20 Years Later (Burlington, 2002)
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the first road trip I ever took to see improvisational rock music. Somehow my parents let me go up to burlimgton, VT to see the Trey Anastasio Band when I was only 16, I don’t know what they were thinking.
My friend Jake’s older brother Nick was our more seasoned chaperone for the trip to the Phish holy land. I remember thinking he was old at just age 27, and looking up to him because he had gone to some of the 80k person phish festivals at the end of the 90s. Today I am 36, and a 27 year old is a baby in my eyes.
We stayed in a motel, which was crazy to me, because I could do whatever I wanted in the room. This was before I became an alcoholic so all I did was smoke a bunch of camel lights and bowls of Vermont headies (weed).
In 2002, Trey was touring around with a 10 piece afro Cuban dance machine, I’m talking about a full brass ensemble and a Brazilian percussionist who had been in Paul Simon’s band. It wasn’t abnormal for the dectet to play 40 minute jams out of any of the songs they were playing. I always wondered what the mechanics were of a band that size improvising at that level. Like, did trey write new horn charts every night? I have messaged multiple members of that band to ask but have never gotten any answers.
The show was at the Memorial Auditorium, which was pretty much a high school basketball court sized venue. I was very close to the stage at the beginning, but the heat and the mdma pills I had eaten were getting to me, so I went up to the balcony to watch the rest of the show. I ran into the percussionist Cyro Baptista at setbreak and complmented him on his big fur hat.
Michael Franti came out and sang the bob marley song “small axe” with some free styling about the upcoming invasion of Iraq. I dunno why, but that guy never did much for me, even at that young age.
Everything clicked during the 2nd set. “Plasma” has this gorgeous horn intro and a lyric that I’m still in love with. Trey and Phish in general are hit or miss lyricslly, but I love the lyrics in “plasma”.
“No matter how you slice your day
Or dream of places far away
Or try to set your world apart
You’ll always end up where you start”
“Plasma” was a 17-minute jazz odyssey, and all was right in my world. Was I on drugs? Of course… but I’ve since heard the tape while sober and it still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I won’t review the show song by song, but I should mention that Page McConnell came out for the “last tube” encore , which I now consider the canned laugh track, or applause sign of arena jam rock, but I loved it at the time, having never seen Phish, it was great to see 50% of the band before they came back from touring hiatus on 12/31/02. I didn’t see them until Feb. Of 2003.
When I got back to high school, I was the coolest kid in the building (in my head). My English teacher made me review the show in the school paper
to pass journalism 101 or whatever my 11th grade English credit was. I think that was one of the last things I had written up until 2021.
I can’t find a link to the tape, but if you have iOS you can hear it on the jam streams app. So go do some homework, I guess.
