jürgen fauth’s muckworld

OK, so Matisyahu covered the Flaming Lips, Rose Hill Drive and Leslie West raged Mountain’s Mississippi Queen, Sheryl Jones and Booker T did Born Under a Bad Sign (”and that’s fine”), that “smokeshow” Grace Potter got Warren Haynes to take her to the river, Big Head Todd and Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook joined Tea Leaf Green for Pulling Mussles, Chevy Chase is buddies with jamclown Keller Williams, Joan Osborne belted Come Together, Stanton Moore dueled Doug E Fresh, and Page McConnell had the balls to lead jazz heavyweights Nicholas Payton, Christian McBride, James Carter, and Roy Hanes through two Phish songs.

Not too shabby, but that’s to be expected from the Jammys, Relix Magazine’s annual Theater at Madison Square Garden get-together that combines surprise collaborations with pleasant scene fluffing. Also, awards.

The only award that really mattered on Wednesday night, though, was Phish’s Lifetime Achievement Jammy (it’s fun to say!) because it was supposed to lure Trey, Mike, Jon, and Page out of rehab, seclusion, or wherever else they’ve been hiding since the 2004 breakup. The rumor mill had been churning hard, and it sort of worked: all four members showed up, sharing the stage for the first time since Coventry — but they didn’t play together.

Instead, Fishman made a joke, Page was sincere, Gordo wore purple pants, and Trey gave one of those heartfelt, halting speeches that have brought many a Phish show to a screeching stop — except this time he sounded more humble, and more final, than ever: “It was an honor to watch you all dance.”

Then they walked off, and it would have been terribly depressing if Trey hadn’t just finished playing with deliciously cheesy yet surprisingly tight Beatles cover band The Fab Faux. Phish or no Phish, sick or sober, Big Red can still — what’s the technical term? — melt faces. Here’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

More on the Jammys:

• Full setlist at Hidden Track
• Photos at reax
• Relix
• Runaway Dinosaur
• Burlington Free Press

Fewer movies than usual because I’m working on several top secret plans for world domination, we’re still catching up with The Wire, and my obsession with Daniel Plainview shows no signs of abating. (Check out the new entries in the contest.) The notable exception was Etgar Keret’s Jellyfish, a sweet film that plays like minor-key Israeli version of Magnolia. I also tried to talk Marcy into watching Southland Tales, hoping that Richard Kelly’s sophomore disaster might improve upon second viewing. The answer was a resounding no — we didn’t make it past the 15-minute mark.

It’s been a good week for concerts, though. I never blogged about the March 19 benefit for Scotty Hard, a cause that brought all the champions of the downtown groove scene to the Highline Ballroom. My personal highlight was an outrageous and all-too-brief set by elusive dub god Bill Laswell, accompanied by Bernie Worrell. This weekend, Ratdog was back at the Beacon — unlike the Rolling Stones, they’re a band that actually belongs there. I missed Thursday’s sit-ins by Jimmy Herring, Warren Haynes, and Steve Molitz, but witnessed Friday’s ups (Tomorrow Never Knows! Hard Rain!) and downs (ridiculous sound problems during The Weight), as well as Saturday’s just-about perfect four hours of rock’n roll heaven. And now you’ll have to excuse me while I retire to my favorite secure undisclosed location.

The Wire. Season 3. ****
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****
Jellyfish/Meduzot. Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, 2007. ***
Southland Tales. Richard Kelly, 2007. *

Ratdog
4/4/08 Beacon Theatre, New York NY
I: Jam > Playin’ in the Band > Tomorrow Never Knows > Tennessee Jed, Sitting in Limbo > West L.A. Fadeaway, Even So > October Queen > The Deep End > Big Railroad Blues
II: K.C. Moan, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, The Weight, Eyes of the World, The River Song > Stuff > Dear Prudence > China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
E: Casey Jones

4/5/08 Beacon Theatre, New York NY
I: Jam > Help on the Way > Slipknot! > Maggie’s Farm, Row Jimmy, Dark Star > Weather Report Suite > Let It Grow
II: You Win Again, City Girls, Victim or the Crime, Lazy River Road > Jack Straw > Dark Star > Stuff, Days Between > Two Djinn > Slipknot! > Franklin’s Tower
E: One More Saturday Night

I’ll have photos from holiday sojourn on Cape Cod later, but in the meantime I wanted to point to Commander König’s eerie and beautiful Easter-inspired photo series.

