for the band, this Piper is what they (we) mean. Less than nine minutes to cover all this musical ground? Ridiculous. Heartening.

Then it's into the abortive Ghost, about which I'm not sure what to say, other than - hey, it's the end of tour and Trey wanted to play a lot of different tunes. It's pretty much his band. I'd rather hear a long Ghost, but haven't they jammed enough this week? Do they owe us ten more minutes of race-to-the-peak nouveau-Ghost guitar rock?

So yadda yadda and then it's Antelope, which is Antelope, and yadda yadda three-song encore and you'll love it as long as you don't listen too closely to the 'Show of Life' lyrics. Kudos to Trey for such naked vocal performances, but that abysmal 'struggle and strife' line makes me want to sacrifice a copywriter to Odin or something.

So to review our review: fine first set, incredible run of tunes from Crosseyed through Piper, and the rest is just fun tour-closer material. And just so we're clear, the 'only good part of set 2' runs nearly an hour. Jesus, what more could you want?

This isn't the letdown of the UIC run, it's the capper. There's so much going on in every tune, so many little moments of humanity and empathy inside each jam, that even without a marquee long-form improvisation this show feels to me like a Must-Hear. The band is absolutely at a peak right now.

Trouble online, trouble behind.

I don't get along with people online, and that's the plain fact. It's taken me a while to be matter-of-fact about it, but there it is. I spent a bunch of time discussing the situation in therapy a couple years ago, but never did arrive at a satisfactory solution.

OK. The the problem goes deeper than incivility.

The summer after 10th grade (1995) I spent five weeks at Johns Hopkins, taking classes in the Pre-College Program. (It's different from the well-known precocious-child program, CTY.) I got my first C (in a stultifying molecular biology lecture) and worked hard to get a life-changing A (in a small, prescient 'Explorations in Text-Based Virtual Reality' humanities seminar). Both grades were portents, but I didn't understand them.

The focus of the seminar was MUD/MOO/MUSH culture - 'A Rape in Cyberspace,' Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,' Neuromancer, some Bukatman, some Dery, that kind of thing. One of the requirements was to spend a bunch of time exploring the Diversity University MOO (moo.du.org:8888). I did. I also signed up for LambdaMOO (lambda.moo.mud.org:8888).

I'd never used the Internet before.

Some days I would get up, read the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog or my newly-purchased Principia Discordia for a while, then head over to the computer lab for a 12-hour stint in Lambda. I missed meals. I even missed class (see above re: 'my first C'). Tuition for the program came to $3,600 for five weeks. My dad mowed lawns to raise a few hundred dollars. A wonderful man in my hometown lent us the balance of the tuition and it took us a long while to pay him back; or else we never did.

I got some sun but not as much as I needed. I fell hard for a girl in the next dorm, who didn't notice me. Then I fell for someone with the username 'Sirena,' and that's one of the weirdest stories of my whole life, I think.

I learned to 'speak in public' on LambdaMOO but I learned plenty of other things as well; and I came to rely on it. When I went home at summer's end I felt totally disconnected from my hometown. I told myself and my family and even my couple of close friends that I just missed Baltimore, had a great time 'at college,' had never been around people who shared so many of my interests, just needed a little time to adjust. Junior year ahead, yay. That kind of thing. All of which was true, I suppose -

- but it occurs to me today, for the very first time, that as much as I missed the people and the school and the freedom, I was also going through withdrawal from the online world where my new self was being born. I mean that literally.

The term we're looking for is addiction, of course, more specifically a form of 'Internet addiction,' which in the late 90's was a subject of no small concern in the press and in academia.

You never hear about it now. Once everyone does some activity all day every day it's not an addiction, it's just 'part of life.' Like TV, or worrying about work, or hating the government.

* * *

I check my email several dozen times a day, yet I fail to respond in a timely fashion to friends and acquaintances. I may in fact be the worst correspondent I know. Yet I don't immediately forget about the 'need to respond': indeed, waves of anxiety about my Inbox full of unanswered emails continue to ripple for weeks and weeks. I am never, ever free of anxiety about these communications - but I avoid responding.

I've destroyed friendships - and strained family relationships - this way.

When I have spare time, I read websites and occasionally comment on them. Sometimes I do this even when I don't have spare time. Altogether I spend hours (hours!) a day looking at webpages and retaining almost nothing. I take no great pleasure from this activity. Indeed it has the dry sterility of pure compulsion, like pulling the arm of the slot machine.

I've posted to this blog more than 3,100 times since 29 September 2003. In that time I've been banned from one website, slunk away from several others, and stormed off several more. I get into fewer 'flame wars' than I used to, but it still happens. I still feel anxiety about websites I've 'stopped reading'; indeed, at the site where I've been banned, I continue to comment under a different name.

I feel contempt for such behaviour but haven't found a way to stop it, as yet.

Since 2009 I've posted upwards of 150 reviews to the phish.net - but I've only posted one or two since June, during which time I've posted 50 comments in discussion threads and in response to the admins' blog posts. I consciously avoided any such discussions until this summer. This correlation between 'chatting' online and posting more thought-out frontline pieces (reviews and articles) has held, in my case, for many years.

After building a (very very minor) reputation as a thoughtful writer at whedonesque.com, I've all but scuttled it by turning into a persnickety, ill-tempered commenter. Unsurprisingly, none of my posts have been featured there since I started commenting more regularly.

The term isn't brand dilution, but then what's the term? Would I be happier if I knew?

* * *

A longtime netizen (remember that term?) told me this when I was banned from phishthoughts.com (for 'trolling'):

You are a highly intelligent, very cerebral and I believe well meaning person but it seems that you have some form of internet Asperger's which makes it impossible for you to determine what is and is not socially acceptable in many circumstances online.

I wrote him a long email telling him, essentially, that he had no idea what he was talking about and I was perfectly justified in what I said about the site's owner and EVERYONE NEEDS TO THICKEN THE OLD SKIN, ETC., ETC. But I didn't send it. My wife approvingly refers to this kind of thing as de-escalation and always looks so relieved when I choose not to carry on such exchanges. The look on her face breaks my heart. I realize, at such moments, that I don't actually know how much damage I do to myself - or I won't acknowledge it, or (worst of all, and most likely) I've decided I need to hurt myself 'socially' in order to continue living as I am.

Last summer I wrote this:

I think we should purge the books and sell them, to alleviate my guilt (not a writer, not a devoted enough reader, nothing special...) and maybe recoup a bit of money. My wife thinks we should keep the books around[...] And dust them. I try to explain that life will stop and start over, better, if she'll just allow this one gesture; I mistake my self-indulgence for patience.

She evidently believes -- insists -- that life can't start or stop, can only continue, so we might allow ourselves to do the same. I imagine that our future must resemble my past. The books, I'm certain, are signs of my...well, my irresponsibility, profligacy, compulsions, status-consciousness. My individual failings, you might say. Don't I get the future I darkly deserve?

But what comes next is ours, not mine. `Mine' is just for comfort -- like the books. In our future[...]I'm glad my wife[...]made me keep the dreadful damned books way back when, and frustrated my urge to reduce our life to my story.

In grad school I went to a conference and met a young professor from some college out of sight/mind, and over the course of several joyful drunkening hours it became clear that we wanted to fuck each other, quite, but I was dating someone and she had to get back to her friends' house where she was staying, and in any case it would have been an absolutely colossal mistake, quite, but unforgivable? Who knows? Probably yes and deservedly so I'd say (were the situation reversed). Well. One of those stories I hold onto in which I 'miss an opportunity' to have a conventional 'good story' but still come close enough to some inner horizon that the light goes strange and new (or very old) things are revealed. So how bad a story can it really be, what I've got now? She was a Buffy fan too and I definitely should have called her when I was single, later. But I wasn't ever really single.

I mention it because, though I can't find the email she sent a few days later in response to my own message, I've memorized these phrases:

• 'maybe too smart for your own good'
• 'extremely socially awkward'

* * *

Shamefully, I often use 'Asperger's Syndrome' as a term of derision.

This is inappropriate and callous.

