My goal for 2019 is to write at least a little something about every show I see, preferably by the next day, we’ll see how it goes. I will compile weekly and post here as-is.
So, in that spirit, this is the twenty-fifth of hopefully 52 posts…
24Jun19
Dave Harrington, Spencer Zahn, Jeremy Gustin @ LunAtico
I post links to my reviews on Medium every week on Facebook and a few weeks ago someone commented something to the effect of “I have no idea who any of these musicians are!” Not in a mean way, but it did make me think. I was thinking about it last night about 30 seconds after walking into an already-in-progress set from Harrington/Zahn/Gustin at LunAtico. Within those 30 seconds I had made my way from the door to side stage without even having to say “excuse me” to a single person and was already ensconced in some of the most amazing, gorgeous improvisation you could imagine. I mean, this was Phish-on-a-great-night good and, like no one knows who these people are. Harrington was playing this blissed-out riff that I’d seen him do many times, it’s probably a real “song” that he’s composed, but really it’s just flat out happiness in musical form, a long, cresting peak of ecstatic major key. The whole trio was locked into something magic, I could just feel it from the moment my ears entered the room and you could also feel that they felt it, too. Harrington/Zahn/Gustin is a band now, or maybe a capital-B Band, they seem to get a monthly gig at LunAtico in and it’s really about the best band/venue/music/crowd/pay-what-you-want combo you can get.
The next piece had some Middle Eastern/Arabic flair to the sound and it was equally as endorphin-inducing, a big, welcoming smile of bass, guitar and drums. I mean, holyfuckingshit, just an extended jam of ridiculous proportions. Harrington somehow channels all his influences with clear paths back to their roots without ever sounding like he’s trying to mimic or copying. You hear Garcia so clearly in his tone and phrasing, but he never tries to sound like Jerry, it’s an amazing feat. His mastery with his pedals was on full display last night. The set closed with the James Bond theme “Nobody Does It Better,” Harrington on slide guitar, slipping into a wild effects spazz-out, somehow getting way out there while keeping it quite beautiful and compelling. My only regret was not getting there from the beginning.
Never fear, after a short break, the trio took the stage again. At this point, there were maybe 20 people in the room? 25? 10 or so sparsely arrayed in seats and stools around the stage and a few more extending to the back, maybe they were there for the music, maybe just there for a cocktail or late snack. Have you been to LunAtico? You should go. You should go when these three are playing. These three are really, really, really fucking good. The second set was a masterpiece of improvisation. Have I mentioned Jeremy or Spencer yet? Harrington was good last night, the other two were better. no one even knows who these guys are. Spencer wasn’t so much playing bass, but actually countering Harrington with a constant soloing of his own. He was playing a quite-nice hollow-body Fender bass that sounded ridiculously good in this trio and was some sort of combination of Gordon and Lesh, yes he was that good. I remember the first time I saw Spencer Zahn, he was the third guy in a fucked-up-it’s-so-good trio with Harrington and Joe Russo and frankly, I had no idea who Spencer Zahn was and he looked and sounded a little out of place. I mean, fine he was OK, but not Dave/Joe level. But pretty much every single time I’ve seen him since then he’s played and sounded better, or maybe I just finally realized how good he is, but good lord, the playing last night was next level. Just constant, glorious, melodic bass playing, serious ears on what Harrington was doing, taking charge at a few points, Robin’ing Dave’s Batman at others. And Jeremy Gustin? Do you know this guy? He may have been the best of ’em all last night, although it sure as fuck wasn’t a contest. Just a phenomenal night of drumming, so much feel, so much massaging of the rhythms, mallets and big fat brushes and plenty of cloth over his drums gave his playing an almost muted, tribal feel. Intense, though, seriously intense. Altogether, it was an epic night. I happened to sit down at a table with another musician no one knows and he was just gushing over how good it was. How does a show like that happen, a handful of cash total in a hat box that goes around to a sparse crowd, some perfect bungalow of livemusic in out-of-the-way-Brooklyn, a Monday night with three guys playing as well as could possibly be, experimenting, grooving, totally accessible, anyone-would-love-this brand of jamming, not contrived, gimmicky jambands shit, but three guys playing the colors of the rainbow and the emotions of the heart, some quiet, some loud, some weird, some beautiful, all amazing. Hopefully they play again in July, but whenever they do, you’d be a fool to miss it.
