Not long after its ferocious East Coast debut in the fall of 2000, the Haynes, Herring, Barraco and Molo line-up of Phil and Friends returned to the road for a series of West Coast dates, including a pair in Denver, a pair in Portland and a set of four in San Francisco in 2001. And immediately the band was even better than before. They took all the raw power and excitement of those initial shows and harnessed it in the way only a collective of truly masterful musicians could, cultivating it to produce longer, far more textured and subtle music that truly traveled to new and wondrous places.
The increased length was crucial, allowing the ensemble to explore in a profoundly open-ended manner, to follow flights of fancy or darker urges or both plus any number of other moods. Many of the opening jams and segues, not to mention internal jams in tunes like Bird Song, featured two, three, even four distinct themes, creating a shifting psychedelic tide that made every night even more unique, profoundly individual, than just a varied set list.
The Jam > Bird Song that opens only the second date of 2001 clocks in at 30 minutes (although to be fair, Derek Trucks was in the mix that night, and he’s always quick to push the envelope). But that kind of number quickly became common place; the expansiveness was simply the way the band did business. In Portland there’s a 45 minute Jam > Scarlet Begonias > Uncle John’s Band and a 20 plus minute Passenger, not to mention an hour and ten minute Dark Star > Eyes > Dark Star > Low Spark the next night.
READ ON for more from Dan on Year Two of the PLQ…
