"Polishing the horn" is not a metaphor.
That's the 19-year-old me, chillin' in Brewster Hall
Room 706 at Syracuse.
My earliest memories of music involve my dad practicing various instruments (he played reeds, which you know what I mean if you dig jazz) and leading the local community band while my mom played organ in church.
Not surprisingly, I don't always see eye-to-eye with my parents regarding matters of music, though my dad and I can talk Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton, Miles Davis and Bill Evans all day. In particular, my dad bags on jam bands something fierce. "Their songs don't go anywhere, there's no complexity, it's boring" — those are his chief gripes. No, no, I say, if you have those beefs with bands like Widespread Panic, the Grateful Dead, Phish, Leftover Salmon, then you have to say the same things about John Coltrane and Miles Davis; you know they only used a couple of chords in each song on "Kind of Blue" or "Love Supreme."
A guitar player like Trey Anastasio tries to examine every single possibility of a chord; thus he takes 10- and 15-minute solos. A lot can happen in that time. He can take a crowd from strolling over to the beer stand to bouncing up and down with joy. And his vocabulary spans seemingly multiple languages let alone hundreds of thousands of words in one language. A jam-band player has to go around the world with each chord before moving on, unlike how most humans stay in one place without exploring every nook and cranny of the places we truly love. Trey knows how to play — and live.
Don't forget the repertoire — these bands play multiple shows in the same venue and won't repeat a single song over the course of nine-plus hours of performing. How many bands in the rock genre could do that? How many of them just set a playlist for a tour and do it over and over again? (Excuse me, how many of their handlers/A&R reps/record company marketers/tone-deaf suit-wearing wannabes thusly set the playlists to drive record sales while boring the paying customers to tears?)
For the second consecutive year I ventured to a nondescript soccer stadium in suburban Denver on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend for Phish's annual unofficial end-of-summer throwdown. Last year it was my 40th birthday present to myself and I loved every minute of it. When I got the email touting the 2014 shows I made the easy decision to get the ticket.
In the five months since I bought the ticket:
• Was threatened with foreclosure (thanks to a payroll issue with my employer last October) before I got my mortgage up to date again;
• Repeatedly spent every paycheck within hours of the money hitting my account, leaving me on $0 for 14 straight days with whatever groceries I managed to buy;
• Hiked two state high points and one more 14er, the peak (pun intended) of my physical accomplishments for a second straight lost year on the road to lava;
• Acquired a significant other on terms I agreed with before she changed the terms and lit me up for my lack of communication (As if you needed me to clarify, it's over);
• Told several wonderful stories in our pages to great critical acclaim before spending two of the three months of summer back on the desk and NOT writing while we searched for a new copy editor;
• Grew the greatest beard of my life in honor of the previous development;
Just came down from the mountain.
What'd I miss?
• Oddly, I bought my Phish ticket around the time of my last haircut, too. Had to match the beard.
So I was ready for a little trip and some live music, and to take another run at my goals from the previous year while escaping reality
With jam bands you have to consider the "scene." By the time Phish arrives in Denver, they've assembled a mini-city of the faithful who have followed them across the country and seen and heard everything. Notwithstanding the pavement, the parking lot resembles a Woodstock and the practice soccer fields have become lounges. I park in a neighborhood nearby in part to not pay the $15 for parking, but also to take a stroll around the grounds and take in the scene. By the end of this lost summer I was so broke and pissed off I must have given a pretty anti-social vibe because no one said hi or offered a beer or toke. Or maybe this was the show that attracted all the assholes. I'd say it's the former.
I had a beer in my little bag that contained some food, my journal and my camera. I sat on a berm overlooking the practice soccer fields and drank it while the faithful filed toward the stadium. Did I mention I got there about an hour and a half before the gates opened? No? Well, good. I like to get there early to stake out a good spot close to the stage, usually on "Page Side/Rage Side" — the crowd's left, in front of keyboardist Page McConnell. He plays five different keyboards, sometimes within the same song, a true artist. Page Side is the place to be.
All this said, I'm not about the scene. I want to hear music, and if it involves some patchouli oil and recreational narcotics, so much the better. But I'm there for the tunes. I got in about seven minutes after the gates opened and I waited with everyone else. The false floor over the soccer surface was stickier than what I remembered but I sat down anyway; I won't stand for two hours on top of the running show time. I chatted with the free-spirited girl next to me, enjoyed the Talking Heads as warmup music, attempted to write in the journal and eyed suspiciously the dark skies to the northwest of the stadium.
Phish came out promptly at 8 p.m. and played a two-song opener that took 15 minutes. They made a few abrupt switches rather than the flowing, fluid jams we've come to expect, but they kept it upbeat and rocking.
Then they rolled into a series of ballads that sent the faithful scrambling for the johns and beer stands. At this point I actually looked at my watch. If I do that or start jacking with my phone, I know the show's getting away from the band. Believe me, I know Phish came out with a setlist in mind, but I doubt they anticipated the crowd would check out during a batch of four or five slow numbers. I felt like they were losing the crowd.
They trotted out a staple called "Funky Bitch." That's all it took for the crowd to get back into it, to rejoin them in the unofficial end of summer celebration. They played two more after that before a 30-minute break. I stopped looking at my watch or my phone and just basked in how a band seemed to know the show was going downhill and saved it. Say that for jam bands — they have a connection with their fans that few other musical artists do, enough to know when the crowd's losing interest.
Before the second set a chill set in over the stadium. Nothing huge, like a front rolling through, but the universe gently reminding us that summer had a shelf life. Then Phish came out with a funky, groovy second set that gave me neck pain from constantly nodding my head to their driving beat. Even during their grooviest parts a lighting effect superimposed points of white light on a moving black screen — like snow. I felt a chill again and moved a little more.
The ending of Lee Dorsey's "Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley" and "Weekapaug Groove" followed by the encore of the Rolling Stones' "Loving Cup" and Phish's own "Tweezer Reprise" just destroyed everything that came before it, a fitting climax to the summer, leaving everyone wanting more. Phish ended it perfectly, and when the house lights came on, someone near me fired up their phone and it said "12:00 a.m." Those guys played for three and a half hours. What an early birthday gift.
The house music as I walked toward the exit was "Lush Life," Billy Strayhorn's sad ballad performed by John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. When it ended I hustled up the stairs and out of the stadium in time to hear an RV blasting Stevie Wonder's "I Wish." Between the appropriate non-Phish tracks afterward and my inability to get my phone to work during the show, the universe wanted me to focus on the music. It wanted me to leave all the bullshit bullets above behind and just lose myself in music and happy smog before heading back to reality. I can see this becoming an annual pilgrimage, and who am I to defy the universe — and my true nature as a music-liver? (Yes, I live in music, I don't merely love it. The verbiage is intentional)
http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/phish/2014/dicks-sporting-goods-park-commerce-city-co-1bce652c.html