Rev Vince Anderson & the Love Choir @ Union Pool
HZG ended at 11pm sharp, I tipped my hat in goodbye and made my way cross-BK to Union Pool, walking into a celebration-in-progress and figuring if I was lucky I’d catch a song or two or three before the setbreak. Such is the livemusic’n life. As it happened, I got there at 11:20 and they broke an hour later, getting me a full dose of Reverend Vince. This was a special night, as it was a celebration of 10 years of residency at Union Pool, although the residency overall is 23+ years in NYC. At one point, during the weekly Q&A section of the show, we got the origin story of Rev Vince and it really spoke to the person he is and the music he makes (the question from the audience was so spot-on and thoughtful that Vince joked about it having been written in advance and I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a plant). There is music at a Love Choir show, a lot of it, a mix of funk and R&B and gospel and the profane, but it really is like a weekly revival, religious in the way we are all religious, seeking spirituality somewhere in the crowd in a concert somewhere. The room was typically crowded, the audience was all-in and the band, with several guests rotating through (highlighted by Eli Paperboy Reed). There was some great banter, Vince is one of the best, lots of dancing, sweating, smiling, laughing, hooting, hollering, singing along, soul-straightening and a whole lot of other stuff that’s all summed up best by “another Monday night with Rev Vince.” At times the music feels like an afterthought to the chaos in that room, particularly during the first set when it’s packed and people are a little on edge jostling with the crowd and the energy in the room. And then at other times, the music is the center of it all, the band locks into a groove, Vince some sort of Dr John/James Brown hybrid with a gruff, lovable growl and a deep connection to his band and audience. It’s rather amazing that Vince is who he is, not like he’s got a great voice or is a virtuoso player… but this is clearly what he should be doing, it points to the notion of a true calling, a higher power of some sort and he knows it and lives and breathes it. That’s the religion you find at a Reverend Vince show. That’s why he’s got a band claled the Love Choir. That’s why the room is packed to the gills on a weekly basis, 10 years, 23 years, last night for sure. After a singalong This Little Light of Mine and some celebration cake and a birthday song for his longtime baritone player, Paula and an awesome extended bass-and-drum funk jam and some more dancing and more singing, he left the stage already itching for the second set. That’s a shitload of energy right there… he promised another nice long second set and “maybe even a third set!” I wish I could have stuck around to see just how long they played and what other fun and surprises were in store, but an hour of the Love Choir was enough to get my inner energy aligned properly and it was still Monday night, so…
25Jun19
Leif Vollebekk @ Rough Trade (early)
Caught Leif Vollebekk last night. It was probably the 3rd or 4th time I’ve seen him including at least once at Newport Folk, and he’s one of those guys that always kind of catches me off guard with how good he is. He’s just got the full thing going on in his live show, great musician, great voice, great songs, great banter, infectious energy. Last night was interesting for a couple more reasons: the show was split into an early and a late set, which is not something you typically see at these kinds of shows, the show was seated, which I’ve never seen at Rough Trade before, they called the early show “sold out,” but that mostly meant that all the chairs were filled and maybe a dozen or so more were standing in the back/sides. I really dug this set-up and would be into more shows there like that. Also, there was a dang grand piano on stage, which I saw when the Bad Plus played there, but maybe no other times. It was also a solo show, which was cool and really fit Leif well. Overall, a great set. Included cool covers of Kendrick Lamarr and Prince.
Dan Weiss Group w/ Chris Potter, Adam Rogers, Nate Wood @ 55 Bar (early)
From there it was over the river to 55 Bar. Fun to go on a non-Thursday and this bill was sheeeeeeet, dynamite. When you see Nate Wood on the bill it’s fun to guess whether it will be on bass or drums, because he fucking kills it on both, but when he’s playing in a drummer’s band with no bassist, you kind of, you know, stupid me, just figure it’s going to be playing bass, right? NOPE… DOUBLE DRUMMERS, fuck-the-bass bitch!
