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 forty-eighth of hopefully 52 posts…
25Nov19 Joe Russo’s Almost Dead @ Brooklyn Bowl
The return of the might JRAD to the Bowl, the triumphant march of Scott Metzger through the end of November, the knight-errant on one more quest, slaying another dragon or two along the way.
This was, as expected, another very sold out night at the Bowl, but the energy was a lot different than the very sold out Billy Strings show. A little more restless, a little more party-ready, particularly for a Monday. To be truthful, I don’t love going to the Bowl and especially when it’s very sold out, but I’ve found that the perch at the top of the stairs in the back of the room affords great views, good sound, a little room to move around and a good vantage to catch a hug with friends as they make their way to the bar or bathroom. That’s where I was to take in this show. For those that don’t know, this was a benefit for Headcount which meant that a) tickets were a bit more expensive than I might have paid to see these guys otherwise and b) the setlist was determined by vote. It’s not clear to me exactly how it worked, but it certainly felt like they just played the top songs in order, the more voted-upon songs coming later in the night. I could be wrong, they may have just taken those songs and put them in an order Joe thought was best, but there was some weird decisions in there that make me think it was just in order. Needless to say, the masses chose a pretty darn good setlist, I have no bones to pick with the songs and got to hear at least 3 of the ones I selected.
That being said, I have to say this was not my favorite Almost Dead show. There were long stretches, particularly in the first set, where things just felt off to me, to the point where I started to consider whether it was one of my least favorite of the nearly 40 JRAD shows I’ve seen. They came out of the gate heavy with Althea and despite a rager first-of-many Bowl-burner solos from Metzger. I dunno, was I the only one who thought there was a lot of messiness in the first half of the set. It really struck me during the Eleven. I spent some time trying to figure out where the breakdown was and finally concluded that Russo just was not as tight on the rhythms as he usually is and that both he and Hamilton were on their own islands of whatever. Kind of disappointing on one hand. On the other hand, I guess it didn’t really matter. The energy was blistering and the audience’s reaction and constant explosions of appreciation papered over the deficiencies. And also, like, it’s kind of interesting to see the band get discordant and off a little bit. Part of it may have been a reflection of the last week or two of music, the sublime perfection of Infinite Jets and Bill Frisell et al. It’s also been a while since my last JRAD and I was once again immediately struck by the severe contrasts between Metzger’s patient, unique craftsmanship, someone who really makes a piece of art every time he solos and what I call Tom Hamilton’s HULK SMASH style. I thought the best parts of the opening sections were when Dave Dreiwitz led things through cool meandering quiet(er) jams, pulling in the band, typically working with Marco and then sort of acting like a very strong magnet, the rest of the players irresistibly pulled south-pole-to-north pole towards Dave’s playing. There was no doubt to me that Dave was the MVP of the night, everything that was special about the show flowed from Dave Dreiwitz’s bass playing. At the end of the night when Joe introduced the band, I think he said “and Dave Dreiwitz on bass… go fucking vote!’ but I heard it as “Dave Dreiwitz on bass, the fucking GOAT.” And ain’t that the truth.
Anyway, that’s a bit of criticism about the show and there were moments in the second set where I had a strong get it together, gents! thought or two running through my mind. But when they were good, they were so fucking good, it didn’t really matter. The highlight of the night was a superlative Ruben and Cherise >> Eyes of the World >> In Memory of Elizabeth Reed. Ruben & Cherise and Liz Reed were my top two votes, but I had no idea how right I’d be about picking them. This little song suite worked about as perfectly as Help > Slip > Franklin’s, each individually amazing, the segues between them being almost too perfect to believe, like holyfuck the transitions between Ruben and Eyes and Eyes and Liz Reed were almost inhumanly perfect, conceived by a higher power and channeled through Russo & Co. So, like each song killed it, they moved from one to the other in amazing fashion, but on top of that, they just fit together perfectly, themes weaving from one to the other, the R&C coda riff tying it all together like it was predestined to be that way. I think that little triplet is one of the best things I’ve ever seen JRAD do. I don’t listen to any of their shows, like, ever, but I’m happy to ignorantly pronounce it “PEAK JRAD” and let you argue otherwise. I’ll let you listen to find out just how they crushed it, how Joe locked in from one to the other, how Scott, absorbing all the awesome of his last few crazy weeks, turned out a performance for the ages, how Marco keyed in on just the right moments to add some grandiosity to the suite, how Dave behind-the-curtain Wizard-of-Oz’d the whole damn thing, just one-man-showing those transitions like the unsung hero he is. I mean… fuckingwow! WOW! WOW!!!