It would be, even if I were Oprah Winfrey.

* * *

Everyone wants his favourite band to also be The Very Best Band. This is really important to teenagers, who in this country have nothing else to do, but it stays important to nominal adults. Like me. Same for books/films of course. (Phish, Coltrane, James Joyce, Fight Club, etc.) Same for people, though I wouldn't know. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I didn't map my tastes on to the cosmic quality scale.

* * *

The point being that there are two problems compounding one another: I compulsively fiddle about on the Internet, either getting into arguments or zoning out pretending to be interested in what Ezra Klein and Arthur Silber have to say about anything, but at the same time I have very serious trouble maintaining a civil tone and spirit of congeniality in online fora. I tend to monologue at people - ever notice how rarely I respond to the wonderful comments around here? When the conversation gets two-sided I lose control of something (maybe just the conversation), and I end up saying things I regret. 'Being misunderstood,' HORROR!, but more than that: no longer trying to understand the people I talking to. Not reaching out.

And that's where I am this morning. Worried, if you're wondering, that I'll slowly lose friends and alienate readers and never stop doing the things I most hate about myself. And - you must know this is deeply related - worried, too, that I'll never write freely because it will always be about me.

You want 100% employment? Assign every single citizen to border patrol. The true meaning of the nation-state right there, the geographic Self. OK, hold one guy back to make dinner I guess. One guy for laundry. And someone to make sure the cable bill gets paid.

My son will probably wake up soon, and my wife with him. The day will start. Real life will start. This...this is the shadow. If you walk toward the light it'll hide from your sight, but not as a favour: your shadow will follow you wherever you go.

The essential, explains-it-all difference between Phish and the Dead. You're welcome!

The home state of Phish's improvisatory music is order (or structure). They depart productively from it, and play against it, entering states of tense, nervewracking disorder. But they always want to resolve, to cohere. Their improvisatory structures (like the two chords of the 'Bowie' jam, with their many modal suggestions) are centers of gravity; that's why they can swing wildly away from them and return surefooted, time after time. Their improvisations are famously architectural and coherent, as are Trey Anastasio's unique full-band written arrangements. The flip side of this strength-in-order is that their experiments in purely Free jamming have rarely been wholly successful, though they've gotten much better at it over the last ~30 years. And for a long time they were afraid to be emotionally wild, preferring intellectual experimentation - at some cost to the overall musical vibe.

The home state of the Dead's improvisatory music was disorder. They were able, on unexpectedly rare occasions, to cohere into well-formed orders within their chaotic musics (cf. the 2/18/71 'Beautiful Jam'), but they were most comfortable in freeform musical spaces ('Dark Star,' 'The Other One,' 'Playing in the Band') because they were accustomed to listening to disorder. The flip side of this comfort-in-disorder is that their formal structures, particularly their practices of song-arrangement, were famously shambolic, inconsistent, and rarely ideally-expressed. Indeed, the Dead's strongest period of pure songwriting (the early 70's country-inflected Hunter/Garcia tunes) is marred by a serious lack of spit'n'polish in arrangement and performance.

Two key causes of this difference are the Dead's average lack of chops,[*] and Phish's early emotionally-withdrawn nerdiness - which respectively pushed the Dead toward expansive Free material and pushed Phish toward hermetically-sealed structures and musical comedy.

The arc of each band was in some ways different, though they shared a destination: the Dead relaxed down to their technical level while sharpening their attack on the forms they had mastered (early-70's knife-edge Free play, late-70's crystalline rhythmic pieces, sparkling joyful 80's worldbeats, ragged balladry throughout); Phish veered toward Talking Heads-style minimalism and sonic experimentation in the mid/late-90's to take themselves out of their heads, then embraced their rock heritage and (ironically) the Dead's naked emotionality in their most recent incarnation.

For the longest time it was enough to say that Phish couldn't do what the Dead did, and vice versa; for the first time, that's no longer entirely true. Phish have finally entered a phase where they can generate the kind of emotional intensity that the Dead naturally traded in. It's for another article/essay to deal with the complicated issue of how Phish's stylistic approach works in tension with this emotionality.

Anyhow there it is. Note that we're not talking about the two bands' respective decision-making approaches, the Dead's lack of a clear artistic vision-leader, Phish's totally different musical heritage, the roles of punk/prog/funk, etc. Another time.

* * *

[*] Lack of chops? Yes. Take out Garcia (with his idiosyncrasies), Kreutzmann (master), and Hart (master in a different domain, weird fit in some ways) and you have the following players: Lesh (very technically limited despite strong intuitive musicality), Weir (brilliant innovator despite technical shortcomings), and the various keyboardists, of whom only Hornsby could match Garcia step-for-step.

Problem with tribute bands.

If you 'replace' your sainted lead guitarist a decade after his death with a guy who's made a career out of sounding exactly like the original guy - but the new guy

1) lacks the musical inspiration, but also

2) (shockingly) lacks the technical ability

to do justice to the old material, you are in trouble. This isn't the worst thing int he world if you're in, say, a Frankie Valli tribute band, but it's a huge problem if you've got John Kadlecik 'filling in' for Jerry Garcia in Furthur. The one thing a Dead-related project can't afford to be is boring - c'mon, we're talking 15-minute rock improvisations here - but Furthur is actually a boring band. I feel bad for 'em.

(bliss is body)

our ~11-month-old son got his first musical instruments today: a marching drum and a little wooden xylophone. at first he just wanted to bang things with the sticks and mallets, which was a joy in itself. seeing him control his environment, even in that small way, is pure pleasure for a parent.

then he and i got into some mallet/stick trading game - he would play with one of each, then i'd trade him a stick for a mallet, and we went back and forth that way for a while. agi was reading her book ('ancient bodies, modern lives') and beaming at us every once in a while, as was her father, feliks's grandfather, who is a painter/sculptor when not working as a thin films engineer, and who obviously wants the kid to turn out a foolish artist. (am i projecting?)

then feliks started drumming on the drum.

i think that's the widest smile i've smiled in a long time. absolute bliss. he was more adroit with his left hand than with his right, surprisingly(?) - tapping in natural rhythm atop the drumskin, hitting just off-center, then sweeping the stick around to rattle on the rim.

i know it's not 'music' to him; on the other hand i'm not sure my own music is 'music' in any essential sense. it's feeling, aurally encoded; echoes of some innerworld, or sense-mapping of a possible world yet to fall into mere physicality.

each day of parenthood is another invitation to tumble laughing into the family-body, the triple-helix that is our own memory-making being. feliks can't know how happy he makes me, not yet; because 'happy' isn't for him a separate category. it's just one way of being. he needn't 'think' about it. but surely he feels it - surely he feels deeply those moments of joyful becoming. feeling deeper than thought.

i don't know what i know, but what i feel is that growing with my son and my wife, being welcomed into the greater body (welcoming all of us each in turn; dissolving), is the truest feeling i know, the most fulfilled. not 'best'; that language is inadequate.

i think: i hope he loves music. i wonder whether he'll love making music as i do, will hear and see it all day. i remember the look in my then-future-wife's eyes as a beloved song rumbled out across a dancefloor (my god it was) nearly a decade ago; she was the music, momentarily. her body a melody line. i hardly knew her then. she was then for me a lovely idea, arm's length: 'Woman' or something. now we have a chance to be one body. it is bliss. we are bliss.

Incompetent.

The best-known blogger on one of the subjects dearest to me is absolutely incompetent at writing. I had managed to forget for two weeks and am reminded today. Pathetic, disappointing, maddening. He lacks even the wit to know that he's bad, which is to say: even his taste in writing is subpar Jesus.

In other news I'm having a nice vacation, talk to you later.

i should be floating

Do you get up up up?
Clouds stop and move above me
Too bad they can't help me
What is the right way?

Do I float up up up?
When I stop and look around me
Grey's where that colour should be
What is the right way?

Old glasses clinking and a
New order's blinking
and I -
I should be floating but I'm weighted by thinking

--Animal Collective, 'What Would I Want? Sky'

yesterfree writeup warmday.

