2008

There are nights that change your life that you are conscious of as they are happening. Some you realize the next day or a few days later. Looking back, April 18, 1994 was a night that my life changed forever and it took me 14 years to realize just how important it was. It’s the day I walked out of my dorm room down South College Avenue and into the Bob Carpenter Center on the campus of the University of Delaware for my first Phish show.

Some dude, fittingly named Jimmy, that lived on my floor literally walked down the hall handing out tickets to anyone that wanted one and in a giant pack, we were off. At that point, I knew as much about Phish as your average Northeast Corridor college student in 1994 – the drummer wore a dress and played a vacuum, they were sort of like the Grateful Dead but I wasn’t sure how and they had a catchy song called Bouncing Around the Room. But the legend of their concerts had already begun to spread and I knew if nothing else, it was a great chance to get wasted with a lot of other people.

It turned out to be a fuck of a lot more than that.

On paper, my first show boasted your typical 1994 setlist. There were some oddities – a Mike’s Song with no Weekapaug Groove, a dedication of Ya Mar by Trey to his now wife Sue. But the music was mindblowing to a guy who had never heard it before. The tone that Trey squeezed out of that guitar, the jazzy way Page would insert himself into the mix, Gordon thumping away in his bright green jumpsuit, and that guy in the dress behind the kit holding it together with precision and power. And the overall combination of humor and seriously that always underlined Phish’s approach to performing. I can still close my eyes and see my view of the stage that night. I recall standing there during 2001 with the lights going and the music rocking and thinking I was seeing something special. I remember the bizarreness of My Friend My Friend and the rocking cover of Good Times Bad Times. I remember almost everything about that night.

READ ON for more of Luke’s thoughts on the return of the Phish…

A few months back we gave you the heads up about Jack White and Alicia Keys teaming up to record a duet for the theme song of the new James

Can I borrow five bucks? No, don’t laugh, I’m serious. I just wasted a ton of hard-earned money purchasing this great little mom-and-pop operation called AIG. Well, technically it was the government who wasted my money for me, even though I didn’t ask them to.

But I’m sure things will work out for me in the end. I mean, I now am a co-owner of the largest insurance company in the world, and I’m confident that I can help turn things around and make us some cash. I just need to make sure the other 301,139,946 co-owners are on board with me.

So that five bucks we talked about, do you think I can have it by lunchtime? I hear McDonald’s has added three new items to the Dollar Menu.

In all seriousness though, the mood around here (and by here I mean the United States) has gotten a little too sobering for me. Some people are even predicting the end of the world is nigh, citing the stock market crash, natural disasters like the earthquake in China and Hurricane Ike, and the fact that the Cubs are favored to win the World Series.

I understand that we’re in a fiscal crisis and all, and we’re on the cusp of potentially voting a dinosaur and a woman who doesn’t believe in dinosaurs into the highest office in the land in a few months, but c’mon America – lighten up! Things could be much worse – at least you’re not Detroit. Oh wait, Detroit is a part of America. Scratch that.

But I’m not here to scare you even further into hibernation this winter. I’m here to help you survive this recession economy with handy money saving tips, like this one from The All For Nots:

READ ON for the conclusion of Uncensored Thursdays…

We all know about Mondays, right? The most dreaded of the days is Monday. Jim Davis has sent kids to college on the royalties he’s earned from his Garfield cartoons related to the first workday of the week. I Don’t Like Mondays, the dramatic retelling of true events set to a back beat provided by The Boomtown Rats, professes to wanting to “Shoot the whole world down” instead of facing another Monday in the classroom. Let’s face it, Monday’s reputation sucks, no question. Why, when people are having a bad day in general, they are often said to be having a bad case of “the Mondays”.

But not THIS Monday. This Monday was one I had looked forward to for weeks. This Monday was when Back Door Slam was coming to town. Not only were they playing the relatively intimate confines of Berbati’s Pan (I last saw the band at Bonnaroo with approximately 10-20,000 festival goers) but I was going to get to witness a set at the legendary KINK Live Performance Lounge, capacity; about forty. This was the best case of the Mondays I ever had.

Before the band came out of the green room, I spied guitarist Davy Knowles wiping blood off his turquoise Fender Strat. Apparently, he had gotten a little carried away at the end of the previous evening’s performance in Denver and sliced a bit of finger during the encore. Clean instrument in hand, the threesome played a forty minute set of classic blues (John Hiatt’s Riding With The King) and newer songs they have been working on for the follow up to their debut album, Come Home. BDS (Knowles, Adam Jones on bass and Ross Doyle on drums) played with every bit as much passion in that intimate setting at noon as they did in Tennessee last June.

READ ON for more of A.J.’s Back Door Slam @ Berbati’s Pan review…

As another Rocktober starts to pick up steam, plenty of New York City jamfans are looking forward to next week when Umphrey’s McGee hits the Big Apple for the MoogFest