So, that’s two drum kits, Rogers on guitar and one of the (maybe drop the “one of?”) best saxophonists in the city in the magic confines of 55 Bar. Heck yeah! They started at 8:15 and more or less played 45 minutes straight without stopping. Were there songs in there? Recognizable riffs? Maybe. Maybe not. Did it kick serious ass? It did, my friends, it did. Rhythms on rhythms as you might imagine, killer one-two punch from the drummers, not the overwhelming in-yo-face double drumming, but more like thoughtful, cohesive, melodic drumming, tribal, subtle dig-deep-into-your-ear drumming, neither one trying to overpower the other or the other musicians or the room at all. Didn’t even need earplugs for this. Rogers was playing these crazy scraping rhythms, like almost afrobeat style guitar playing, but also like somehow multiplied riffs, two different riffs at two different rhythms at the same time. For all that was going on around him, the elegant, powerful, rhapsodizing saxophone of Chris Potter, dude can play a long solo and keep it interesting and fascinating and beautiful the entire time, for all that sax and all that drums, and also for all his own solos, it was Rogers’ rhythm guitar playing that had me completely hypnotized. The music was like the sounds of inside a watch, different gears of varying sizes, clicking at their own rhythms, keeping each other in synch through delicately engineered teeth that just fit together perfectly. It was an improvised hour of straight music, but it had structure and a time to it. Dan Weiss is a treasure of a drummer, a hidden-in-plain-sight gem in a city overflowing with great drummers… he’s one of the best. You should go see him when next he plays, which is plenty.
Killer Tuesday night that ended right when it needed to.
26Jun19
Kikagaku Moyo @ Elsewhere Rooftop
Perfect night for killer music on a rooftop. Was thankful to score an afternoon ticket to this sold out show yesterday (thanks Pete!), always fun to go from not-going to yes-going in the blink of an eye. Especially for a show like this. First of all, the Elsewhere Rooftop is like my new favorite venue. It was comfortably sold out, you’re staring right at the Manhattan skyline and the sunset during the show with some character-adding Brooklyn industrial sights in between you and the views. The layout is nice, kind of tiki bar feel with a stage right where it should be, nice outdoor lighting scheme, somehow a laid back vibe and also a place to see a good rock show.
Been listening to Kikagaku Moyo for 5+ years and I remember the first time I saw them about 3 years ago it was the feeling of relief that they’d finally come to play the States from Japan and also wondering if it would be the only time. The show was at Sunnyvale, there were about 10–20 people there, my expectations were high and while the band was very good, I felt like the show could have been better. Fast forward to last night, now my 4th time seeing them, and the 3 years have been very good to KM: sold out crowd, second of quite a handful of shows in the NYC area alone for this year and the music was leaps and bounds better than that first show I saw. One thing I like about these guys compared to a lot of other in-the-psych-rock-vein bands I seriously dig, is that their sound has lots of different spaces to go into. This was on full display last night, at times they were noodling along in classic Garcia/Dead mode, even playing in the style of JRAD, at other points they were doing expansive, dense Maggot-Brain-esque stuff, there were deep grooves and Sabbath-style heavy rock outs… and in the middle of the set, they even sat down, one guy taking acoustic guitar, another on cello, to exercise their folk-wandering muscles as well. And the thing is, they kind of nailed it all. As much as your typical jamband is all over the place genre-wise, it’s rare for a band to hit so many styles and do them so well. That first show I saw, there were one or two sitar solos, the rest of the time the sitar dude was on keyboards. Last night that was inverted, sitar almost the entire time, lots of soloing, but also just as seasoning on the top of an already scrumptious meal of guitar/bass/drums. It’s also quite deft how they’re able to work in sitar without it feeling like a gimmick. These guys are from Japan, but there’s very little about the music that feels Japanese in any way, they are clearly students of American/Brit style classic rock/psychedelia/jam and channel it into their own style with artistry and flair. Beyond the music perhaps my favorite endearing thing that happened last night was when one of them did the old “how are you doing?” thing that every band does, but as they don’t really speak English all too well, it came out as quite simply “how everybody is?” and I think I want to put that on a t-shirt. They raged a perfect hour of music with the sun setting behind them, I can’t imagine a more idyllic set of music with the space, the weather and the band clearly at a creative and performance peak, although who knows what their ceiling is. It’s rare to hear an audience go hogwild demanding an encore when the band is quite clearly done, but the crowd wouldn’t relent and Kikagaku obliged, doing my favorite livemusic thing where they did “OK, fine, we’ll play one more song” and then played the best shit of the night for like 12 minutes, a glorious song off their first album (one of the few that featured sitar the first time I saw them), how do you not even plan on playing what might be your best song and then pull it out for an encore you weren’t even going to do? That one was the keeper to go home with, the one that will ensure that their return to Brooklyn (MHOW) in the fall will sell out and who knows what beyond that?