[this is how i warm up to write in the mornings. W20 is MIT's student center. the buckles is of course starbucks. --wa.]

here at the buckles in harvard type tapping away, tips and topplings, tenuous at best. rhymes tipping tapwise out of electrical taping. sniffles, snorts, watery eyes, sore neck. thick chest-filling mucus. tv on the radio on the headphones on the computer (and by way of inspiration playing on the PA system here at starbucks, else why would i have turned toward vocal music at all, writing freewriting?).

managed to turn out something halfway decent yesterday, or so it seemed. something and something else put together into some third thing. some goddamn high school girl sitting across from me interrupting her homework to text dispassionately someotherone. maddening to see total affectlessness on another human face. do i look that way? ever? face goes slack, studied indifferent posture. same hands same eyes same dead non-smile. same will to power will to powerlessness. same whatever. every high schooler like every human being is totally different but the normalizing pressure on behaviour is incredibly strong. the ones who escape the orbit of the prevailing culture find something else, some orbital base on one or another poorly-lit basement asteroid playing D&D or punk rock in a twelfth-rate garage band with his buddies or they fuck a lot or refuse to, yes or find jesus entirely or just gesture at being a scientist, write sonnets ONLY I INSIST using elizabethan vocabulary and modern pseudo-psychology of course. 'i am a snowflake melting each morning reforming as new dark ice each night' that sort of thing.

all poems written by high schoolers are essentially the same poem. SOMEONE HOLD ME CLOSE SOMETHING MAKE ME WHOLE SOMEHOW LET ME ESCAPE

dude barking loudly into his cell phone over there in celtics gear and beaten-up brown boots, scars on the back of his arm (burns from hot metal looks like). man with miles on him. frayed edges on his t-shirt, worn jean-hems. earned his age. plenty to be said for a man who lives into his form and fate in this way. look gathering motes of time upon leatherworn skin like the settle of ancient dust, once was skin (all of us all of ours)

every surface edge of you frays and wears with the idiot passing of (we call it) time

commander controller i found you

defender destroyer i found you

dirtly little whirlwind

all caught up in the flesh of a girl

-- tv on the radio

time is a name we give to forgetting

tv on the radio is one of the sexiest bands i've ever heard in my life. ever. i mean i've never heard sexy music that wore its intelligence right on its sleeve like that and dared the listener to find that sexy. the push and pull of carnal and intellectual impulses makes for the music's complexity i think.

* * *

ok i think it's time to get down to work. 10:45am, i need to be home by 3pm, plenty of time to nail down the final comments on the four papers. give each of them a half-hour or so. something like that.

ok here we go.

* * *

just a little time before meeting agi for the ol' baby-changing-hands afternoon routine. weird being the one to receive the baby at day's end i gotta say. ok let's not dick around too long here. reading D&D shit online annoyed/rattled me i gotta say. the usual annoyance over petty things, aggravated by middle-aged men bitching about Those Kids and the (Inevitable) Decline of Culture. same old shit. no generation wants to be mislabeled that way.

crowded tables at the buckles. like W20 with more attention to paid to grooming. i wish that were something i valued. to be the kind of person who cared about things that other kinds of people cared about. to have that connection-via-abstraction. subcultural membership. only i don't much feel that way day to day. well you can be part of the mythical-alone too, if you like. another subculture.

Top-flight summer 2011 Phish.

Here's the listing for the mix I've been listening to lately. By all means have a go. I've stupidly left out all three versions of 'Timber' played this summer. They've been burning that tune to a crisp all through tour. By way of context, note the minimal appreciation for the one show I actually attended (Great Woods)...

* Kill Devil Falls, Boogie On Reggae Woman > Waves > Prince Caspian > Crosseyed And Painless (05/27 Bethel, NY)

* Halley's Comet > Runaway Jim, Bathtub Gin, DWD > Free, Backwards Down The Number Line, Makisupa Policeman > Harry Hood (05/28 Bethel)

* 2001 > Light > Slave To The Traffic Light (05/29 Bethel)

* After Midnight (05/31 Holmdel)

* Tweezer > No Quarter, Twist > Ghost > Backwards Down The Number Line (06/01 Holmdel)

* DWD > Fluffhead > David Bowie, Waste > 2001 (06/03 Clarkston)

* Steam > Piper > Sneakin' Sally > Hood > Have Mercy > Hood (06/04 Cuyahoga Falls)

* Tweezer (06/05 II Cincinnati, OH)

* Rock & Roll > Mango Song, Pebbles And Marbles (06/07 Great Woods)

* Undermind, Golden Age > Mike's Song > FEFY > Weekapaug > What's the Use > Theme > Backwards > 2001, Hood (06/08 Darien Lake)

* Curtain With, Down With Disease > Free, Swept > Steep > Bowie (06/10 Camden)

* Rock & Roll > Albuquerque, Piper > Wading > 2001, Stealing Time (06/11 Columbia)

* Steam, Light (06/12 Columbia)

* Ocelot, Gin, Light Up Or Leave Me Alone, Carini > Sand > DWD > Maze (06/14 Alpharetta)

* Rock & Roll > Ghost (06/17 Charlotte)

* Split Open And Melt (06/18 Raleigh)

* Alaska, Bowie, Crosseyed And Painless > Walls > Slave, Fluffhead > Sand, Sally > Light > Backwards, Suzy (06/19 Portsmouth)

Brief note on the improvisatory centerpiece of last night's (6/4/11) Phish show.

The DWD is as uplifting and powerful as has been reported, but for my money the fluid segues in and out of Fluffhead are the most extraordinary things about last night's DWD > Fluff > Bowie run. After all, there are other great Diseases and soaring Fluffheads and deep Bowies. But recent Phish has been perilously short on the seemingly effortless four-handed transitions that were so common in the band's mid/late-90's music. Trey's in charge here but he never forces the issue; he just puts out cues and the three other parts of his brain (aka Mike, Page, and Fish) respond complexly, organically, inevitably to the evolving structure. It's a heartening return to familiar form. Let's hope it sticks.

The rest of the performance stands tall too. There's even an improvised bridge between Waste and 2001! The whole show simply overflows with strong, adventurous playing. Nice to wake up to.

Too many metaphors.

From a recent review at (apparently) the most popular Phish-related weblog:

Flowing in one of the most naturally-contoured jams of the night, as Phish dripped out of structure, they drifted into space, sculpting a soulful and ambient sound sculpture, more melodic that many we’ve heard so far this tour.

Lemme highlight the main problems with that sentence, OK?

Flowing in one of the most naturally-contoured jams of the night, as Phish dripped out of structure, they drifted into space, sculpting a soulful and ambient sound sculpture, more melodic that many we’ve heard so far this tour.

Did they flow, drip, drift, or sculpt a sculpture? Apparently they did all four. Were they in a contoured jam structure or in space? Was it natural or carefully crafted? All of the above. Why talk about this jam if there are other, even more 'naturally-contoured' jams? Because the phrase 'one of the most' means almost nothing for such a small sample size, so it's easy to use.

You see this sort of thing a lot in fan discourse: the writer loves something and wants to communicate that love, sure, but he wants to examine as well - noble enough - without really being able to do so. The trouble is that fan-readers don't hold fan-writers to very high standards because of their shared love for [whatever it is], so this kind of writing never gets nudged into the precision/accessibility/beauty sweet spot. It's either formless nonsense like the above-quoted stuff, or baroque overwritten 'critical' talk in dire need of editing. (Buffy fandom is just swamped with the latter; Phish fandom is given almost exclusively to the former. At least the trustafarians are unself-conscious about it.)

Incompetent writing is nothing to get too worked up about, particularly in niche networks like Phish fandom, where nothing you can say about the music is a tenth as true as the thing itself and no one's reading closely enough to care anyway. But the day you accept a paycheck for writing or editing you lose the ability to be entirely casual about this shit. And it's particularly galling in the quoted writer's case: his weblog is one of the most popular in online Phish fandom, but his decent taste in Phish (if not music in general) is weighed down by his near-total inability to speak critically about the stuff.

Ho hum.

Mind out of mind.