I just happened to mention Phish’s 1998 Prague shows the other day — turns out, the second night is being officially released on LivePhish today. You can listen to the Ghost for free. Some other time, I’ll tell you about how we stayed at an expat commune stalked by a mysterious “sickness” and the mirthless lectures on materialism I received from a future Park Slope real estate agent. I still have the poster we managed to rip off a downtown wall without being arrested by the Czech secret police.

Screening-wise, it’s been a slow week. I walked out of Olivier Assays’ Boarding Gate after it became clear that the tats on Asia Argento were the only interesting thing about it. Instead, I’ve been obsessing over my There Will Be Blood DVD — much more on this later.

Boarding Gate. Olivier Assayas, 2007. N/R

From The Last Waltz to Shine a Light, most concert movies leave me wishing for a more democratic, inclusive view — even if they’re not directed by Martin Scorsese. Instead of focusing on faces and fingers, I find myself longing for wide shots, audience shots, the view of the stage and crowd as a whole. The usual approach implies that the camera is somehow superior to the regular flesh-and-blood attendee because it has VIP access to the close-ups. But the concert isn’t just in the guitarist’s fingers, and in my experience, the best bands know how to make the music fit the space and all the people in it. At the very best shows, it doesn’t matter where your seats are, or if you’re standing half a mile away.

More than any other band I’ve seen, Phish completely owned any place they found themselves in, from sweaty pubs to summer sheds, hockey rinks, Indian reservations, abandoned military bases, Madison Square Garden, and the top of air traffic control towers. There’s ample proof of this in a motherlode of videos I stumbled upon last night.

Among the stash of 300+ handheld clips (think Awesome! I Fuckin’ Shot That!) uploaded by YouTube user silverchair97, I want to draw your attention to a few choice tunes that emphasize the spectacular lighting design by Chris Kuroda, famous for improvising along with the band on the light board and sometimes referred to by fans as CK5 — the fifth member of Phish. (Once upon a time in downtown Prague, Kuroda paid Marcy a compliment — but that’s a story for another post.)

Who needs closeups of Mick Jagger’s cracked face (or Bono in 3D) when you can feast your eyes on Kuroda’s work, which manages to meld the sound, the crowd, and the stage into an oozing vessel of rock’n roll that can be appreciated from any angle?

Also Sprach Zarathustra (as always, a cover of the Deodato disco version from the Being There soundtrack rather than the Richard Strauss original Kubrick used in 2001):

The Velvet Underground’s Rock’n Roll in two parts:

The alien mothership has landed in this infamous jam out of Twist, from the Island Tour:

.. and a few more after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

These are bittersweet days for the nostalgic Phish fan. The tenth anniversary of the legendary Fall tour of 1997 is bringing a few things into sharp relief: how lost we are with Trey in rehab and Mike in hiding, how we still haven’t gotten over Coventry, and how embarrassed we still are by just how much we love this band. Mike was right: they had another 21 years in them, easily. That’s the bitter part.

And the sweet part? As always, the music. I’ve been embroiled in a fiendish listening orgy, making my way through the tour set by set, often dropping everything I was doing to stand in awe of the continuously developing sound and earth-shaking improvisation. Since they first graduated to arenas in 1994, Phish had perfected its tension-and-release jamming for big venues, but it wasn’t until the low-pressure European tour of 1997 that they discovered new spaces and rhythms in the music — a style that came to be known variously as cow funk, intergalactic space funk, and porno funk. Whatever you call it, it was groovy and psychedelic and very, very tasty. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!

