2011

After enduring a round-trip total of 28 hours in a Rav4 and extreme sunburn, I managed to survive the 2nd annual Hangout Music Festival on the beaches of Gulf Shores, AL. The sold-out festival featured three days of incendiary music, including over 60 acts right on the Gulf Coast. Festival headliners included Paul Simon, Foo Fighters and Widespread Panic, and those were not even the weekend’s best sets.

Gulf Shores was the epitome of a tacky tourist town; think Myrtle Beach crossed with Wisconsin Dells, with an added pinch of southern hospitality. The main strip, Highway 59, was lined with attractions including over the top souvenir shops, an amusement park (featuring the Wild Woody go-cart track, definitely worth the ride), bold colored beach houses and neon-lit restaurants including oyster bars and shrimp shacks.

The festival itself was set on the beach, roughly 25 feet from the coast. Everyday the sun beamed down from cloudless skies, incinerating the flesh of thousands of scantily clad fans. Stumbling through sand, insane music fans and sweaty southerners while watching the likes of My Morning Jacket, the Flaming Lips and Ween made the Hangout Festival a priceless experience. When the overabundance of skin and scorching temperatures became too much, all one had to do was walk a block out of the festival grounds, and take a dip in the ocean. I was honored to represent Hidden Track in witnessing all the glory the Hangout Festival had to offer.

Day 1: Easy Star All-Stars, Umphrey’s McGee, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, My Morning Jacket

Hangout officially kicked off Friday May 20 to 85 degree heat and blazing sunny skies. I started my experience with some mid-afternoon, soul soothing dub-reggae by the Easy Star All-Stars (ESA). The seven-piece collective are best known for their dub renditions of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (Dub Side of the Moon), Radiohead’s OK Computer (Radiodread) and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band). ESA heated the afternoon with signature Dub Side and Radiodread selections. They also performed original songs off their April 2011 release First Light, the collective’s first full-length album of original songs.

• Hangout Music Festival – Day One Recordings: My Morning Jacket, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Umphrey’s McGee, Widespread Panic and Warren Haynes Band

READ ON for more on the first day of the Hangout Festival…

For a band like Phish, who rely so much on onstage chemistry, the first show of a tour is rarely if ever the best show of the run. Now, that is not to say there are not gems to be had. If you poke around there is a takeaway moment from practically every Phish show ever played. With that in mind, we put together this list of 10 memorable musical moments from past tour openers, not just any tour openers, but all shows where the band had not performed publicly in at least 90 days to give a taste of what’s possible at tomorrow’s tour opener in Bethel, NY.

Keep in mind, you won’t find the crowd eruptions such as the hiatus-ending Piper at Madison Square Garden 2002 or the breakup-ending Fluffhead at Hampton in 2009, because well – that would be too easy, and that is not what we do. Here’s what we came up with in reverse chronological order…

06/11/2010: Toyota Park, Bridgeview, IL
Ghost:
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/toyota.mp3]
Taped By: TaylorC

Phish came out of the gates with an improv-heavy first show of the summer last year at Toyota Park in Chicago, IL. The first set featured jam songs Down With Disease, Wolfman’s, Reba and Bowie, while the second stanza was top heavy with a potent Light that went into a Maze that had two ferocious solos. For our money, the highlight of the night was a Ghost that was dotted with tasteful Orca usage by Trey, bass bombs a plenty by Mike and some adventurous clav work by Page before the band worked their way towards Limb By Limb. Let’s hope tomorrow night is on par with the 2010 opener.

• Previously on HT: The B List – 10 Best Phish Tour Openers and Predictions – Phish Summer Tour Leg One

READ ON for nine more strong tour-opening moments…

This week brought about a few interesting news items in the realm of digital music. First, came the news via Forbes that Facebook – in conjunction with Spotify, a European-based

Tomorrow is finally the day that Phish returns to the road after a near six-month layoff for the first of three shows at Bethel Woods in Bethel, NY. All in all, the first leg of the group’s tour contains 18 shows, most of which will take place at familiar venues for the band and their fans.

We wanted to give our staff and our readers a chance to get their predictions for what the tour will bring down “on paper” and then once the tour wraps up on June 19 we’ll see how everybody did. So take a look at our calls and be sure to leave your own predictions in the comments section.

Our first question was, “which band member do you expect to be this tour’s MVP?” Next, we asked everybody to pick a “classic” song that will get “the treatment” from Phish this summer. Then, we asked everyone to pick what they thought the best show of the first leg would be. Finally, we asked each contributor to predict how many new songs Phish would debut and to pick the biggest bustout of the tour.

Andy Kahn:

1. MVP Band Member? Fish, because he’s due. Recent tours have seen Page take a more prominent roll leading jams, Mike showing off what he’s picked up from his solo band and Trey, well Trey is Trey. It’s time for Papa Fish to show the kids what he’s made of.

2. MVP “Classic” Song? Free needs to grow the pair it’s seemingly lost in its 3.0 incarnation. Hoping this one gets back to ripping bass runs and surging jams and loses the going-through-the-motions feel it’s taken on at times.

3. Best show? June 1, second night of Holmdel. This will be their second night at Holmdel and coming off the extended stay at Bethel Woods looks ripe for a mid-week-snooze-you-lose kind of show.

4. Number of new songs? Six: four new Trey/Tom songs, one from Page and one from Mike.

5. Biggest Bustout? Lushington – it’s been years and years since the band took us down the brutal miles and miles of Lushington. Throw in The Chase segment from Fluff’s Travels and this becomes a bustout of legendary proportions.

READ ON to see what the other contributors guessed and to make your own predictions in our comments section…