All That I Would Ever Need: Rochester, 12.11.97

In the fall of 1997 I was 18 years old and in full-on all-Phish-all-the-time mode. I’d seen the band three times over the previous two summers and folded most of my high school friends into the jamband world. As a first-semester freshman at Ithaca College, anyone who had Phish tapes on my floor became a source for knowledge. When I asked one dude if I could take his entire collection of some 50+ tapes, he hemmed and hawed before telling me I could take a couple, and if those came back OK, I could have a few more and copy those.The guy with the Clifford Ball poster at the end of the hallway had a handful of tapes that I copied the first day of classes. I was surprised by songs I’d never even heard of before until I consulted Andy Gadiel’s Phish page for setlists and realized that what he’d hastily scribbled as “Weekapang Grane” was actually “Weekapaug Groove” and “Coyote” was actually “Guyute.”

I spun those tapes–and yes, they were tapes, Maxell XL IIs–relentlessly, devouring them while developing film in the darkroom, on walks to and from class, and my weekly stints at the school newspaper’s front desk. I devoured my copy of The Pharmer’s Almanac so thoroughly that the pages were held in with scotch tape (when they were held in at all). My freshman year roommate--a high school friend who’d become a longtime tour buddy in the years to come--borrowed the book only to watch its dog-eared pages flutter to the floor. I underlined and highlighted the Almanac far more intently than I did in any of the books I was supposed to be reading for my minor in English. 

AND I AM TAKEN FAR AWAY...

Phish’s 1997 fall tour was announced in early August, so it reasons that by the time classes began I would’ve had plans for at least the Rochester show on December 11th. The problem was that I didn’t have a car, and neither did anyone else I knew. Thankfully, a guy in my Intro to Film Aesthetics & Analysis class had a roommate who was going and secured me a ride. The driver, Justin, had a ubiquitous rainbow-striped Volkswagen Jetta that I’d previously seen on campus. It was like Gatsby’s car--everyone had seen it. 

When I met up with Justin and three other half-bearded dudes I thought, “Yeah, these look like guys who would go to Phish shows.” It turns out they were as green as I was in terms of seeing the band live, but were phans-in-good-standing, and as I’d later learned, this was the show that most Ithacans saw that tour, as the War Memorial (now BlueCross Arena) was only about 90 miles away from campus.

We crammed into the Jetta and drove to Rochester through a literal blizzard. I perched in the middle of the back seat--the spot where there’s no headrest obscuring the view of the whiteout—and marveled at the fact that Justin navigated the highway with zero visibility. I silently repeated Hail Marys that we’d arrive at the venue in one piece.

Jeff (“Weekapang Grane” guy) also arranged for a ride to Rochester, but unfortunately got left high and dry. We’d argue about this for years, as he missed this, my favorite show, and I missed his (10.30.98) because of a similar-but-different travel mishap. If I recall correctly, some time after both shows we even got in a shoving match about it. (I repeat: I was in full-on all-Phish-all-the-time mode.) However, the day after Rochester Jeff and I caught a ride to Albany with a middle-aged woman who’d posted on rec.music.phish that she was driving from Buffalo and had room for riders. She picked us up on Ithaca’s campus, then picked up two more guys from Cornell. It felt sufficiently weird, but not weird enough to pass on a ride. We caught the December 12th show—the first of nearly 40 shows we’ve seen together—and then rode Greyhound back to Ithaca on Sunday.

A TINY SPACE TO MOVE AND BREATHE

I don’t remember if the Rochester show was general admission or reserved, but my group wound up about halfway up the arena on what-was-then-Fish-side. I wore my People for a Louder Mike shirt (it read “When I catch Phish… I like big bass”); I’d give anything to know where that particular shirt wound up in my flurry of post-college moves.

We got to our spot just as the lights went down and the first thing I noticed was the camera crew, especially the boom that swung in front of the stage. I was only four shows into my Phish-going career, so I didn’t think much of the cameras, and besides, my previous three shows had all been outdoors at Alpine Valley and Starlake, so I figured that this was par for the course for indoor Phish. When Bittersweet Motel was announced a few years later, the pieces fell into place, and to this day I hope against hope that all that raw footage will find its way onto a DVD or Blu-ray release. (There were no cameras in Albany the next night, but given that Jeff and I were in the very last row, as far from the stage as possible, I don’t know that I would’ve been able to see them anyway.)

