2016 Albums

My Favorite Records of 2016

I’m sitting and listening to the thudding bass and wailing vocals which kick off the new Childish Gambino record, “Awaken, My Love!”, as I consider the yearly slog through the exercise of ranking albums. This album certainly makes a strong case and, being freshly released in December, it has a decided edge over a few great releases that might’ve slipped off the immediate radar. But that’s what we’re attempting to assess, isn’t it? The question isn’t, “What albums did you like?” The question is, “What albums are truly noteworthy?” This album, with its unabashed references to Funkadelic and Prince might well belong on that sort of list. I’ll let it spin and see if it comes back around as we talk.

I’ve harped on giving up this year-end thing so many times that I’m bored with the standard excuses about feeling compelled by the quality of the material or wanting to offer a rebuttal to other lists. I’m not going to lie, I like to look back and see what has landed in my collection and heart. I do not like ranking items. How can I compare a cultural cornerstone artist to an up-and-coming musician with only a couple albums in her catalog? It’s patently ridiculous. So don’t look for rankings here. No bullet points or whatever, either. Consider that method off limits and don’t try to interpret the sequence of my narrative as an order of preference.

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Phish – Big Boat

“I don’t listen to Phish albums.”
The number of times that I have heard this declaration, or some variant, over the years is striking. Doubly so when one considers the fervent fan base commanded by the band. Yes, live performance is where Phish rises to its highest heights. No, the studio albums do not contain the same energies found on stage. Fans often seem to have difficulty reconciling this disparity even as the band, ever aware of it, has embraced the separateness of the two more and more on each album. Their latest release, Big Boat (out Oct. 7 on JEMP Records), continues this trend and manages to present the listener with some fresh sounds. The challenge may be that the audience doesn’t really want fresh sounds. By and large, fan criticism runs from unrestrained delight in a new Phish album to indifference to disgust. Scanning Twitter on release day, one sees the entire gamut from assertions that the band is “…out of ideas…” (which is nonsense) to “hitting a creative peak”. As usual, the truth falls in between.

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20 Years Later: Phish 1995-06-19 Deer Creek

When plotting my Summer ’95 shows, I decided that I wanted to go to Deer Creek for the Grateful Dead’s annual run at the shed. It had garnered a reputation as a great place to see a show with notable performances stacking up in recent years. GDTS, however, saw fit to deny that portion of my order. Not to be deterred, I ordered tickets to see Phish there instead. I acquired a pair of tickets and my friend, Scotty, got one for himself. As plans sorted themselves out, Scotty volunteered to drive us in his mother’s car. Happy not to risk my beat-up Sentra on such a haul, I gladly accepted.

Scotty is a great guy whom I had met at a Capital Center Dead show the previous Autumn. He sat right in front of us and, inevitably, we were drawn into conversation. (I totally called the “Hell In A Bucket” opener. Scotty was appalled to hear the suggestion but it was, in fact, a mortal lock and the correct call.) We learned that he and I lived no more than three miles apart and became fast friends. We were soon were trading tapes and hanging out regularly.

The day after the Nissan Pavilion show was a Sunday and an off-day for Phish tour. We took advantage of this to make the trip out to Indiana more leisurely as our return trip would be a hurried, directly-from-the-show drive. Scotty had to work on Tuesday (and so did I) so we enjoyed our drive that Sunday and made camp late that afternoon in a western Ohio state park. Continue reading

20 Years Later: Phish 1995-06-17 Nissan Pavilion

My fourth Phish show (much anticipated after my third, 1994-12-29) marked the first of that Summer for me. Phish was coming to Northern Virginia to our brand new shed and we were ready to make it a great time. I can’t begin to tally the number of folks I knew at this show and, among them, how many were seeing their first show. Our tickets were acquired via PTBM and a large local crew gathered to pre-game at the home of some friends a short drive from the venue.

It was a brilliantly hot, early summer day with blue skies and few clouds. Hydration and sunscreen were top requirements. Other requirements being fulfilled, we hopped into our rides and attempted to get into the venue. It being new territory for all of us, we only had a general idea of how to approach the spot. This, coupled with construction on Interstate 66 and a general degree of befuddlement that sometimes accompanies such events, led to a hectic trip into the lots. Fortunately, we had our trusty tape of 1989-05-28 (set two) blasting in Modi’s car. This helped us keep cool as we zigzagged through the cones and chaos of Northern Virginia’s roadways.

The parking lot was a dust bowl. While the venue had been completed for the season, the lots had clearly remained an afterthought. The absence of order and landscaping could not dissuade us, but the hot moonscape of the parking lot held little attraction once we encountered the heavy security presence, so we made our way into the show a bit early. Continue reading

Dead50 Envelope art by Terry Larkin

All The Years Combine

Twenty years ago, I was a twenty-year-old Deadhead with no worries beyond growing my small record collection and obtaining tickets for the next Grateful Dead shows. I’d been seeing them for nearly four years, listening for maybe eight, and I’d just come home from the Mardi Gras run in Oakland, California. My t-shirts were strictly music-related, my trousers corduroy, and my hair was a disaster. I had a girlfriend and a 1983 Datsun Sentra. Both were good enough. My life plans involved seeing any and every amazing concert possible; primarily, but not exclusively, Grateful Dead and Phish; and writing about them for any audience that might have eyes for such things. What could go wrong?

I only managed one show on the Grateful Dead’s East Coast Spring Tour that year. Money was tight after my California trip and I was disinclined to quit my record store job, so work took a degree of precedence. After all, Summer Tour mail-order would come around soon enough. But, I had the fortune to be inside the Philly Spectrum when they played the first live “Unbroken Chain”. That’s the way things went. You never knew which show would be the show. You went when you could and enjoyed what you found.

Dance. Wash1. Repeat.

June rolled around and we caught some Phish shows, followed by the annual Dead shows at RFK Stadium and a one-nighter in Pittsburgh. We mail-ordered for Grateful Dead Fall Tour. My 21st birthday coincided with the scheduled Boston run and GDTS set us up with decent seats. Phish mail order soon followed for what was to become a legendary tour. Life was good. Even when it wasn’t. Who could complain about such riches? Continue reading