We wanted to celebrate the release of 7-DVD Clifford Ball set
“Beautiful man… I don’t know how you do it…”
The Clifford Ball. It was the end and the beginning. It was, yeah, just a couple Phish shows, but it was also the rift between two eras. For me and the band. In my mind there are some distinct periods in the history of the band which I described in my blog here. The Ball was a distinct shift where Phish went from being a band that was big enough to tour with their own grand piano and fill arenas to a band that was big enough to put on a massive festival on their own and compel tens of thousands of people to schlep to remote locations. This was the birth of “big Phish.”
It was also a distinct shift for me. The summer had officially started with my graduation from college in May. When the summer ended I would be in graduate school. It was a real life bar mitzvah moment: time to become an adult. The woman I love(d) would go from being a girlfriend to being the person I lived with. But before all that, there was the summer. Phish announced their dates in the spring – a pretty minor stretch of shows, 11 in total, all in the middle of August, starting out west and working their way toward the big bash at an Air Force base in Plattsburgh. The highlights were a you-crazy? 4-night run at Red Rocks and something they were calling The Clifford Ball, which, to hear the Phish literature describe it, was just about as much fun as you could have in upstate New York.
READ ON for more of the Clifford Ball installment of Nedstalgia…