The band took the stage and Trey scratched out the intro to “Punch You in the Eye,” which was my favorite Phish song at the time (along with the nascent “Piper,” which had its longest and weirdest outing to date the following night in Albany). My first “Punch” had come at Alpine earlier that summer as I wondered aloud: “Huh--’Punch You in the Eye’ into ‘The Landlady’ and back into ‘Punch’? I must be witnessing history!” By December, however, I knew.

“Punch” bubbled into Mike’s intro to “Down with Disease,” and after the jam’s initial peak ended with a full-band thrust, major chords led to a spacy section with Trey soloing in a higher register before settling into a sinuous, relaxed jam. To me, this is the sound of Fall 1997: mid-tempo Mike-led grooves, Page synths, Fish shuffle fills, and start/stop jams. 

“Disease” remained unfinished (for now), and slid smoothly into “Maze,” which featured its typical build as Trey comped under Page’s organ solo, before his typical machine-gun shredding. It’s weird to say that this doesn’t feel like a 15-minute version of “Maze,” but it was, making for one hell of an opening 45-minute trifecta.

I knew the two newish songs--the sublime “Dirt” and the wiggly “Limb by Limb”--from some tapes that had already been circulating of the previous summer tour, both in Europe and the States. (Did I just use “already” when discussing shows that happened four, five months prior? I did indeed. Remember that, kids, when you complain that tonight’s soundboard recording isn’t on the LivePhish app until an hour after the show ends.)

At this point they’d been on for about an hour, and “Loving Cup” felt like a very logical closer, especially in 1997. But after its conclusion, Trey counted off “Rocky Top” and capped off a 70-minute first set. “We’re gonna take a break,” Trey announced. “We’re having a great time–thank you!”

A setbreak tangent: I think fans tend to forget that most of the four-, five-, and/or six-song sets that are so revered in hindsight were much shorter than the band’s usual 80- to 90-minute sets, and that this was the subject of some hallway beer-line grumbling at the time. To me, one of the reasons that Fall ‘97 is held in such high regard is because the band seemed to trim the proverbial fat, excising songs deemed “filler” and/or the 3.0 trend of piling one set closer on top of another (specifically in second sets—Trey’s “jukebox sets” or “Saturday night specials”).

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL BUZZ

As the second set began, I felt rewarded for my obsessive tape-scouring, as I knew the “Drowned” opener from my newly-acquired copy of 12.31.95 (I admit that I was at that time unfamiliar with Quadrophenia, although I knew the song’s pedigree). As with “Disease” in the first set, this jam featured sparkling Page piano fills and Trey chord-builds until about the 10:30 mark, which lead into a downtempo section with plenty of Fish hesitations and lots of space for Mike fills. Trey expanded the jam with the sirens/loops that mark much of 1997’s sound and the band found a deep ambient space (reminiscent of the style that would hallmark 1998). 

Bittersweet Motel viewers know all about the transition into Phish’s debut of Ween’s “Roses Are Free”--Todd Phillips cuts from the band rehearsing the song backstage into its full-blown explosion during the actual show. I had only heard of Ween at this point, so this one was completely unknown to me, as I’d surmise it was for at least 90% of the crowd. Smartphones were still a decade away, so we couldn’t simply check Twitter or phish.net to see what the song was called or who wrote it. Because of its quintessentially Phishy lyrics (“Throw the pumpkin at the tree / Unless you think that pumpkin holds your destiny”) I assumed it was an Anastasio/Marshall original.

Up until this point in the show it was a fairly “serious” Phish performance—there had been no madcap antics, no vacuum solos, no instrument switching. And then came “Big Black Furry Creature from Mars.” The faux-metal riffs and threats of murder led to Trey running laps around the stage, lots of syncopated vamping, and a tease of Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral.” (This sound would rear its head again during the so-called “heavy metal Wilsons” of the late-1.0 era.) “BBFCM” eventually slowed to sludgy tension before more spacey ambience carried the band on a dime into 1997’s Rookie of the Year, “Ghost.”