The Babe Rainbow @ Rough Trade (200th show of 2019)
From there it was an easy trip to Williamsburg to catch Babe Rainbow, from Australia, they’re in that similar “who knows when/how often they’ll come this way” and this was my first time seeing them after digging their albums for the past couple years. I never hear anyone talking about them and figured they were a bit under the radar, so I was kind of surprised that the show was sold out to a very enthusiastic, heavily dancing and into-it crowd who stuck around to the very end and, again, demanded an encore from a band that may not have been planning to play one (although this one may have just been a band being coy). Another killer show, a total dance party, these guys put on a psychedelic disco, playing grooves of all flavors. On stage was almost chaos, constant moving, a giant joint being passed around, a guy who was just filming the entire thing on an old Super 8 camera and a front man dressed like he was a flamenco dancer from an acid trip fever dream. Everything that the Kikagaku Moyo show wasn’t, this one was, like the two countries from which they came, both in the Pacific Ocean way far away, but couldn’t be more different… but scratched two of my itches quite well. Two killer shows. Sign me up for whenever they come back.
Full Bowery Presents review here.
27Jun19
Living in NYC it’s not the rarest thing to see two fantastic shows in a night. It definitely happens every once in a while that you get to see two of your absolute favorite bands/musicians play in the same evening. But last night I saw shows from two acts I’ve both seen over 50 times and I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. Two all-time-favorites who I’ve been seeing for over 15 years and, both remarkably but unsurprisingly, they both absolutely crushed their sets, still blowing me away all those years and shows later… it was a very good Thursday night.
The Bad Plus @ Jazz Standard (late set)
I’ve written so much about the Bad Plus, versions old and new, that I hesitate to even get into last night’s set, even more so to continue to compare 2.0 to 1.0 TBP, but I also can’t resist. I mean, I saw the original version dozens of times and for good reason — their music made me very, very happy, awe-inspiring, beautiful, unlike anything else. Call it “jazz” if you must, but… transcendent is the word I usually would use. Somehow the new version is even better, maybe? Different in wonderful ways. The Iverson-era TBP was like an Italian sports car, perfectly engineered, beautiful to look at, a thrill to drive (I imagine). Part machine, part work of art, but still something made up of different components — the engine, the transmission, the steering column, the frame, all put together in some aesthetic perfection. The new version is like a beautiful flower, an organic, growing, unfolding thing with a single DNA that somehow contains it all in one code. It’s a marvelous thing.
Last night they played a set almost entirely of songs off their latest album, Never Stop II, which I admittedly/shamefully don’t really know that well or at all really, and then maybe 2 older songs. Didn’t matter. In fact, it made me love the set even more. I was completely removed from any sense of nostalgia or preconceived notions of certain songs. I mean, I love so much of their material, I know it so well and it still astounds me, brings me to chills, occasional tears, but part of that reaction is the knowledge of the music, knowing what to expect and then the meeting or subversions of those expectations. Hearing new music, though, that’s the test, do they continue to bring goosebumps to my skin? That’s the thrill of improvisation right there, but it can be found in composition as well. I love it when bands jam out, but I also love listening to something from the studio that I’ve never heard before, that first time is the thing. What’s the reaction? What does it do? The Bad Plus brought me to my proverbial knees once again, didn’t matter what they played. They opened with a Reid Anderson song “Scenes,” starting slow and quiet with just Orrin Evans playing piano, so deliberate, so soft and pretty. His playing is so very natural, the petals of a flower unfolding because that’s just what they do. Bass and drums come in and it’s so quiet and slow that the word “lull” is appropriate: you close your eyes, you concentrate everything on listening, to hearing the notes and the drums and way things interact with each other, try to piece together what it is that makes this music so magical, and while you’re doing this, the more you try to concentrate on the music, the more the music takes over your consciousness and now, while fully intending to do the opposite, your mind is totally adrift, wandering from this thought to that thought, thinking about all these things that are not the music, because