Reading other fans' memories of Phish (and the fandom) in mid-to-late 1997 - the moment when the band tipped over a cliff from nerd-prog rock algorithms into deep dark free improv - has me a little misty right now. My peak fandom began that summer and burned out in Fall '98; it was the happiest time of my life for a long while. Merely a moment.

Might have to bust out my 7/22/97 DWD → Mike's and travel the spaceways tonight...

Quick notes about last night's (5/29/11) Phish show.

1) I owe Carl some emails!

2) This is arguably one of the best versions of 'Harry Hood' ever played - I wouldn't hesitate to call it the most powerful 'conventional' (i.e. 'Type I') Hood since the late 90's, though several versions in the intervening decade (Jones Beach '09, Worcester '10, several summer '03) have broken the song's form to stunning effect.

3) This is unquestionably the best 'Cities' since the return - again, as good as the song gets without breaking open a la Deer Creek/Amsterdam '97. Tremendous 'Jim' as well: a little dose of that four-handed post-Waiting for Columbus style (which in turn recalls the jaw-dropping Worcester '03 'Stash,' a personal favourite).

4) Yes, this fabulous 'Gin' does contain a full-band 'Golden Age' jam, but before it can coalesce into a performance of the song, Trey gets this idea to play 'Manteca'...

5) ...which is just like every other quick-n-silly 'Manteca.'

6) The 'space' jam out of 'Disease' is further evidence, along with Friday's divine 'Waves,' that Phish's ambient jamming has ascended to another plane: the spacious textures of Fukuoka 2000 in the hyperarticulate ensemble style that flowered during the 2010 Holiday Run (cf. Worcester 'Hood,' MSG 'Simple').

Just an extraordinary show. Good as the late-summer and October 2010 shows were, the last two nights have been the most complete performances in...well, how long? Are we talking late-90's here? Has the band ever been capable of this much at any one time?

Additional information about how hard it is for guys like me to invest deeply, emotionally, in even those most vital cultural texts like Everything's classic pop near-hit 'Hooch.'

The problem with the song, with all cookie-cutter pop indeed, is clear in the final bridge. The affectless lead singer has the bottom line in the clean-and-clear choral stack; the line is just the same three-note phrase repeated three times. Trouble is, the three repetitions are chordally identical: there's no development, no free play, no improvisatory energy in his delivery. Because none of the singers' lines have any autonomy and the lead vox are mixed low, the song's ostensible climax rests on its haunches instead of leaping forward.

The lead singer clearly wants to leap up to the second-top harmony line (landing on the third of the IV chord) for the last phrase of the bridge, but if he's doing it, I can't make it out. A shameful waste of musical energy.

Balance.

I have finally, finally, finally begun reading John Crowley's Aegypt quartet; to balance that choice out, maturity/intensity-wise, I'm going to spend the next two months listening solely to the early-90's college-rock semi-classic 'Hooch,' by Virginian jam band Everything.

If you haven't listened to the song lately, you should. It's a particularly pure example of late-20C hedo-moron stoner pop, one of the best (stupidest, simplest, emptiest, most embarrassing, most nakedly pleasurable) pop tunes of recent vintage. The lowest-common-musical-denominator saxophone solo in the middle is archetypal 'jam band' stuff in the Dave Matthews Band vein (though without Leroi Moore's obvious chops); that acoustic-guitar earworm is so addictive that it's easy to miss the actually tasteful electric-wah chords; the vocals couldn't possibly be more bland or pointless, yet the campfire singalong chorus manages to transcend every possible barrier to enjoyment: aesthetic, national, historical, sexual, perceptual, ontological. Oh my god, when the crash cymbal hits at the beginning of the final 'Let's get real' line I start to lose my brains a little bit and become Pure Relaxation.

Songs like 'Hooch' defy all aesthetic laws; they manage to perfectly capture a particular (lazy, debauched, lame) mood, an age (the Golden Age of psychedelia, i.e. age 19), a place (wherever you were when you first realized that girls with unshaven legs were rad; possibly 'the levee,' per the lyrics). 'Hooch' makes me think there's not a hell of a lot of point to having such endlessly worked-out opinions about Art. It's so, so bad. I enjoy it so, so much. Heaven save me from myself.

(girl; boy)

[Oh my god, I know this is more or less just bullshit (circa February 2008), but I seem to recall two things: (1) $20 copay every session to hear that I need to finish something and get on with life and etc. etc. etc. and he was right, very much right; (2) a friend watching me fall apart on a sidewalk awaiting a light-change and he says 'Maybe you need to finish something you've started'; well these things will bury you if you don't shovel them on top of someone else. Baby, but no one ever collected enough diamond dust to make a diamond, am I right? But it's better than regular dust. Right? Am I right?]

pretty girl looking for work
couldn't say where she's headed
rich boy from just outside new york
never let you forget it

he seemed to treat her with respect
she seemed to have half a brain
he was nicer than she'd expected
to find here - mom was surprised, too

one week they were everywhere holding hands
skating at rockefeller center
he bought her tickets to museums she'd never seen
threw snowballs in the park in early winter

late nights talking about everything
love language, a duet in creole
she thought he looked like a flower and was twice as sweet
he even paid to put her on birth control

she wrote home saying 'i think he loves me'
he wrote home saying 'great time wish you were here'
she called a friend, said 'you've gotta meet him'
he called his ex, said 'when do you visit, dear?'

when the day came she decided
'i'm ready to say i do'
he was outwardly delighted
though he didn't ask, it's true

just smiled and said 'you know i love you'
also true - but it left her feeling blue
('i love you' can be an excuse too)

when he got bored of undifferentiated kisses
he planned on saying goodbye
right before a couple weeks in europe
she could sit around, have a good cry
(and then move on like the weather)

but he found a note instead:
'i've had a premonition
of you and me waking up in ten years
you've traded me for some new possession

i'd rather not be in the position
of being any man's acquisition
nor indulgence, nor vacation
nor consolation'

he thought, 'she learned those words from me'
praised himself, gave a sneer
but she'd learned them from the last guy
he was more patient - and sounded more sincere
and left her just as far behind
another lesson, another year

(billie holiday rises up slow from this earthly prison to be released)

oh but honey, listen to that
smoke sound you make
sidewalk stutter
alleyway backbeat bore you up
a long time

lady who knew
you

i got this stutter now
spine syncopates, stepwise,
backhand wiseass walk way

lean close to the mic
we
hear cigarette crackle
lips brush

you sang her kiss to my mouth
slow tobacco burn, other scents,
breath fills me

grey rain streetside evening wash slow hush bye love lady go on

Phil Lesh & Friends at the Warfield with Scofield et al.: brief listening notes.

The female vocalist is shiiiiit.

Scofield and Osby are an awkward fit with the others.

Phil's slowed-down arrangement of 'The Other One' sounds lifeless, especially without backing vocals.

Do people who fall over themselves to praise Phil Lesh's 'original' bass style ever wonder what he'd sound like if he'd learned the full range of elementary bass technique? His musicality isn't in question here, only his decision to spend 45 years playing like a precocious newcomer instead of an expert practitioner; which is to say no one else could play as well with the Dead as Lesh could, but I haven't heard any Lesh that convinces me he could hack it in a technically sophisticated group. He's wasted more potential than most bassists ever have.

The two transitions into 'Dark Star' are a damn mess. Sorry Trey, Sco, Kimock, Warren: this tune sounds incomplete without that nine-fingered fella.

'Shakedown Street' is a great little song.

This is not a 'must-hear' album.

That's all.

Moxy Früvous.

I spent a lot of time listening to these guys as a teenager - going to three shows in a week, for instance, with my freshman-year girlfriend Jennifer.

I am listening to some Moxy right now, in fact.

A mixed bag: several decent-or-better, more or less aggressively Beatlesque tunes ('I Will Hold On,' 'River Valley,' 'Horseshoes,' 'Fly,' 'The Incredible Medicine Show,' 'Love Set Fire,' 'Fell in Love,' 'Bittersweet,' 'Laika'), lots of cheeseball please-notice-me-I-am-a-poor-busker comedy, an alternately ingratiating and grating eagerness to please (see above re: busking), and - surprisingly - one singer (out of four) prone to moments of nasally off-key nails-on-chalkboard moments, particularly in his frequent role as 'emotive' lead voice. It's Jian, of course, whose ensemble singing is reasonable but who's always easy to pick out of whatever winding chords they're getting up to, for better or worse.

Unlike, say, their nerd-rock brethren They Might Be Giants (another favourite among MIT kids), Moxy were made for witty cabaret melancholy rather than (ironic) bombast. Cheerful novelty tunes like 'King of Spain' and the Romeo & Juliet riff 'BJ Don't Cry' made them mini-famous, but their woodsy love songs carry real feeling, even when lines like 'I was a person who would censor / Pee-Wee's Adventure / She was exceedingly liberal / (was she?)' threaten to torpedo the mood. That same song ('Fell in Love'), after all, also goes 'She said my pasta was 'delicious, bit repetitious' / That kind of thing made me crazy,' which is just the right scale of sentiment, if that makes sense.

It's often hard for smart songwriters and performers to rein in their neocortices and just spill their guts; Moxy Früvous could do it, though not always, nor indefinitely. Their spare live cover of the Beegees' 'I've Gotta Get a Message to You' (on Live Noise, which smartly captures the vibe of a live Moxy show) builds steadily in power through two verses and two choruses, and the stepwise modulation during the outro delivers an actual emotional punch - Jesus Christ, what a great song - but the proceedings are marred by a brief a capella take on the instrumental break, which feels like a slide into kitsch despite the stark surrounding quiet. (We can say this: they were talented ensemble arrangers.) Otherwise it's an affecting cover, showing their singing to best effect, modulo a couple of clams from Jian.

Anyhow, they broke up a few years ago, which isn't a great loss for pop music but which gave a lot of sentimental geeks and their boy/girlfriends cause for, I'd like to think, a tearful moment of fellowship in/and reflection. Y'know, doofy as it all was, as everything was back then (did I ever not know what death was? hopelessness? to lie and be lied to?)...well, without the encumbrance of mere living it's easy to slip swept wonderfully up into the stream of Life, Man, Just Life, You Know? which I'm grateful for. So hi, Jennifer, though I hope that's not what I meant, or not all.

See? I want to know what kind of writer/person I am, and maybe I'm the last one to figure out that this is it.

Rock well.

Unordered assorted fives.

Representative not definitive.

BOOKS: Mimesis, Against the Day, Riddley Walker, The Cheese and the Worms, The Great Outdoor Fight.

DISCS: Surrealistic Pillow, Inspiration Information, And Their Refinement of the Decline, Tango: Zero Hour, 6/14/00 @ Fukuoka.

TUNES: Running the World, Freedom 90, The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver, Let's Take a Walk, He's Gone.

DISHES: picadillo, cremita, com chien, malai kofta, tortles.

PENCILS: Milch, Wallace, Whedon, Mamet, Crowley.

GAMES: Golgo 13, Dominion, Final Fantasy, Civilization, Top Secret/S.I.

FLICKS: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Spirited Away, Serenity, Monsoon Wedding, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

LINES: Please don't make me redundant; You want me to be...explicit?; ...the sun flung spangles, dancing coins; They are in love. Fuck the war; Well, people kept ringing the bell!

SPOTS: coming into Boston on 90 going 100, El Morro, in the car in the rain, nighttime on Beacon Hill with headphones and bourbon, downstairs at Harvard Book Store.

DAYS: watching In the Mood for Love with her, 'We have a son,' lying down amid attentive hush everything music after midnight 8/16/98, that day at the Arboretum, Christmas '89 at a Motel 6 in Kentucky unwrapping the Nintendo.

SCENES: Swearengen runs to defend Alma, Willow finds out about Xander and Faith, Poor Grendel's had an accident, Fats tells Mingus good-bye, with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

ENDINGS: Southland Tales, Fight Club, OK Computer, Billy Breathes, The Wasp Factory.

NOW: find socks, get him into the bear suit, pick her up at work, figure out dinner, carry on as if everything is possible and nothing but perhaps learning is compulsory which it is and it isn't if you catch my meaning do you catch it are you with me we have come through it is always I believe in can we go on into love yes we can yes we can.

David Lynch speaks true.

I always say, you take George Lucas or Spielberg: They're doing, in my mind, what they truly love. But what they truly love, zillions of people love, so they're multimillionaires. I'm doing what I truly love, but the audience is way smaller. And Don Van Vliet was doing what he truly loved and the audience is hardly there at all.

But it's OK, because if you do anything that you don't love for money or fame, you die. You can't live doing that. It's hollow. It's a joke. So be thankful you're able to do what you love.

--David Lynch, LA Weekly interview

I'm a forbidden word!!

[From my 'unposted posts' postbox.]

Over at one of the blogs I used to frequent back in the day, 'Wax' and 'Banks' are apparently forbidden words in comment threads - as is my last name! Any use of those three words lands a comment in the moderation queue.

I confess: I don't know what to say.

Why is the Amanda Palmer metanarrative so much more interesting than her work?

[Another ancient post dusted off and uploaded unchanged. Man, I go through some anger sometimes!]

She's lying on the stairs at some awards show pretending to be dead! She's getting naked on the red carpet outside some other awards show! She's dating an old man! She's blogging about her stomach fat! She's having problems with her record label! She's playing a bunch of...undistinguished...singer-songwriterly tunes...about...the usual bullshit.

Actually, I just answered my own question:

Advertising. (Duh.)

Phish.

My first show: December 1995; latest: December 2010; twenty-six inbetween. America's biggest touring circus in the 90's, Zappaesque progpunk then jambientronica, then walked away (twice); sober now, middle-aged, more emotionally open and less ostentatiously clever. I defy you to name any rock band that can do so many things so well. Over a quarter-century they perfected an unprecedented improvisatory formula: not just Dead-style 'jamming' but structured four-handed spontaneous composition. Say what you want about dreadful lyrics, unsingable melodies, fallible vocals, pseudo-hippies - no group's ever improvised like this. Ever. They create band structures, not solos. Rapturous complexity. I am addicted.

Brief note about Neil Young's 'Albuquerque.'

If you're going to write a song about a city, please choose a city whose name you can sing without sounding like an complete idiot. 'Albuquerque' is probably the clunkiest city name imaginable for that purpose - the 'kur-key' ending just can't help sounding, um, dorky.

Not a bad song in general. But the refrain makes me want to rip my own face off.

Backward down.

26 October 2010
Manchester NH
Phish

Superb close to a strong week of shows. Phish will never be a reggae band, but the Gregory Isaacs tribute is just one of three reggae tunes in this show (if you count Trey's doofy original, Makisupa Policeman), and Night Nurse is probably the strongest pure reggae rhythm work the band has done. (Between Night Nurse, Mellow Mood, and the Have Mercy bustout earlier in the week, I almost convinced myself the boys were warming up to play Natty Dread for Halloween. ALMOST.)

Every song is juiced with something special; the boys are in their best 'Phish 3.0' form right now, no question. The Curtain (With) jam - which (Attention, Nerds!) is basically a Reba jam in Limb*Limb's meter, with all the roiling tension and tonal-shifting that implies - is customarily beautiful; the reggae tunes are groovy; Song I Heard... is pure rock'n'roll climax; Mike's and Ghost are on par with their best renditions of the year (Mike's Song is particularly encouraging).

But the best moments - the patient, multifaceted Light jam and the stunning Ghost > Mango > Weekapaug > Llama sequence - are as good as anything since summer 2003. Light is more insistently rhythmic than the celestial 8/7 Greek version, but just as rich, and few moments in Phish's recent history can compare to the feeling of ecstatic release shared by band and audience alike during the show-ending string of segues, with Trey belting out off-key lyrical callbacks and careening madly from one improvised transition to the next. It's old-fashioned fun in a distinctly new musical language: they've finally figured out a way to integrate the spare/spacy sound of their late-90's music, and the rock-hedonist haze of their '2.0' material, with their recent song-driven approach (itself a much more emotionally accessible throwback to their contained early-90's performance style).

...hmm...

What's missing is the ominous darkness that coloured Phish's greatest performances - the joyful peaks of those classic Fall '97 shows were all the more extraordinary for the forbidding valleys that preceded them. Not to say Phish 2010 are always cheery, but they're certainly a lot less inclined to give in to darkness and melancholy than they once were. For instance, compare this ASIHTOS to the canonical 6/19/04 version, which spends half of its 18 minutes in deep cold water before alighting on an icy shore. The much busier Amherst version resolves in a mighty wail from Trey's guitar, and if 'resolve' is a very fine emotion for a musician to share, it doesn't stay with you, haunting your sleep, like the distance and loneliness contained in the SPAC version.

Yet I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy the heartbreak and inner torment that produced Phish's pre-retirement music. The new happier Phish might not have any interest in the dreadful vistas opened up by their years of Weary Continuance - or maybe their interest is outweighed by sensible self-preservation - but after all, they're just four middle-aged guys. And we share in their happiness. And we've got the tapes. Those were scary years: the millennium clock counting down, resources dwindling, cliff edges growing nearer seemingly on all sides, deathly voices of unremembered times welling up from below, the boneyard of the past...

I wish to go back, sometimes, but also, certainly, to return afterward. Always remember that 'Go toward the light' is not an invitation to more life - and neither is 'Come into the dark.' That was the serpent's-voice of Chance calling out, but we (with this quartet of artists we love) content ourselves instead with Change, which is inexhaustible. And who'd begrudge his fellow human being's contentment, anyhow? Isn't that one of the things we came for?

You should seek out this show, along with (unquestionably) 10/19 through 10/23, 10/12, and (you have the hard drive space after all) the whole rest of the tour when you get a chance. That's a simple answer to the hard question, I guess.

Lately.

In Treatment, Season 2: We're only a couple of weeks in (thanks, infant son, for your thoughtful stance against excessive TV-watching), but it's both better-integrated and less startling than the first season. Part of the problem is that the discursive/investigative structure of the episodes is a little more predictable the second time around, particularly in the Mia and Walter episodes. The raw energy of the April and Oliver hours keeps them from that trap - and then there's Gina. Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest must have loved working together; Byrne gets to stretch his legs a little and Wiest gives him unbelievable stuff to work with. What a well-designed relationship, and how well played! (Plus it's the show's cleverest dramatic/structural conceit: we spend the week with Super Therapist Paul, then see him spun around on Fridays by a therapist whose style is completely different from his own, but who knows all his tricks.)

I love this show, even if its occasional schematicism keeps it from joining Mad Men and the Big HBO Shows at the top of the TV heap.

Monster Manual 3, 4th edition: If WotC put out a one-volume compendium of the 4e Manuals with updated statblocks and MM3-style background/narrative info, it'd compete with the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual (1989/1993) for 'Best D&D Monster Book Ever' honours. They will not do so; the days of encyclopedic D&D texts are long gone. Something to think about.

Little, Big (John Crowley): Still haven't figured out what I want to say about this book, other than that reviewers invariably describe the last 50 pages as 'heartbreaking,' but I found them joyous, ecstatic; the one ostensible 'sad ending' struck me as the truest and happiest of them all.

Well OK, here's something: like Pynchon, Crowley simply obliterates the boundary between genre elements (Barbarossa legendry, Faerie, the orrery, the cards) and painfully real depictions of mere life; unlike Pynchon, though, Crowley writes with absolute authority on the subjects of lifelong love and sex. Clute describes him as 'conspicuously and fruitfully knowledgeable about the bullseyes and aporias of heterosexuality.' Indeed! Or as normal folk might say: the Tale of Alice and Smoky is one of the best love stories I've ever read, seen, or heard. It is utterly, joyfully True. And the Tale of Sylvie and Auberon (Lilac reminds you to mind your pronunciation) is just as good.

(Pynchon did write the perfect 'They are in love. Fuck the war,' but he's generally more interested in sex-as-transgression, or anyway sex-as-metaphor, than plain ol' sex, never mind plain ol' love.)

Little, Big is a wonderfully dangerous book - because it does not lie.

The Grey Album (Jay-Z + Beatles mashup by Danger Mouse): Danger Mouse is from White Plains, not NYC, and the ostentatious hipster cleverness of this album wears thin after a while. What you're left with is Jay-Z, who remains a narcissistic, hypocritical buffoon whose talent for rhymes is dwarfed by his self-promoting instinct. The lyrics to 'December 4th' used to move me, but they're embarrassing:

And this was the stress I lived with til I decided / To try this rap shit for a livin / I Pray I'm forgiven / For every bad decision I made / Every sister I played / Cause I'm still paranoid to this day / And it's nobody fault I made the decisions I made / This is the life I chose or rather the life that chose me / If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack / Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black

Bless him for working so hard, but those lyrics are nonsensical where they aren't merely offensively stupid. After moralizing a little bit about his 'bad decision[s],' he sideswipes 'every sister [he] played' on his way to excusing his paranoia, insists that his career as a crack dealer was 'nobody's fault,' disingenuously takes blame for choosing that career, then backtracks into platitudes about 'the life that chose [him].' Oh, and a petulant whine to close, which literally means nothing at all. Not a thing.

And how did he end up in the 'life that chose [him]?' Take it away, Mr Carter:

Now all the teachers couldn't reach me / And my momma couldn't beat me / Hard enough to match the pain of my pop not seeing me, so / With that disdain in my membrane / Got on my pimp game / Fuck the world

Aaaaand...that's it. He's Patrick Bateman: his explanation for his vampirism is 'Hey, I'm a child of divorce.' Wanker.

The Grey Album: lipstick on a pig.

Moss (Mike Gordon): 'Cactus' Gordon is a fascinating musician. He's a skilled rock bassist, perfectly capable of doing the standard root-downbeat thing, but his work in Phish has gotten a lot more Lesh-like over the years - fluid rhythms, unexpected rests and syncopations, odd inversions, genuine use of the bass as a lead voice. Unlike Lesh, though, Gordon has access to a full complement of bass-comping skills (e.g. slap technique); when paired with a lead guitarist as versatile as Trey Anastasio, who's essentially his own rhythm guitarist, Gordon is a deadly improvisor and in-the-moment designer of ad hoc song structures, essential to Phish's unparalleled sonic richness in concert.

In his solo work, Gordon's essentially a pop-rock experimentalist. His early tunes like 'Mound' and 'Weigh' reveal him to be a natural melodist whose oddball ensemble arrangements encode lovely, singable lines within devious instrumental passages. But that was Phish stuff, written to fit the band's nerd-prog sensibility. Since Phish's first hiatus, Cactus has become the band's most productive - and arguably most interesting - songwriter. His work with Leo Kottke is rustic without falling into folksy cliché, complex without ever seeming fussy, while his solo albums have moved between wild sonic experiments (Inside In, with its trombone/steeldrum weirdness) and easygoing funk-rock driven by precise, intricate guitars.

Meanwhile he's been quietly exploring the potential of the electric bass guitar as a lead instrument. (Working with Kottke seems to have emboldened Gordon to step out more than ever.) But if you're thinking 'Primus' at this point, then (a) kill yourself and (b) this is not that. With Moss, Gordon has found a fine balance between the bass-driven strangeness of Inside In (and the more organically-structured The Green Sparrow) and Phish's ensemble sound. It's a decent record! Almost kinda...indie. Songs like 'Horizon Line' and 'Flashback' still feature bossy basslines, but the opener 'Can't Stand Still' and album highlight 'What Things Seem' are fine pop tunes in which the bass serves a supporting ensemble role without sacrificing presence or authority.