25 years later, I still consider this “Ghost” the pinnacle of my show-going career. If I ever stood before some jamband Judge Judy who demanded I demonstrate the finest 20 minutes of Phish, I’d dial this up in a heartbeat. In later years (most notably the 3.0/4.0 years), “Ghost” became known for its angular, strong-armed rock versions that (almost always) veered into blissful territory. This one gets wild, too, but in different ways—its slinky, minimalist funk was the sound of 1997, the love child of Halloween 1996’s Remain in Light hangover and Mike’s move to a Modulus bass in February. People for a louder Mike, indeed.

The “Ghost” jam picked up steam with Page leading the way on clavinet (also a major part of 1997’s sonic awakening) before switching to synth washes as Trey soloed quietly over a cool, mid-tempo groove. Eventually Page moved to piano and Trey found a delightfully repetitive lick that he pushed into higher registers before the band achieved liftoff 12 minutes in. Fish signaled a faster tempo shift a few minutes later and by that point Trey had activated bounteous Band of Gypsies Hendrix mode. It was almost a “Disease” jam now, and it kept building and building and building.

I’ve heard it said that you know the band is really feeling it when Fishman yells. You guessed it—the band was really feeling it here. Around 16 minutes, the drummer shouted “NEW YORK!” (or something to that effect… even on the soundboard recording it’s unclear). A minute later it felt almost like they were headed back into “BBFCM” for a heartbeat, and a minute after that Trey led them back into the main lick of “Disease” and the whole place Just. Went. Nuts. The actual reprise was a very brief, run-through-at-best before the whole thing collapsed and eventually tumbled into “Johnny B. Goode,” but there’s no denying this is a band at the absolute peak of its powers. 

Trey got about half of the words to “Johnny B. Goode” right, but who cares at this point? This was the icing on the proverbial cake. The second set was barely over an hour long, but it doesn’t matter—Phish put on an absolute clinic, from breathtaking peaks to mellow smoothness to head-scratching zaniness. It’s all there.

There’s a phish.net review of this show that simply reads “‘Waste’ of an encore,” but I respectfully disagree. While I understand that it’s not everyone’s favorite song (or even favorite ballad), I found the placement perfect. Had this preceded or followed “Ghost” it would’ve flummoxed the flow of a flawless set. Here, “Waste” stood firmly on its own, delivering the pathos largely absent from the previous two hours of music.

THIS WAS MY BIG SECRET

In the following weeks, months, and years I extolled the virtues of this show to anyone who would listen, but in the midst of an absolute monster tour, it often got lost in the shuffle. The fact that the band and its archivist Kevin Shapiro  later officially released other sterling fall shows like Denver, Dayton, Auburn Hills, and Hampton further relegated Rochester to the afterthought bin (although being in the afterthought bin for Fall 1997 is akin to warming the bench for the 1992 Dream Team).

Three years later, when Bittersweet Motel finally hit theaters (and its bonus footage appeared on the subsequent DVD release), this show finally started getting its due. Then, sometime in the late 2000s a soundboard recording appeared/leaked (no doubt tied to Bittersweet’s audio recording and synching needs) and minds changed even more. These days it’s the 17th highest-rated show on phish.net, behind Denver and Hampton but ahead of Dayton and Auburn Hills. 

A week after Rochester I took my first exams and finished my first college semester. I headed home with five Phish shows under my belt, no longer a neophyte but far from a veteran. I don’t remember when I finally obtained the tape of this show, but I guarantee that it played endlessly for the immediate future. 1998 was the year I went all-in on seeing shows, as it brought my first Phish festival, Halloween, and New Year’s Eve experiences, and 25 years later I’ve seen the band nearly 150 times. 

Whenever anyone asks about my favorite Phish shows I usually provide a Greatest Hits list, with 7.25.99, 7.11.00, 7.29.03, 6.17.11, and 8.22.15 all rotating through, but my absolute favorite? The desert island show? The One Show to Rule Them All? It’s still always Rochester—Thursday, December 11th, 1997.

20 Years Later: Getting Hooked on Phish

I: THE OVERHEAD VIEW

I grew up with the oldies channel on the radio and Jimmy Buffett, John Prine, and John Denver cassettes in the tape player. There was always music in my life, and when I got my first Walkman I started taping songs off the radio and buying cassette (and later CD) singles at the mall.