The second set also took a little while to get rolling, I thought, but once they hit Dark Star and that Dark Star > full Terrapin > Shakedown > Throwing Stones. That was, as the kids say, wild. Wild, wild stuff. It’s kind of crazy that Metzger didn’t sing one song until the very, very end of the night (I mean, I get it, we love Jerry songs), but it also was sort of the way it had to happen. The build up to Throwing Stones, the one everyone in the room knew was coming, was an epic onslaught of jamming. The band really seemed to finally gel during this stretch and entered do-no-wrong territory, very comfortable with just exploring and getting out there. The Ruben & Cherise melody twinkling its way through this monster section only tied together the show in grand fashion. I heard some moaning at the length of the Terrapin extended suite, but I, personally, love it (my 3rd vote that got played), Joe was totes bonkers throughout this section and the whole Dark Star as open-ended jam vehicle > Terrapin as prog-orchestral complexity > Shakedown as this-room-ready-to-party booty-shake (side note: learn to woo! properly, people!) > Throwing Stones as “there are many Dead cover bands, there is only one Almost Dead” was chef’s kiss awesome, exactly how a JRAD show back in their home base should have peaked. The Throwing Stones was particularly gargantuan, spiraling out 3 distinct jams between verses. A rock rager, a type-II we’re-going-on-a-quest journey that sort of went off the page and onto the next in what-a-fucking-band fashion and then a jam that somehow morphed quite perfectly into an Another Brick in the Wall jam, the kind of thing that few bands can do, that few bands can make feel natural and planned while being 100% spontaneous. Fuck yeah, that was fun. All that and for a good cause, too? Nice.
Not sure the show convinced me that it’s worth it for me to shell out and schlep to the Cap in the winter, we’ll see if I can convince myself, but I’m very glad I hit this one.
26Nov19
Freaksgiving with Gitkin @ Threes Brewing
Maybe it’s a little weird to review a show you booked, but no one said these were objective in any way, so…
The third Freaksgiving featured the same band as last year, Brian J’s Gitkin. The band has a unique twist on a familiar array of world sounds, combining elements of cumbia and tuareg and middle eastern and more into a single, singular music. It’s groovy as fuck and the band was really dialed in last night in the small room at Threes, which was comfortably packed with Freaks looking to boogie. They featured a few new songs, including one with a guest vocalist, and even extended a few of the older ones with a few breakdowns and some killer percussion interludes. There’s a lot of flavor once you bite into their mix-of-spices dishes, but mostly it’s just a really fun funk party, perfect for the occasion and the room. They played a short set which very much felt like a warm-up set, getting people loose and accustomed to the band’s style and energy. The second set was about 45 minutes of pure boogie. I’ve seen these guys 3 or 4 times and that was easily the best I’ve heard them, everything seemed to click, the room/audience/band/sound nexus was filled with serious warmth and groove. There’s something beautiful about being in a room filled with awesome people, each one of ’em letting their freak flag fly. Freaksgiving indeed.
Biondo Beat @ Mama Tried
The show ended at 11 and the spirits were definitely of where-to-next? variety. @ferdmania made the executive decision: there was music at Mama Tried in Sunset Park, the loose caravan dispersed and reconvened at this tiny, nondescript bar in a wait, where are we? spot on 3rd Ave. There’s music going on here? Yes, yes there was. I don’t know who was more surprised when the crowd inside the bar tripled in strength, the people already there, the people arriving to some depth-of-groove music or the musicians who suddenly had a 3/4-full bar filled with people whose dancing feet were still very much in the mood.