you don’t have to concentrate anymore, it’s there, it’s controlling you, it’s the drug in your bloodstream, the aroma in the wind, the oxygen in the air, and then, before you know it, the music is not slow and quiet, but tangled and big and loud, there’s so much sound that you couldn’t take it all in if you tried, 3 guys with no boundary between them, piano drums and bass all sewn into one thing and it’s overwhelming in the best way, in a fully orgasmic way, like whoah! that is the shit right there. And that was just the first song! It was about an hour of that, of music seeping into your brain, somehow turning electrical connections into intangible, ethereal, powerful magic. Evans’ “Commitment” was a rapid fire readthrough of several short stories in a row, unclear if there was any connection to each theme, but each plot was a surrealistic doozy. Dave King’s “Anthem for the Earnest” was one of the few “older” songs, another killer jaunt of rhythm and melody… and on and on, so many great moments of pure improvisation, so many moments where things build and build, a slight drizzle becomes a steady rain becomes an inundating downpour and it’s too late to do anything about it, you’re fucking soaked, and so you just look up at the sky and start laughing, because what a wonderful thing it can be. Sometimes it takes watching 3 guys in such extreme comfort operating at such a high level to realize that the previous iteration, while still one of my favorite things ever, wasn’t all there. The other thing is that they’ve phased out so much of the between-song dada banter. Just one dose of it before Anderson’s “Kerosene 2,” just a reminder that these guys are hilariously weird as well, that the humor is still there, lurking, maybe the reason for the profundity in the music, but maybe they’ve decided that they’re better off playing music instead of goofing off. If it means just one more song is played instead of talking, then who would complain? We know you’re funny and strange, but these times call for the music that can transport you off the planet for an hour or so, and that’s certainly what last night’s set did for me. The only question now is whether I make it back for one more set before they close up for this time around Sunday night. If I were you, I wouldn’t miss it.
Wayne Krantz, Kevin Scott, Cliff Almond @ 55 Bar (late set)
Man, they’re allll good, no doubt. But some are better than others and it takes a set like last night’s late one at 55 to remind you that there’s good, there’s great and there’s “holy shit, this is ridiculous!” Yes, Wayne & Co killed it last night. The comfort WK had with these guys was palpable, liquid, you could fill a glass with it and drink it up. Smiles throughout. And when Wayne’s in the comfort zone, he can do some fucked up shit with that guitar of his. That was last night, some of the more creative wowifying guitar playing I’ve seen in that room (i.e. ever/anywhere). They opened the set with “Once In A Lifetime” which bended out of the astral plane and didn’t come back. It was the second song, though, whatever that one is called, you know the one that goes {{insert air guitar riff here}}, that was where the musical gymnastics started, backflips and cartwheels and handsprings of guitar/bass/drums, Krantz inventing stop-drop-and-roll melodies out of thin air, I mean, what the fuck is even going on in that guy’s head? The whole set was masterful, literally watching three masters do their thing. It feels like you’re witnessing a game: how crazy can we get while still keeping shit funky? How far from the path can we go and still find our way back? How unrecognizable can we make “Back In Black” or “Another On Bites the Dust,” or “U Can’t Touch This,” a song that traced paths hyperbolic and elliptical through the room, it was here and then here, there, here, and then wherever, here a jam, there a jam, everywhere a jam-jam. Each foray felt like a truth or dare, an attempt at something unthinkable or a revelation of deep internal truths, or both.
The late night audience was so great, too. Lots of familiar faces and a bunch of people you could tell were told by someone they had to check this out, solo dudes scattered around the room, you could smell the connections in the brains frying as they tried to follow along. Then there were the randoms in off the street, the scene outside on Christopher St was a scene you might imagine with Pride Week in full swing and the Stonewall right next door and so occasionally someone would pop their head in or walk in and see what was going on… some lasted a song, some a couple minutes, one couple entered the room, took one glance at the chaotic scene inside, one listen to the sonic humidity filling the bar, looked at each other, shook their heads and walked right out. Hey, it’s not for everyone, but me?, I wouldn’t miss it.