My musical world expanded greatly when I got to high school, as it no doubt does for most people. At the beginning of my sophomore year a friend loaned me Green Day’s Dookie, Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, and Weezer’s blue album, and I took my first steps into a larger world.

One night, riding the bus home from an away basketball game, a teammate turned around in his seat and handed me a tape. Matt had moved to my sleepy hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania from Corpus Christi, Texas before our freshman year. He was automatically more worldly than anyone I’d ever met.

I’d heard of the band before but never actually heard the band before. I’d seen the logo on t-shirts and sewn on backpacks, but figured it was something alien to me, something inaccessible.

The tape was the second set of Phish’s October 19th, 1991 show at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California. Matt had taped it off a bootleg CD that he’d somehow acquired, which in doing research for this essay I learned was called Cruzin’. (Thanks to a DAT soundboard recording this show quickly circulated and became many fans’ first high quality sampling of Phish’s music.) Looking back, Cruzin' is an appropriately Phishy pun--think A Live One or the band's Live Bait series.

The first side of the tape opened with “Llama” and “Bathtub Gin,” but the moment I was hooked was “Sparkle.” Two decades later I look at “Sparkle” and revel in its beauty--Trey Anastasio took a really downcast poem by his friend Tom Marshall about the horrors of getting engaged and turned it into a major-key sing-along happyfest. Back then I didn’t know any of that, but I thought it was catchy as hell. “Laugh and laughing fall apart” indeed.

There’s a “Tweezer” and a “You Enjoy Myself” in that set, a Fishman tune (“Terrapin”) and a cover I didn’t realize was a cover--Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times.” I loved it. I mean, I absolutely loved it. I took Matt’s tape home and copied it that night, not trusting him to dub it himself over the weekend and bring me a copy. I wore that tape out over the next year.

II: EVERYTHING IN ITS OWN DOMINION

I soon got Junta for my 16th birthday from one of Erie’s independent record stores, then the rest of the studio albums from BMG. (Anyone over 30 no doubt remembers the eight-discs-for-a-penny scam.) I made mix tapes of my favorite songs and subscribed to the Doniac Schvice, the band’s semi-quarterly newsletter/merch catalog. We got a new Macintosh for Christmas and I made spreadsheets sorting the band’s songs alphabetically and by length.

I bought A Live One when it came out, but I admit I didn’t quite “get it” yet. I loved “Chalkdust Torture” and “Gumbo,” but in my Phish infancy, I often skipped disc two’s monster “Tweezer.” It was too massive, too swirling, too out-there for someone who’d grown up on four-chord folk-rock songs. (Full disclosure: I still sometimes skip this "Tweezer" if I don't have a half-hour to spare for its outer-space tension-and-release weirdness.)

Because of the nascent Internet, one of the areas in which I didn’t get involved was the world of tape trading or tracking the band online. I didn’t buy any of the “bootlegs”/”imports” that circulated in some of the record stores around town, though, mostly because of the ridiculous price tags (sometimes up to $50 for a single disc and $100+ for a complete show). I had the tape of that Santa Cruz, show, though, and the following summer Matt graciously procured me the tape of set II of June 23rd, 1995 from Waterloo, New Jersey because he knew I liked Blues Traveler, and John Popper sat in that night for a jam out of “Harpua” that touched on Abba’s “Waterloo” and ended up as “Llama.”

And I listened and I listened and I listened.

III: SWEPT AWAY

Fast-forward to August of 1996. I was vacationing with my family at my grandma’s house outside Minneapolis. I was 17, and about to start my senior year of high school. My cousin Sarah, two years older and ready to head back for her sophomore year at Northwestern, pulled me aside after dinner one night and asked, in a tone that made us sound like conspirators, “Do you like Phish?”

Yes, I answered. A thousand times yes.

The next day, we drove from Twin Cities to Wisconsin for the band’s first show at Alpine Valley, a ski resort that the Grateful Dead played nearly two dozen times in the ‘80s. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.

The night before the show we camped out with a handful of Sarah’s friends, a few of whom were really into the band (one guy’s requests: “Free,” “Fluffhead,” and “Harry Hood." He got 'em all!) and a few who were just along for the ride. I talked more to the ones who were really into the band, and once I passed some kind of figurative acid test about Phish knowledge (the drummer wears a dress onstage!), I was accepted into their merry band and dubbed “Cousin Kevin.”