At the time, that magnificent noise, sometimes driving, rising, sometimes standing still in imperceptibly morphing waves, sounded like the future to me: this was the mothership. Now it comes heavy with nostalgia for a season when I was setting off on a road trip from the Deep South to New York City with a new haircut and a brand-new girlfriend, a promising writer with a funny name and an even funnier sensibility. I met my future Schwiegereltern, saw movies that never made it to Mississippi, and crashed the Mayflower Hotel with Andy Gadiel’s crew for an epic holiday run at the Garden — only the first of four memorable New Year’s Eves I spent with Phish. Ten years later, the band is gone but the girl’s still with me.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be listening to a lot more Fall 97, and I doubt I’ll be able to resist posting about it again. For now, here are a few tunes from the beginning of the tour, sorted by ascending dankness: Black-Eyed Katy is friendly enough, but anyone except the hettiest brahs might get hurt listening to Tweezer and Run Like an Antelope. (These are all audience recordings, which accounts for the somewhat muffled quality. Just turn it up. If you dig any of this, I highly recommend Live Phish 11, the official release of 11/17/97 Denver.)

From 11/13/97 Las Vegas, Black-Eyed Katy, a new song that defined the tour and later, with added lyrics, became The Moma Dance.

[audio:Phish-BlackEyedKaty-971113.mp3]

Gumbo from 11/14/97 Salt Lake City

[audio:Phish-Gumbo-971114.mp3]

Timber Ho! from 11/16/97 Denver

[audio:Phish-TimberHo.mp3]

The half-hour Tweezer that opened 11/17/97 Denver, and a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ Fire. Again, you can get this in soundboard quality on Live Phish 11.

[audio:Phish-Fire-971117.mp3]

[audio:Phish-Tweezer-971117.mp3]

Also Sprach Zarathustra and Run Like An Antelope from 11/19/97 Champaign

[audio:Phish-AlsoSprachZarathustra-971119.mp3]

[audio:Phish-Antelope-971119.mp3]

• More from This Month in Phish History
• Download every show from Fall 1997
• Setlists from the tour so far after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

All week, I’ve been checking back on PhilLesh.net, hoping for the promised photos from the show, reasoning that you can’t possibly post about Ryan Adams’ birthday party without at least one good shot of Ryan’s green knit pom pom hat. I’ll update if any hat photos ever surface; in the meantime, my own camera-phone shot of Phil seen through my friend Walter’s white shock of late-era Garcia hair will have to suffice.

The shows? Phenomenal. After Halloween’s cover extravaganza, Tuesday’s sets mingled classic rock standards — Dixie Down, Brown Sugar, Revolution — with Grateful Dead warhorses like Deal and Shakedown, and seeing Phil drop Other One bombs from the rail was bone-shatteringly good. I was just beginning to miss the ballads when Death Don’t Have No Mercy, sung by Jackie Greene, provided a rare treat, topped off by a sweet, sweet Brokedown Palace for which I happened to be the audience member closest to Phil. A deeply satisfying concert, as good as anything I’d ever hope to see from anybody who didn’t use to be in my favorite band.

But Monday was the real reason I’ll keep on coming back as long as this music is getting played. After a first set loaded with primal late-sixties Dead grooves enhanced by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin on sax, the second set was pure Deadhead heaven. It happened to be Ryan Adams‘ birthday, reason enough for Phil to splurge and extend the show until after 1am for four hours of music filled with some of the best tunes in the Dead catalog, played with vigor, love, and inventiveness.

An informal poll conducted on the way out confirmed what we already knew: “That was profound” and “Wharf Rat dominated my skull.” Walter, who’d come in from Düsseldorf to see Phil for the first time since 1994, could hardly have picked a better time–if you’re going to take a transatlantic flight to a rock concert, this was the night. Two more shows this weekend top off what by all accounts has been a stellar 11-night run. Thank you, Phil.

Phil Lesh and Friends, Nokia Theater, 11/5/07
Set 1 (with Steve Berlin)
Brown-Eyed Women, The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion), Viola Lee Blues > Operator> Viola Lee Blues> Next Time You See Me> Viola Lee Blues, Chest Fever, Sugaree
Set 2 (with Ryan Adams)
Happy Birthday Ryan, Eyes of the World> Scarlet Begonias> China Cat Sunflower> Bird Song, Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad, Ripple, I Know You Rider> Uncle John’s Band> Dark Star> Franklin’s Tower> Dark Star
Encore: Wharf Rat