The band was a full-improvising funk machine, led by Eric Biondo, who is the kind of guy that’s easy to find in all sorts of projects (a stint in Antibalas, natch) if you know where to look. The kind of guy that thankfully grows on trees in NYC, where if you see him/her in the band, you know it’s going to be worthwhile. This band fit the show-after-show bill perfectly… Biondo playing keys and percussion and occasionally trumpet, joined by bass, guitar, drums and a flute player… and then later by Paula on baritone sax who is Rev Vince’s right-hand-woman in the Love Choir among many other she’s in this appearances around town. The band would find a groove and then just go with it. This wasn’t loose exploratory improv, it was form the pocket, hang in the pocket, the pocket is good, embrace the pocket kind of shit where a different kind of magic happens. The second “piece” they played was quite remarkable, the flute player riding the rhythms to some real fanciful melodies, enchanting riffs that bordered on dark. The baritone swapped places with the flute halfway through and brought things even deeper.
We left at the break, but what a find that was! The city never ceases to amaze me and no matter how many clubs or bars or performances spaces get priced out of existence, the music here, like a creature in Jurassic Park will find a way, even if it means getting pushed to strange corners of the outer boroughs. If you look hard enough, you’ll find some awesome shit. And, as is often the case, even when you’re not looking all that hard, if you’re with the right crew, the music will find you. As Freaky a night of music to end a ridiculous month of livemusic’n. A break for Thanksgiving and then we’ll finish the year strong.
1Dec19 Phish @ Nassau Colesium
I’ve seen Phish a gazillion times and while there is some comfort in the repetition of musical themes and motifs, of a certain flow and energy between the band and the crowd, the ritual of the actual just going and being there, the true joy is in the things that are different every time out. This Sunday night show had a little bit of both the expected and the uniquely strange to make it an averagely enjoyable PH show. Perhaps the most interestingly unique thing about the show is how close it was to my house. I’d have to go back to 2003 when I was living in New Jersey and went to E. Rutherford to see the band to find a Phish concert that was so close to where I call home. Transit to and from the venue was about half the time that I usually take to get to a show on a normal night out for me (of which, you are of course aware, there are many in a given week/month/year), so not only was it a rare not-a-schlep to see Phish, it was actually an even rarer easy-ride to see a concert period. It seems like a simple, dumb thing, but the lack of effort to get to the show paired with the maybe-I-see-too-much regularity that I travel further to see 45 minutes of one-off transient music, made the Phish show feel a little extra, I dunno, mundane, like, not quite the special thing a Phish show should be. The fact that it was on a Sunday night after Thanksgiving, squeezed between a long trip for the holiday and another trip for work, made it feel even more less-special in some way. On the other end of the spectrum, yesterday would have been my dad’s 70th birthday; he grew up very close to the Colesium and, while not even remotely a PH fan, he somewhat inadvertently formed so much of my musical identity and certainly got that I got it, that I couldn’t help but think of him often during the show… a show that featured enough song selections for moments of such reflection. So, that was my energy going into the show (not to mention my comically awful seats, particularly in the first set).
The show opened with Ghost, a perfectly excellent way for a show to open and I was definitely feeling the ghosts of neddyo past, present and future scurrying around the venue. Maybe I was projecting those ghosts, but this version had very high fall-97 vibes for me. Certainly not of the caliber of the Island Tour version, but the band just had a very this-is-easy thing going on, the energy of a middle-aged dude who has figured out who he is and that he is totally comfortable with that… and when a dude like that walks down the street, that comfort emanates like rays from the sun and everyone gets to bask. Despite some getting-settled-in-my-space first-song doings, I was absolutely basking in a super enjoyable Ghost to open the show. I think the tone was set there for a really great first set. First sets can be great for many reasons: an unexpected signature jam, some very cool bustouts, or a round-robin of tour debuts, amongst others. Last night’s show had a sort of casserole of good things about it with a no-weak-links setlist, some moderate, but super-cool bustouts (no one is complaining about getting TMWSIY and Cool It Down in the same set last night, are they?) and some legit jams, like that great opening Ghost and a late-set excursion in Tube. The set was elevated to great status, though, because of a host of “smaller” moments, short jams that were scattered throughout. The common thread, to my ear, was the playing of Mike Gordon and Page McConnell, who controlled the energy in the first set and, really, the whole show. While Trey was his usual average-great, there were no moments in the show last night where I was blown away by what he was doing. Rather, I was continually zeroed in on the keys and bass and how they corralled Trey’s somewhat aimless playing into some truly great stuff. Each song felt like a new room with four doors in it and when Trey was left to choose which door to go out, he seemed to walk into a murky darkness. Page and/or Mike (typically they seemed to work together) seemed to get ahead of him, open the door and guide the jams to some cool spaces. A moment in the Wedge when Page played a quick riff that Fishman picked up on, Trey following, leading to a cool little interplay; a spaced-out darkfunk in Timber with Mike pushing and pulling the narrative like taffy, Trey eager to bit into the confection; the beautiful middle of Roggae with Gordon somehow anticipating and following Trey at the same time, a sherpa through the foothills, making sure each step of guitar was the right one towards the summit. The first set was filled with moments that don’t make the headline, but that was what made it so strong to me. I’m a bit of a Character Zero apologist, so I thought it was an appropriate closer for the set, but found it to be somewhat-hilariously bad, a song that exists solely for Trey to hit his arena-jizz peak never really hit that peak proper. That to me was the surest bet that Trey was having an off night. What’s amazing to me is that Trey not at his absolute best still yielded such a good first set… just goes to show how well the other three were playing. I’d love to hear that first set with Trey’s guitar removed.