The week before, I’d seen Hootie & the Blowfish at Starlake outside Pittsburgh, my first big-time amphitheater show without my parents. I was all set to rock my Hootie t-shirt at the Phish show as my way of announcing my newfound coolness. One of Sarah’s buddies saw me put it on before we left the campground and he subtly shook his head, indicating that no, Hootie was indeed not cool. I threw on an old UNC t-shirt and off we went.

I didn’t have a ticket, which at 17 really freaked me out. How would I get into the show? Would I have to wait in the car? Would I get arrested and spend the night in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin jail? (Looking back, I realize how ridiculous all this sounds, but again: I was 17.)

Luckily, the guys we were traveling with found me a ticket at a gas station that was swarmed with young people in VW buses and Jeep Cherokees, all plastered with stickers that I didn't understand ("My Other Car is a Mulitbeast?"). The circus was indeed in town. At that early stage I fully believed that was as crazy as the experience was going to get.

Then, the lot: I’d never seen anything like it, and I’d seen Buffett a half-dozen times with my parents by that time. While the Parrotheads I’d seen were known for their partying, I was wide-eyed at the apparent lawlessness of the Phish lot. The most incredible example was the guy walking around with a huge branch of marijuana--you could hand him a $20 and snap off a giant nug. I watched it happen!

The vending of all sorts, legal and illegal, baked my noodle. One could simply ply his wares--patchwork clothing, blown-glass pipes, veggie burritos--and nobody seemed to care, least of all the police. (I've been back to Alpine a handful of times since--97, 99, 2000, 2009--and heard it described often as a police state. I never saw anything like this. As in any Phish lot, as long as you're not doing anything ridiculously illegal conspicuously, I think you're pretty much OK.)

Following that lead, we tried to sell grilled cheese the following summer, which was an utter failure. Later, I financed most of the dozen shows I saw in 1999 by selling “Thank You Trey” bumper stickers for a dollar each. My lesson in lot commerce had already unconsciously begun.

At that point, Alpine (capacity 37,000) was the biggest venue the band had ever played (a record that would hold until 70,000 fans showed up for the Clifford Ball, Phish’s first large-scale festival, a week later). We set up a blanket about halfway up the crazy-steep lawn and settled in. I reiterate: I had no idea how much my very limited worldview was about to change.

IV: ATTEMPTING TO RECORD THIS VIEW

“Cousin Kevin knows all the words!” one of Sarah’s friends shouted to our group halfway through the first set. At that point, he was mostly right, as the first handful of songs had all been on the studio albums I’d listened to ad infinitum for the past 16 months. I knew “My Friend, My Friend” and “Poor Heart,” “Fee” and “Reba.” I’d never heard “AC/DC Bag” (because it wasn’t on a studio album) and I labeled “I Didn’t Know” as “A Picture of Otis Redding” on my setlist. The set closed with another batch of songs I indeed knew well--"The Horse > Silent in the Morning,” “Rift,” “Bathtub Gin,” and “Cavern.”

I was still too wet-behind-the-ears to know much about the mythos of the band; I couldn’t have differentiated Gamehendge from Narnia, told you what a Type II jam sounded like, or picked a clavinet out of a lineup of keyboards. I didn’t know that “Reba” didn’t always feature the whistling, or that Trey didn’t always sing the verses of “Fee” through the megaphone, or that Fishman didn’t play the vacuum at every show. None of that mattered. Yet.

I remember sitting on the hill at setbreak, still wide-eyed at the scene taking place before me. (It’s important to note here that at 17 I had never once had a sip of alcohol and had only occasionally even smelled pot. I didn’t partake in anything that night, but suffice to say I saw a great deal more than I expected to see.) Setbreak could’ve been Trey’s proverbial 15 minutes, it could’ve been an hour. I don’t remember, and at the time I didn’t care. I was in love. With all of it. The music, the scene, the people… this was for me. When I got home and my parents asked about the show, I could only find myself talking about the people, how nice and welcoming everyone was. I’d found my tribe.

