When Phish announced the dates for their first tour in five years I was extremely excited to see that the shows lined up really well with my schedule. My plan
Old Crow Medicine Show, Dave Rawlings Machine, The Felice Brothers and Justin Townes Earle team up for The Big Surprise Tour. READ ON for more info on what’s sure to be an amazing night of music…
At first I didn’t think I was at the right place. I mean, I had pulled up in front of the brick faced loading docks across the street from a local microbrewery. The store front in front of me had an a-frame sign, hand painted on the sidewalk. My fender was within inches of it. It read “Texas Hold-em. Totally licensed and legal”. There were metal, portable stairs on wheels locked in place against the bricks, allowing access to each of the loading docks. There was a chain link fence separating the docks, effectively locking in the seven port-a-johns that were placed off to one side, the fence surrounding them, I’m sure, for security reasons. Also inside the chain link were about five or six old couches. That must be the designated smoking/peeing section.
Up the metal stairs and inside the first door I found a mineral and gem show, free samples of vegan, coconut ice cream and the assorted families normally associated with mineral shows and free samples of vegan, coconut ice cream. There were nylon patterns stretched wall to wall, floor to ceiling in red and black that hid the industrial warehouse trappings against the red brick walls. There was free water refillable from the five gallon jug of ice water the staff drove themselves crazy replenishing (a hearty Thank You to the girl with the line up the back of her stockings). There was the loud, throb of dance music beats coming from the other side of one of the nylon covered brick walls, loud enough so that the tie dyed and barefoot children of the gem and mineral-ists wore ear plugs, the infants, headphones.
What there wasn’t was anyone at the door asking for tickets or money. Tonight’s show was put on gratis by the benevolent folks over at Lightworker Nonprofit Productions. LWNP is the brain child of Portlander Jake Weaver. Their mission is simple: “Lightworker Nonprofit Productions exists to provide communities across the country, exposure to multiple levels of artistic expression at no financial cost. Our goal is to keep ticket prices FREE to ensure that people of all income levels can attend our events”. Weaver adds, “By producing concerts and related events, with many different types of art being displayed at once, people can experience this expression, become more enriched, and bring that energy back into their community.” READ ON for more from A.J. about EOTO & Ozric’s show…
The second batch of expanded remastered cd’s of The Replacements is as much of a labor of love as the first four. The exhaustive liner notes and the meticulous detail former manager Peter Jesperson attributes to the bonus tracks (which sometimes double the number of cuts on a given cd) depict a dramatic backdrop to music that is wholly gripping on its own terms. Truth be told, the casual music lover who discovers The ‘Mats via these releases, not knowing their history, might very well come away convinced this Minnesota quartet is one of the finest rock and roll bands America’s produced in the last twenty years…or perhaps longer!
Coming off the most accessible album of their career, Rather Ripped, the 16th full length recording from Sonic Youth is aptly named, The Eternal. They have returned to odd timing’s clanging guitars and poetic lyrical workouts, however not all the mainstream sheen is worn away.
Former Nirvana bassist, Krist Novoselic, has announced that he is running for public office to protest Washington state’s election methods. Novoselic filed papers Wednesday (June 3) to run for county
Happy Sunday from all of us here at HT! This is a quick reminder that it’s easy to have your finger on the digital pulse of what’s going on tonight
For me, this was the one – a serious, relentlessly energetic Phish concert that rollicked for more than three hours and drew generously on the vibes created by a happy crowd, a gorgeously temperate New England evening, and the assuredness of having spent a week on the road, working out kinks, getting sea legs back, remembering to enjoy one another’s myself onstage.
[All photos by Jeremy Gordon from 6/5]
All four of our beloved Phishermen delivered the goods, and while we’re still far from the point where they feel comfortable (excitable?) enough to take jams deep into the blurry, whirry cosmos, I haven’t seen or heard a better full-length expression of the fairly conservative, songs-first, relax-and-do-your-job well Phish 3.0 yet than what we witnessed at Mansfield last night. The boys were on. They had it. They reined things in where, say, 10 years ago they might have been an exercise in transcendent improvisation, or five years ago they might have been a frayed, sloppy trainwreck, but the crowd was better for it, the vibe was better for it, and the band, well, it’s safe to say it feels like Phish again. “Long live the Phish!” howled a goofy bobber in a Makisupa Police Academy t-shirt, seconds after Phish put the wraps on his apparel’s titular song.
All around, the setlists have been a little oddly paced in the week of shows we’ve seen so far, but maybe that’s a subtle suggestion to throw out old ideas about how a Phish show’s machinery should be oiled. They didn’t exactly lose anybody by opening with a new song (Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan — crisply rendered, if no great shakes) and a relative obscurity from Undermind, the cool, even-keel Nothing. Quite the opposite; when the groovy gallop of Back On the Train set in and had the whole place bobbing along like synchronized pogo, the band had already hit its stride, not yet even a half hour into the first set. From there came balanced moments of familiarity that were briefly, wonderfully toppled with aggressive jamming: a ripping, groovalicious Gotta Jibboo tempered by Page’s calming croon in Lawn Boy, for example, or a Trey solo nugget (Let Me Lie) splayed against Taste; or the laid back snacking of that Makisupa followed by a deceptively easygoing, then full-forced hungry Prince Caspian. Trey had already torched the midsection of Jibboo but it was here where he veered from note-y pointillism to starry-eyed, psychedelic abandon. Simply. Fucking. Gorgeous.
READ ON for more from Chad on last night’s Phish show…
Jeremy Gordon was on hand to shoot night three of Jones Beach…