As such, the second set was fun in that it provided little down time. The setlist was again, superb and the flow was actually pretty good. If jams couldn’t find their traction, the band was right to move on. Nothing felt ripcorded to me, it’s just that the natural end for a lot of the improv came quicker than some long-jam enthusiasts probably would prefer. This was a classic fun-in-person/nothing-stands-out second set. A set made for fans to just boogie to some of Phish’s best jam vehicles played average-great well. Everything’s Right took a quick turn out of the verses into a dark groove and that was sort of the way each song went. Song > quick left turn > Trey poking here and there > Page and/or Mike doing the yeoman’s work finding the right direction for the jamming > Trey going along for a bit, losing steam > segue into the next song. I don’t listen back to shows after the fact, but I imagine this one is best left to the memory of how much fun it is to see Phish indoors in December. To watch a band that is so freakin’ good that even their freakin’-awesome average shows are as good as anything you can see these days. I loved the segue into Cities, the way it didn’t quite work — it sounded like Cities mixed with the rhythm and key of NICU to me — and how the band was caught halfway between trying to get right on track and sticking with the weirdo not-quite-right groove they were in, a little more calypso and a little darker than usual. Another version of Phish from another tour or another year might have let such a thing derail the set completely, last night it was quite the opposite. The Carini that came out of it felt like exactly the right choice. I kind of laugh to myself when there’s this collective groan at the start of Twenty Years Later — I think the last two versions I heard were show highlights. Yes, the lyrics are groan-worthy, that’s true of nearly every (non-Halloween) PH song written in the past 5 years (the second set featured no fewer than 3 of them), but the way the energy of this song changes with that end riff, from this rock song to this depth-descending riffer is pretty great and I love the band finding new ways to explore in that space. Last night’s was great, I thought, a more focused part of the second set, unsurprisingly because Gordon and McConnell willed it to some interesting space, at one point pulling on the controls completely, somehow pulling Trey out of an overcharged nosedive into a rather lovely glide through the stratosphere. That was some good stuff. The Numberline > SANTOS felt earned at that point, a band that was more interesting making art in short 2–3 minute spurts in some of their songier songs… for one night at least. Lord help me, but if every second set opened Everything’s Right and ended Numberline/SANTOS, I think I’d be OK with that.
As far as ghosts go, the fact that they summoned the Island Tour by playing both Carini and then Roses Are Free in the encore, two songs played superlatively well in the same show back in April of 1998, seems like a bit of fate-tempting to me. Was it a purposeful choice to play both of those or was it just a random coincidence? Probably the latter. They’ll never match those versions, but a Roses Are Free > Slave encore made me laugh out loud. They don’t jam Roses no more, but damn, it’s cool to hear and it gets the crowd going, rightly so. When they segued into Slave to the Traffic Light, I literally laughed out loud. Even at its worst, there are few better ways to end a night with Phish than Slave and this was definitely a no worse than replacement-over-average version. Thank goodness for Page and Mike, slowly and methodically laying down the track for Trey to cruise over, building to those quintessentially Trey peaks, giving me a chance to close my eyes and chase a few more ghosts before my uncharacteristically short drive home.