The second set opened with a bunch more tunes I knew--"Wilson,” “Down with Disease,” Scent of a Mule.” “Free” came next, and because I wasn’t in the virtual Phish world yet, I wouldn’t know it until I bought Billy Breathes on the day it came out that October. “Hold Your Head Up” announced a Fishman song (the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post" sung as a joke). This segment of the show I was familiar with thanks to the Catalyst tape. I laughed with everyone else when Fish took his vacuum solo, and was incredibly psyched when the set closed with a blissful “Harry Hood” and “A Day in the Life,” the latter I knew all too well from the tape of Sgt. Pepper’s that my middle-school buddy Dave had found in his mom’s car and we played until it unwound.

More stuff I knew in the encore: "Contact," one of my earliest Phish favorites, and Jimi Hendrix's "Fire," which I admit to being introduced to via Wayne's World. I looked at my watch, incredulous--for my $25, the band had played for nearly three hours.

After the show, as I walked back to the parking lot with a perma-grin, Sarah informed me that because I’d stayed sober I’d have to drive us, but there were two problems: 1. We had no destination, and 2. I couldn’t drive stick. Nobody thought to mention that to me before or during the show. So I got a very rough tutorial in driving a manual transmission, and our posse “camped” at a nearby rest area. (I put “camped” in quotation marks because all we did was unfurl a blue tarp on the ground next to the car and crash for a few hours until someone other than me was sober enough to drive.)

Cruising back to the Twin Cities the following day, with no air conditioning and Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” hissing from Sarah’s speakers, I sat in the back seat already wearing one of the three t-shirts I’d bought at the show--this one was of Dr. Seuss’ the Cat in the Hat juggling fish from bowl to bowl. I also bought an official tour shirt (which I still have but never wear because it’s an XL… I weigh a good 20 pounds more than I did when I was 17 and I currently wear a large… Why on earth did I buy an XL?) and one of those terrible bootleg t-shirts that get slung in every parking lot of every concert ever for $10. I didn’t care. I wore them in rotation once the school year began a few weeks later. I sewed the Phish logo patch onto the back of my favorite baseball cap. I was, as they say, hooked.

V: THIS EVERLASTING ITCH

Later that fall, I had a ticket to see what would’ve been my second show. It was on a Saturday, in Buffalo, on October 19th, 1996. Unfortunately my dad was out of of town and my mom didn’t like the looks of the crew I was riding with, so she put the kibosh on my would-be adventure. In hindsight, I can’t say I blame her, but if she’d seen my cousin Sarah’s friends, my first Phish show might’ve been out of the question as well.

My actual second show came the following summer, back at Alpine. Sarah and I took her brother Peter (two years younger than me), and we were joined by a friend of hers who wore denim overalls the whole time. We drove my uncle’s giant red Suburban and made the aforementioned ill-fated attempt at selling grilled cheese in the lot. (When Peter climbed atop the Suburban and announced that our product was “a party in your mouth” I closed up shop. We made no money.)

I took my three best high school friends to Starlake a few days later, and I soon had tour buddies for life. I caught two more shows during the fall of 1997 during my freshman year at Ithaca, one of which is my still-favorite-of-all-time, December 11th, 1997, immortalized in Todd Phillips’ documentary Bittersweet Motel.

From there, I've been seeing Phish as often as I can, wherever and whenever, coast to coast. Since that fateful day when Sarah asked me that innocuous-enough question, I’ve seen Phish 99 times, in 17 states (and once in Canada) in 37 different venues. I’ve seen five of the the band’s ten major festivals, three Halloween shows, and three New Year’s Eve extravaganzas.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to call Phish my favorite band, and while there are many, many people who have enriched my fandom over the past two decades, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my friend Matt for the Catalyst tape and my cousin Sarah for the Alpine trips.

This has indeed all been wonderful.

#MyLeftToe Twitter campaign for Phish 7.25.99

15 years later, my goal for this Friday, July 25th is to harness the collective power of a technologically-inclined fanbase and get an all-time Phish gem officially released. 

My plan is for as many Phish fans as possible to use Twitter to very politely bombard Phish archivist Kevin Shapiro (@shapsio) with as many requests as possible for an official release of 7.25.99 this Friday (which is the show’s 15^th anniversary). I’ve tweeted at Kevin the past few years on this date to suggest a release, but haven’t had any traction.