Phil Lesh and Friends, Nokia Theater, 11/6/07
Set 1: Bertha> Deal, Big River, Gone Wanderin’, Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Cosmic Charlie
Set 2: Brown Sugar> Shakedown Street> Revolution, Beat It On Down The Line> Cryptical Envelopment> The Other One> Death Don’t Have No Mercy> The Other One> Brokedown Palace
Encore: Not Fade Away

Tunes
For your listening enjoyment, audience recordings of Monday’s skull-dominating Wharf Rat encore, Tuesday’s Revolution, and Death Don’t Have No Mercy. Torrents for the Nokia run are up at etree.org in flac format, but if you’d rather grab mp3s, you can download 10/31 (312 MB), 11/5 (247 MB), and  11/6 (229 MB) while the bandwidth lasts.

[audio:WharfRat-071105.mp3]

[audio:Revolution-071106.mp3]

[audio:DeathDont-071106.mp3]

YouTube has a pro-shot clip from the 2005 Jammys, when Ryan first came out as a Deadhead, also with Wharf Rat. If you squint, you can spot me in the audience. Carefully, this clip is brutally cut at the ten minute mark — and Ryan’s not wearing any green knit hats, either.

Reviews on the fan message boards are mixed, but I had a blast at Phil Lesh’s Halloween party on Wednesday night. Halloween’s a major head holiday, and how could you not have fun getting down to Sympathy for the Devil with a room full of hippie witches, blinking aliens, Imperial stormtroopers and the usual assortment of wookies? Phil’s new line-up features the very talented Jackie Greene along with Particle’s Steve Molitz and regulars Larry Campbell and John Molo, and the show was a little heavier on blues jams than on the usual psychedelic freak-outs.

The Werewolves encore was a safe bet, but I don’t think anybody saw the cover of Phish’s Ghost coming. There was an unusual number of first times played (Don’t Let the Devil Take Your Mind, I Put a Spell on You, Boris the Spider, and Sympathy for the Devil) and the second set achieved lift-off with Caution > Voodoo Chile. I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the run, even if my chances of catching any of the rumored sit-ins — there’s talk of Bob, Bob, Ryan, Warren, Levon, and Trey — are pretty slim. I’ll keep adding setlists to this post as we make our way through the Lesh Marathon of 2007.

Phil and Friends, Nokia Theater, NY, NY
Set 1: Shakedown Street> Loose Lucy> Don’t Let the Devil Take Your Mind, Candyman, I Put A Spell on You> Jam> Story of the Ghost> Casey Jones

Set 2: Phil Reads from “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Cryptical Envelopment> Boris the Spider> Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks) > Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)> The Other One> Cryptical Envelopment> New Speedway Boogie> Fire on the Mountain, Sympathy for the Devil> I Know You Rider

E: Werewolves of London

There are no torrents up yet, but here’s the Grateful Dead playing Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London on Halloween ‘91, a show that also featured a truly frightening guest appearance by Ken Kesey, reciting e.e. cumming’s “Buffalo Bill is Defunct” mid-Dark Star to commemorate Bill Graham’s death. You can download the entire show from nugs.net. and archive.org.

[audio:Werewolves of London-Grateful Dead.mp3]

(photo: soupflowers)

It’s no secret that Marcy is a great connoisseuse of pools the world over — from the gigantic Moses-built Astoria public pool to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme, the Nerobergbad, and Stadtbad Mitte, this summer we dunked our tails in chlorinated waters from the Hell’s Gate to the Spree. So when we stumbled past this ancient-looking city pool all lit up event-like the other night, we just had to just stick our heads in.

Lo and behold, the pool wasn’t filled, wasn’t even operable, but on two balconies, an orchestra was performing works by John Cage (”Atlas Eclipticalis,” “Songbooks”) and Bernd Thewes (”Seufzer-Halde”), with a guy down in the pit doing choreographed movements along to the music. If you had to come up with a parody of a Prenzlauer Berg art happening, this would do — but the sounds, light, and motion did transform the dilapidated building into an eerie, subterranean dreamscape, a pagan temple perhaps, devoted to the Gods of Chlorine.

The Stadtbad Oderberger Strasse has had a bumpy history; the Trockenschwimmer Festival went on for the rest of the weekend with performance art, readings, and more music.

Here are a few minutes of footage from the event: