Alright, man, now I’m absolutely ROCKING OUT. It’s no time to hang up my writing shoes when the flow state is on, so let me see. The new thing is listening to 25-minute long Phish songs and blogging to the rhythm, which is what I’m doing tonight. I’ve drawn parallels before between improvisational music and my writing process, but I won’t delve too deeply into it to avoid redundancy on this blog. If writing is like jamband tapes, they all have to be different.
I want to share that I’m partial to 2003 Phish tapes, maybe because it’s when I was 17, feeling like I had the world by the balls and embarking on my first suburban, white boy rite of passage Phish adventures. I’ve heard they were less well-rehearsed, a bit rough around the edges where they might’ve once nailed complex composed sections of songs like “Reba” or “Divided Sky,” but the parts where they opened up and jammed are some of the best I’ve ever listened to. This post won’t entirely focus on Phish, I don’t think, but I just want to share the memories associated with what I’m listening to right now, as this flows out of me uncontrollably.
In the summer of 2003, I was eagerly anticipating my August trip to Maine for my first Phish festival, and back then, I was obsessed with the band. I don’t think I listened to anything else; I carried around a binder of CDRs filled with Phish bootlegs that I made everyone listen to, despite 50 Cent’s big debut album being the rage that year at my school. Anticipating the IT festival, I was glued to everything the band was doing as they made their trip east. I would download the tapes off Furthurnet, a BitTorrent trading community for artists with a taping policy, as pioneered by none other than the Grateful Dead. That’s when I got July 15th, 2003.
I don’t feel like reviewing epic Phish jams in a play by play, but let me just tell you that the 2nd set can stand with any night that Phish fans claim is “epic.” The opening “Mr. Completely” (first time played) is 30 minutes long, with noticeably unique little sections that coalesce into music that sounds like it was written beforehand (it wasn’t), before smoothly transitioning into a cover of War’s “Low Rider.” The jamming style is reminiscent of the “Ghost > Low Rider” from my first show back in Worcester that February. It just absolutely snaps… or slaps, I guess is what the kids say nowadays. There’s no way it wouldn’t be in any top ten jam list I could make. I’ll post the link and probably move on to something else. If you’ve got 30 minutes, give it a spin; it’s blowing my mind right now.
I forgot how much better I am at things when I listen to good Phish. When I was a kid, my friends noticed my skill at the Playstation 2 launch snowboarding title SSX, and writing does kind of feel like a PlayStation 2 snowboarding game when it works. It really feels more like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or Tekken. These are two games with such a tight control scheme that it starts to feel like there isn’t a controller in your hand, and the inputs go from your mind to the polygons on the screen. There are times that I feel like there isn’t a keyboard here. It’s only because of “Mario Teaches Typing” for Mac when I was a kid; I’d say my speed is at around fifty words per minute, which won’t land me a data entry gig but works with the whole blogging thing.
The last writing I did before letting the skill go dormant for 18 years was a review of something Trey Anastasio from Phish did. I reviewed a Trey Anastasio Band show I went to in my junior year of high school for the school newspaper. If anyone can find that, I’d be ever so grateful, but I’m not going to look for it. My teacher, Mr. Walker, knew I could write. He was so disappointed when I decided to skip class and get stoned beside the tennis courts instead of caring about the craft of writing. It’s a shame, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I had my hands full maintaining the cool token high school stoner persona with my long hair and tie-dye shirts.
Okay, I made it through the half-hour jam. I think I’ll call it a night. I guess the post ended up being about Phish, but that’s okay.