Plus, Cactus's thin nasal vocals sound better than ever this time around. That lets the songs be just songs, instead of 'experiments' or 'Mike songs.' It's just an album of idiosyncratic tunes perched comfortably between Phish's jammy prolixity, the cannonball articulation of bluegrass (one of Gordon's musical loves), and Cactus's own carnivalesque compositional sense. There's a straight line from 'Sugar Shack' (Mike's superb contribution to Phish's last album, Joy) to the tunes on Moss. I dig this album. You might too - and for the first time, it sounds like Mike Gordon really cares about getting you there. Paradoxically, his most pop-accessible album seems also to have been his most effortless. But then: the further in you go, the weirder it gets.

We3 (Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely): My favourite of Morrison's comics. Quietly devastating - and FQ's art is peerless. Reading this has finally convinced me to go back and try The Invisibles, which I couldn't be bothered with after being so disappointed by The Filth.

Fiasco (Jason Morningstar): Do you play roleplaying games? Do you like telling stories? Did you enjoy Fargo or A Simple Plan? Get this game.

I managed to surprise myself (yay, I guess?) writing about the 10/22/10 Providence Phish show.

10/22/10
Providence
Set 1: Down with Disease, Funky Bitch, Fluffhead, Roses Are Free > Rift, The Moma Dance > Ocelot, NICU, Sample in a Jar, Julius

Set 2: Rock and Roll -> Carini -> My Problem Right There, Mike's Song > Sanity > Weekapaug Groove, Suzy Greenberg > Light > Character Zero > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Loving Cup

Encore: First Tube

I've been listening to a lot of Dead lately, and one thing I've come to cherish about Dead shows is the 'Jerry Ballad' - the slow, intensely weary late-second-set Garcia tune that in the band's later years served as the inevitable landing pad for the big Set Two jam. Those weary murder ballads and brokedown folk numbers - Wharf Rat, Black Peter, Morning Dew, Stella Blue, Standing on the Moon - let the dancers come down a little and offered a familiar musical space for the psychedelicists in the room, but also brought the night's intensity and intimacy up to a new level. They weren't just 'bathroom break' tunes. Far from it.

I don't know that there's a Phish equivalent to the Jerry Ballad. Certainly there are late-night Phish mainstays: Slave, Hood, the inescapable YEM. But you might say those tunes are for getting high rather than going deep, you feel me? Phish have never been a melancholy band, and their 2010 shows are more relentlessly upbeat than any of their post-Remain in Light performances; gorgeous as Hood and Slave are, weirdly abstract as YEM is, they're also a little glib, mainly in terms of lyrical content. ('Seen the city, seen the zoo / Traffic light won't let me through' doesn't deserve to be spoken aloud in the same breath as 'Half of my life / I spent doin' time for / Some other fucker's crime.') The Hood jam might be the most beautiful thing anyone's ever played - I think that sometimes - but as a whole, the song Harry Hood is a little jokey for its own good, wouldn't you say?

And aren't the songs songs, rather than wrappers for improvisations?

Now, Phish aren't up to what the Dead were up to, obviously, so we shouldn't hold Trey's 'failure' to be Jerry Garcia against him, anymore than we should reduce him to his success at (kinda) being Frank Zappa. But listening to this superb show, I find myself wishing for a Jerry Ballad. This band means the world to me, but I've been wishing it for a while...

This concert is pure high-octane Friday rock majesty, but it didn't have to be just that. There isn't a single dull or lame moment in the whole second set, and plenty of thrilling ones: Trey's haunting guitar work near the end of the Rock'n'Roll jam, unexpected funk rhythms in Carini, the spry solos in My Problem Right There, the ecstatic stupidity and surprising intensity of the late Sanity jam, chromatic craziness in Weekapaug, and of course the unbelievable richness of Light. (Phish have never played a bad version of Light.)

In fact, 10/22/10 is in competition with 10/20, 10/26, 8/18, 8/14, 10/19, 8/9, 8/7, and 6/27 for Show of the Year.

But consider what the guys are working with! Sanity. Mike's (etc.) Groove. Carini. Suzy Greenberg. Character Zero! Fluffhead for Christ's sake! Sophisticated music (usually) paired with lyrics ranging from the middling to the puerile - joke songs, many of them. (Indeed, the lyrics to Weekapaug, Carini, and Sanity are explicitly intended as jokes - as is the much more successful My Problem.) In lyrical terms, the most fully-developed song in this second set is Loving Cup (a cover), followed by My Problem Right There. The pervasiveness goofiness of this repertoire, some of it a quarter-century old, extends to the playing in some ways. Mike's Song is all snarling anger, Rock'n'Roll and Carini feature complex jams, Light has that powerful mezzo forte middle section...but the set never quite LANDS, never goes to ground and puts down roots. It just quiets down. And the most intense parts lack the icy-dark edge of Phish's late-90's peak (or its scary 2003-04 reprise).

On the best day of their lives, the Dead could never have put on a show like this. But the reverse is true too. There's a reason so many Trey Ballads - Let Me Lie, Show of Life, Bug, Secret Smile, When the Circus Comes, Mountains in the Mist - serve or have served primarily as piss breaks for so many (admittedly ungenerous) audience members. Some of those are gorgeous songs...but Trey can't consistently summon the weariness or earthy authority the music needs. Even songs like Joy often seem to be sung out of the side of the band's mouth - yeah, even that heartfelt song of remembrance. Phish are completely sincere in their emotional outreach, I think, but their vocals often fail to convey the full emotions in the lyric to songs like Rift and Ocelot (never mind Sparkle or Horn!), which in any case are often wrapped in irony and good humour. They flinch just as their hearts are about to break. Alas.

...

So that's what this show makes me think. 10/22/10 II, like the shows just preceding it, is about as good as modern improvisatory rock gets - but what keeps it from the rarefied realms of an 11/22/97 (or a 10/21/83!) is that its bright light isn't shot through with darkness or cold or loss, needn't work to drive away some creeping nighttime void. It's there to keep everybody up awhile, as if afraid of bad dreams. But Phish's greatest music (so far) was played right at the cliff's edge. I'm happy that so few fell in, but don't you kinda wish for a little of that danger back?

'See here how everything / lead up to this day / and it's just like / any other day / that's ever been / Sun goin up / and then the / sun it going down...Run and see / hey, hey, / run and see...'

Run and see the day, I take him to mean, and the dying, and the dark as well. Phish are true musicians, and they're able to show us just about everything else. But not the dark. Not now. For whatever reason.

Get this show. It is absolutely wonderful.

Steve vs. Paul.

Stevie Wonder's cover of 'We Can Work It Out' is a better time than the Beatles' original, a better 'pop single,' but I think it misses the implied musical point of the original, or rather its mood of desperate fear. The cover's devil-may-care energy is appealing in itself, but 'There's a chance that we might fall apart before too long' translates from searing to irrelevant in Wonder's version.

I always figured the point was that they can't work it out. Is the joke on Paul? Stevie? Me?

Private regrets.

I am ashamed to have devoted energy, in my wayward youth, to a school of music that counts the Disco Biscuits as members, never mind giants of the scene. (I speak of 'jam bands,' of course.) I understand the Biscuits' appeal to bourgeois stoners who grew up in the hip-hop era - y'know, the kids who ruined Phish's lot scene in the late 90's - but the music of the Biscuits is a null. The basic idea, integrating techno/electronic instrumentation, style, and arrangements into the Dead/Phish-inspired improv-rock form, is perfectly valid. All the more disappointing, then, that the Disco Biscuits combine mid-level instrumental chops with atrocious singing/lyrics and thin-at-best songwriting, and that their seemingly endless 20-minute improvisations are just as monotonous as the euro-dancefloor rubbish they were supposed to be (a breaking wave of helpless children hoped without knowing that this dimwitted comedy routine would be) invigorating.

light is growing brighter now

Here's a best guess for the moment: 'life-affirming' songs don't report on increased self-confidence, they offer it to the listener. Music on record is about the 16-year-old hunched up next to her stereo in the middle of the night with a furrowed brow trying for the tenth or thousandth time to make out the lyrics to a song that she'll someday cry at the mere memory of; if she wakes her parents everything will fall apart; in exchange for her devotion it's not enough to give her 'something of yourself,' you have to give her everything. She doesn't have to earn it. Emptying yourself and living for a moment with (and in) her heart rather than your own is how you earn the right to keep carrying on as you do. You're not making a record of yourself or your 'art' - you're giving her a chance to mark the time that is her life. All you can offer is a gift. She'll give you so much and more. You have to believe that. I mean 'understand.' I mean 'believe.'