30Jun19 Phish @ BB&T, Camden, NJ
My 2019 literally started at a Phish show. The six months between midnight on 1/1/2019 at PH at MSG and very-close-to-midnight on 6/30/2019 in Camden was the greatest livemusic stretch of my life, quite possibly never to be duplicated. 203 shows, exactly 300 sets of music in 181 days. ((WTF?!?)) I enjoyed the hell out of all of them in one way or another, including many, many, many jaw-dropping, chills-inducing, tearful, joyful, awe-inspiring, superfun, life-affirming moments along the way. Quantity plus quality to the utmost limits of my personal ability. That was a helluva half a year and, it seems, I somehow managed to save the best for the very end…
We had no plans to hit Phish on Sunday. Our plan was for 2 SPAC and 2 Fenway, but then push came to shove, looking more like just one at SPAC now and so when it seemed incredibly doable to head to Camden and back Sunday, not just doable but bordering on why the fuck not? we hopped in a car and followed the lines going south (Jersey), no tickets and no worries. Beautiful day, a smooth ride and free parking on the street and we were good to go. We figured we’d see if we could find something cheap on the lot, great and if not we’d grab lawn seats from the box office. We lollygagged a little bit too long as we waited for the line to shrink to hit the box office and go in and when we finally stepped through the gate I had a heart-dropping moment: they were already playing and I’m pretty sure they were playing one of my favorite songs and yes, they were and it was The fucking Curtain With, we scrambled up the stairs and were in position in a decent spot on the side of the lawn to catch the entire end section including the devastating Trey solo that gives me the chills every time. An amatuer mistake to miss any music of that show, but it would be the one and only mistake of the night.
The first set was a marvel of setlist construction and playing. The sound on the lawn was beyond pristine, we had so much room to dance that I took full advantage of the whole night, the temperature and humidity couldn’t have been better and we had a great view of the sunset over Philadelphia. The band was just playing at a very high level throughout and the setlist was not just one great old school semi-bustout after another, but somehow was a compelling narrative of the band’s styles in a very coherent order. Like sometimes they’re telling you a story but they’re all over the place and you get the gist of the anecdote, but you’re a little exhausted trying to follow the arc of the tale. Last night was the opposite, everything flowed naturally from one point to the next. We got every style of Trey in that first set, from his Lydian masterpieces in Curtain With and Reba, to the pretty shit in Fast Enough to the rapid-fire, how-many-notes-is-too-many-notes/there’s-no-such-thing-as-too-many-notes ridiculous in a crazy good and surprisingly-placed Buried Alive (good lord, that was the first indication that this was going to be a fucking show!) to the psychedelic funk of Camel Walk to the anthemic arena rock of Sample and on and on. The setlist was very early/mid-90’s and the band’s playing, their interaction and their energy matched that era quite nicely. I don’t think I could have drawn up a setlist quite as good as that one and then have them deliver on it. Dang! Also, a sentence just for the fact that they played me a goddamn Reba… my needs are simple, just play me a Reba and you’ve made a trip down to Camden worth it. This one was characteristically soaring and I got the chills as I do when the band is very good, when they’re feeling it, the notion that you are standing in a crowd of thousands of people having this amazing shared experience, it’s why you go to the show, why the stream will never suffice, you’re enjoying this collective thing but the band is very much playing in those moments, very much playing just. for. you. That’s the magic of this band, the reason why you go dozens or hundreds of times, why you say fuck it, let’s go to Camden on a Sunday, the way they reach out through the summer air and grab you, make your body move in ways 45-year-old bodies shouldn’t move on a patch of grass in Camden, NJ of all fucking places, turn that patch of grass into your own little personal heaven for 5, 8, 10, 20 minutes at a time. That was a great first set.
I’ve been to a few of “the show where they play a lot of songs they haven’t played in a while in the first set”’s before and they’re a blast of whoa! and sick! and plenty of smiles and high-fives. But it seems that a lot of times they kind of expend all the adrenaline in the first set and then flutter around like a half-inflated balloon in the second. I remember that show in Syracuse a couple summers ago as being strongly in this category. So, I was very curious as I caught my breath during setbreak, would they match the first set ease-my-old-aching-bones hot tub soak with second set scalding, or would the hot water heater crap out and leave us with something lukewarm?
Well, without ruining the suspense, the second set may have been even better than the first. They opened with Mr Completely, my first time seeing this played by Phish, and it proved to be an excellent vehicle for jamming by a band that was clearly in a unmissable-Sunday-show zone. If the first set had been an everything-Trey-can-do kind of showcase, the incredible variety of skills of the band’s frontman leading the charge, the second set was the same for the entire band, delivering jams and peaks that showed off all their different facets, again in a very point A-to-point-B fashion. I mean, what the band did in this Mr Completely jam was so ridiculously good and yet so par for the course, that I had to remind myself throughout that not all bands can do what they were doing. That no bands can do what they were doing. Basically they wrote a fantastic ambient electronica piece and then followed that up right after by writing a seriously raging Led Zeppelin riff… on the spot, without blinking an eye. Like here was this beautiful, textured thing, swirling, lose-your-mind kind of piece that any bedroom musician would kill to write after weeks of trying and they just kind of aw shucks this piece out in real time, and then went directly into a raging rock riff that would have been the centerpiece to any classic rock album of the mid-70’s, like it was no big thing. That latter jam just built and moved to one of those classic latter day ecstatic bliss peaks and it was really fucking good. This transitioned into 20 Years Later and I think there was a hesitancy in the crowd, like, is this where the show goes off the rails? but I just had a feeling about this one and 20 minutes later, I think that was confirmed. They rocked the song portion and then easily moved into a jam that kept morphing and morphing. Here it seemed the band really gelled as a 4-man-unit, I thought Mike took control for most of the second set, defining the boundary conditions of the jams and the band following along before he moved it somewhere else. He masterfully built this one up a winding path through the woods, the band taking a rigorous hike, slight sweat, a few stops to check out the fauna and flora, but deeper and deeper into the woods they went. It’s weird how the 20-minute threshold is somehow a thing with this band, but it is also more than just symbolic, in the past it might have meant the band was meandering for minutes on end, struggling to find a grip or a foothold for the improvisation… but these days it almost exclusively means the opposite, it means they haven’t just found one foothold, they’ve charted a path up the mountain and kind of lose themselves in the moment, collectively climbing, climbing, climbing. It’s weird to look at the totality of last night’s show and realize that they highlight was undoubtedly a 10–15-minute stretch of Twenty Years Later, but there you go… that’s why you go.
At this point, the show was already a winner, a killer first set that matched song selection with playing and two fantastic jams to open up the second set. There’s really little more you need, but they continued with cool old school setlist choices (BBFCFM, Makisupa) some goofiness, another great jam in the Tweezer, which was concise in an incendiary way, the opposite of a 20-minute thing, this was a fiery flash of Phish excellence, the kind of Tweezer’s you’d hear in 92 or 93. Trey opened the jam with a brilliant little riff, once again real-time composition that is just too amazing to consider, but then this melody that he’s constructed, he’s put it together and then he starts taking it apart, breaking off pieces and tweaking and the band picks up on this bit or that and then Gordon charges ahead with the whole thing and POWPOWPOW! I loved that Tweezer. The backside was a very short but absolutely stunning bit of quiet, ambient improv that I was ready to crawl into and make a little nest inside. It was so good and so short and maybe it was good because it was short, a few seconds of meditative bliss in the middle of a chaotic world, a small piece of beauty to return to. Like I said, all the powers of Phish on display last night.
The show was good enough to deserve two set closers, both raging raging rage, Chalkdust is a great way to end a show like this and the tacked-on Suzy G. felt superfluous at that point, but who’s complaining? You think the band was feeling it? Three songs in the encore, each more surprising than the last. Punch You in the Eye hadn’t appeared in an encore in over 20 years according to my research assistant and they kind of nailed a song they don’t always nail. That was fun. Then What’s the Use? which has never appeared in an encore and man, that song is made or not made by how the audience lets the band find its inner solitude and last night I thought was as good as I’ve heard since Magnaball, the crowd just soaking in that freakin show they had just been treated to, letting it sink in while the band explored the empty spaces in the show and all the while I’m sitting there, eyes closed, thinking hard on the whole thing, just mesmerized by the profundity of this band and the place they’ve had in my life and just knowing knowing that there was a Tweezer Reprise coming and then… JULIUS? What’s the use? What about what the fuck? I was surprised they were going to play that before Reprise, but I was convinced it was coming and then it didn’t come and I realized how much I don’t like Julius and thought about how much that show needed to end with a Reprise, a show that could have started with Curtain and ended with Reprise with a Reba and all the rest of it in between and it didn’t, so close to perfection, but, how could I complain after that? Maybe next time.