Yet.

7.25.99 has long since passed into the pantheon of Great Phish Shows, and while the remastered audience recordings are solid, this one’s due for a full-on LivePhish release. Here are a few reasons why:

·        

• The first of only two “Meat” openers ever.
• “My Friend” > “My Left Toe” > only non-Fishman version of “Whipping Post" since 1989.
• “Makisupa” loaded with references to Chris Kuroda’s birthday (and Fish's terrible Jamaican accent).
•  That second set. Seriously. Everything about it.

The idea for this campaign came back in May, when I tweeted at Kevin to include the 7.8.99 “Fee” on LiveBait10 (purely on the assumption that there’d even be a tenth volume), and lo and behold, that very “Fee” found its way onto the compilation.

Here’s what we do: you can either follow me on Twitter (@kflinn1) and re-tweet my missive to Kevin, or create your own. I only ask that you follow a few simple guidelines to make sure this runs as smoothly as possible:

1. BE POLITE. Ask nicely, and you never know what can happen. Demand, and we got shot down.
2.  Wait until this Friday, July 25^th, for the show’s 15^th anniversary.
3. Use the hashtags #MyLeftToe and #phish

Let’s make it happen!

Scrimshaw excerpt

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming fourth novel, Scrimshaw. It's an adaptation of a song by Nashville-based songwriter Pete Holland.

Scrimshaw will be available for purchase in paperback and Kindle formats via Amazon.com next Tuesday, November 12th.

Click-clack.  Click-clack.  Click-clack. 

            The steadfast iambic rhythm of wheels skittering over steel rails, more like a human heartbeat than the pace of a machine driven by wood and coal, rods and pistons and steam. Some would no doubt argue that the railroad is more akin to the pulse of the United States than its denizens are even aware, with its heart located somewhere around Omaha, the miles and miles of Union and Central Pacific tracks snaking in all directions, carrying passengers and cargo and pumping its collective blood to every corner of the country.

Leaving Iowa behind and chugging through Nebraska signals that your odyssey is nearly halfway finished. You’ve never been this far west in your life, and with every hour you move farther from Massachusetts and everything you’ve ever known, and closer to California and everything you’ve ever feared. You’ve buried questions like How will I find her? and Will she remember me? deep in your subconscious. You don’t want to know the answers, anyway. 

            So you stare out the glass-paneled windows as the miles roll away, the American Middle West shattering all your previously-held expectations—Iowa wasn’t nearly as flat and featureless as you envisioned, not the perfectly smooth ocean on the calmest and least windy of days. Instead, you bear witness to sweeping, rolling hills, brown and green waves pitching back and forth in the near distance, threatening to toss the train from the rails and drown its passengers in a dizzying sea of swaying cornfields.

            It’s been three days since you bid goodbye to New Bedford and the Atlantic Ocean. Three full days of clicking and clacking as you’ve limped the aisles, wondering dutifully where the other passengers were headed, wondering if they pondered your destination, your reason for sliding your last 45 dollars through the window in Council Bluffs for the privilege of riding in the belly of this steam-powered beast another day to Cheyenne, two more to Ogden, and two more after that to San Francisco.

            When you awaken after drowsing in your seat, you pat your breast pocket fitfully, ensuring the letter remains safe and sound, close to your heart at all times. You’ve managed to keep the knife a guarded secret, but a few times every day you remove the scrimshaw from your pants pocket and run your weathered fingers and thumbs over the intricate carvings, your carvings, all that remains of the life that the Atlantic swallowed and New Bedford all but forgot. The whale bone remains a token, a talisman (it could be called a good luck charm if it had brought any good fortune whatsoever), something to hold onto through your travels.

            You’ve been on a train only once before, back in the summer of ’61, on your way to Philadelphia, mere weeks after enlisting to help cement the blockade and Scott’s Anaconda Plan. The train ride was a novelty then, the fastest way to move troops south to Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia. Now, as you travel deeper and deeper into the thickening American night, you grip the scrimshaw a little tighter, triple-check your pocket for the letter and close your eyes as a deep sigh rattles through your 70-year-old bones. 

            Click-clack.