Mid-Seventies Miles.

Jarrett is (as usual) both arrogant and right: after the early-70's Cellar Door band, Miles never again played with such a sophisticated ensemble. That said, the later Dark Magus/Agharta/Pangaea material does seem to offer the canonical, 'finished' form of the music Miles was working toward during his Fillmore/Live-Evil/Jack Johnson period, which included the now-famous Cellar Door shows. There are grooves on Dark Magus, a live date from 1974, that Miles could never have dreamed of during his more widely-known (and well-regarded) In a Silent Way/Bitches Brew period. (Take a moment to be astonished that those two canonical albums were recorded in the same year.)

For that matter, the 1972 band(s) couldn't have produced the demonic rock-ambient grooves on Dark Magus either. Important as On the Corner was and is - for many listeners it's the border between Miles as great innovator and Miles as anti-jazz huckster/sellout - with the benefit of hindsight we can admit that the final studio album is no richer than the sessions that produced it, but even those dates can't touch Miles's live work from 1970-74. In the context of Miles's evolving jazz/rock conception, On the Corner has kind of a provisional feel. It's sexy, aggressive, downright nasty music - but its ideas feel half-formed at times, the grooves open questions rather than authoritative declarations.

OK, some days that's what you need.

But In a Silent Way accomplishes more than On the Corner with a lot less posturing and ruckus - it's both way cooler and even more tense. It jangles your nerves but sings too. Dark Magus offers a wide variety of moods and tempi as well, and if it's never as cool as Silent Way, well, nothing in the last forty years has been. And all three of Miles's well-known 1974-75 live albums take Miles's groove/space ideas a lot further than On the Corner, with the relatively quiet passages giving the explosive ensemble noisemaking extra meaning (and vice versa).

Anyhow, the Cellar Door band might've been capable of more than any subsequent group of Miles's in broad jazz-technique terms, and it certainly boasted an impressive roster of soloists, but it wasn't capable of producing the earth-shaking music on Miles's mid-decade live albums. I think that has to do with a wholehearted adoption of rock'n'roll (less 'electric jazz,' more Hendrix) as the basic musical palette. Much as I love Miles's early-70's stuff, the Dark Magus material seems to fulfill the ambitions that led him to his early-70's experiments in the first place.

If I knew more about my material, this is where I'd talk in detail about Pete Cosey, Miles's key guitarist from 1973-76. But that's for another day, or maybe another writer. I gotta study up first.

Yoko.

Are there any John Lennon tracks that are improved by Yoko Ono's presence? Even one?

More diplomatic phrasing: Did Yoko Ono bring anything to John Lennon's music? Does she have a musical identity of her own? Did she record tracks that would stand on their own if she weren't, say, trading on Lennon's reputation?

Synchroneity.

I love this sort of thing: the same day the Dead played their final June '77 Winterland show, with that earth-moving Estimated > St Stephen > NFA > Drums > St Stephen > Terrapin > Sugar Magnolia sequence, Maggi Payne and Arthur Stidfole (flute and bassoon, respectively) sat in a room with a bank of synthesizers designed by David Behrman and recorded the magical minimalist improvisation 'On the Other Ocean.'

By all means do listen to both.

Not for a general audience so much as, um, a tiny niche within a tiny niche. (THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!!)

For the tiny percentage of readers who care about such things: I've written more than 150 Phish show reviews over at phish.net. I recommend the 11/14/95, 9/22/00, 12/31/99, 8/9/93, and 12/9/97 entries for general sweep-of-the-band's-history material, but (y'know) they're not exactly literature, and the whole thing's a little inside-baseball anyway, and I have no idea who the ideal reader for the collection is.

Still, there you have it. Where does the time go? There, among other places.

How to tell a story.

'There are times when I spend the whole night thinking about things like, "God, my feet hurt," or "I gotta pay the rent," or "Why can't I get my guitar in tune; it doesn't sound quite right" - I never get past the trivial little bullshit, so I never see the audience, I never see anybody in the band, I'm just locked up in a little private hell - heh, really, man. But sometimes on those nights people will come up to me and say, "God, that was the most incredible music you guys have ever played; it sounded -" And I just go, "What?" I listen to a tape and it sounds amazing and I say, "I don't remember that; I didn't play that," and it's those moments that I realize that my conscious will, the me I know of as the day-to-day me, is just really not very involved in this whole thing in a way that can interfere with it substantially or cause it. It's something that occurs in a mediumistic way, something involuntary. I trust it because I know it's not me. If it was me, I wouldn't trust it because I couldn't dig it; I know myself too well.'

--Jerry Garcia, 1979

Previous generations had 'The Conference of the Birds.' My generation has 'Twitter.' My generation, by the way, if anyone was wondering, is rubbish.

I am horrified.

I was just reading online comments about the 8/12 Phish show in Deer Creek (strong show, tremendous Meatstick > Mango pairing) and realized that every website I've looked at this week has represented a conscious choice not to read Little, Big. Only I didn't think of it in terms of reading a book. My innerwords were:

'I could be there, but I choose to remain here.'

John Crowley has described Little, Big in part as an 'impertinent' attempt to write a novel like 'Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's V. and Vladimir Nabokov's Ada.' As for whether he succeeded, I'm tempted to say that's up to the critics, but of course such judgment falls to the Reader, and in my official Readerly capacity I'm happy to say you should read and find out. (Executive summary: oh yes, yes he did.)

I don't think of Little, Big as a book anymore. It's become a place, a Geography(!), and along with Ulysses and Riddley Walker and The Whole Sort of Pynchonian Trip it's a good enough embodiment of my literary ideal, which is to say, my becoming-dream, the consciousness I desperately wish to enter, to be forever occupied by. I wish I could see the way these stories see.

But I took a few minutes to read over comments about the Phish show (check out the slightly-extended 'Cars Trucks Buses' in the first set), and pulled over to share this post with you, haha, and I'm not sure what's next. I'm never sure, and usually I'm dealing anyhow with what's now so it doesn't bother me. But today I've noticed, and am horrified.

Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide
Return and back into your Sun subside

Well, I can't really blame my shortcomings on my generation. Maybe my parents', though? Yeah, that's the ticket.

Nine mile skid.

Heh. The 9/21/72 release was one of the first Dick's Picks I sought out, and it's one of those things that would've drastically changed my life had I heard it during, say, freshman year of college. Yesterday I was driving around with the GD Movie soundtrack playing, that incredible He's Gone > Jaaaaaam > Other One from 10/17/74, flashing back to something one of my closest Phishin' buddies told me recently: if he'd been around to hear 1973-74 Dead, to know that somewhere in America a bunch of guys were playing music like that every night, he'd have dropped everything that moment and gone on tour. It was just too pure, too real not to.

Now, I've always been kind of a stick in the mud, in terms of tour culture. In an essay I've been working on I go on for a while about "middle class white kids with time to kill – the folks who think 'hippie' is a synonym for 'irresponsible,'" and I mean it. Phish tour culture actively pisses me off, and the Phish fan community leaves me colder by the day.

But for the very first time in my life I found myself wishing I could go back to that age, to that unrecoverable time, and just wander the country. I got it, for a minute. The only way to see (to hear) a nation-idea so big is to keep moving, either through time or through space. For a moment I wanted to run around a little, and it was 'He's Gone' that got me there. The very idea: songs that reach backward through time toward blues spirits and mountaintop musics...it's just destroying me, lately.

Of course I quickly disabuse myself of nostalgia every time I turn on any post-Hornsby Dead. Time isn't a friend or a lesson, it's just time. Same as space. My wife is working at her laptop now, sending emails to colleagues. We're in house slippers and there's a 'Baby Shower' banner over the serving counter. This is far, far better than OK.

Scales falling away.

8/27/72 Veneta

PLAYIN' IN THE BAND

GOD DAMN