Rhyan\djay

Jabberwocky, obviously, was fun to listen to, but I had every live recording and every rehearsal recording in there and I just couldn’t make it through all that stuff. I listened to two rehearsals and then moved it all over to the live music archive and just listened to the Live compilation and The Lundo Sessions.

I had thought that listening to a bunch of Jabberwocky would be really fun and nostalgic and it was for a while, but eventually all I heard were the out-of-tune guitars, my own failed attempts at vocal harmony, and lack of polish on the production.  Still love the songs, though.

After Jabberwocky, I had Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, which was my second listen through, and I’m still impressed at how what is essentially one long song doesn’t get boring to listen to even after 45 minutes.

Then it was Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Judas Priest.  

At one point in my life, I was thoroughly enthralled with Jimi Hendrix.  And for good reason.  But listening through those three albums this time was just kind of annoying.  Not so annoying that I got rid of them, but still annoying.  Especially all of the hard-panning in a lot of the songs.  I’m sure most of this was due to my mood, but I really didn’t get much enjoyment out of these albums this time around.

Johnny Cash took up my entire afternoon yesterday.  I listened through all of the American Recordings albums.  All of the older Cash I have exist in decade compilations (50′s, 60′s, 70′s) which I’ll listen to later.  It worked out well, because as it turned out, country music was about perfect yesterday.

And then this morning I found myself looking at four Judas Priest albums and realized I had no desire whatsoever to sit through that.  Upon examining the albums, I found that British Steel was the only one that was really needed.  The rest only had one or two songs each that I wanted, so I relegated them to the decade compilations and filed them for later listening.  British Steel, as it turns out, is a damn fine album and after listening to it, I understand why I held on to those other albums for as long as I did.

Also, I’m a bit ashamed to say, during this process, I deleted three John Coltrane albums.  My theory is that I only listen to jazz when I specifically want to hear jazz, and since I have no education in jazz and usually just want to hear an awesome drum solo or something, I’ll probably just listen to jazz radio when that situation comes up in the future.  No reason to clutter my iTunes with it.  I’m sure I’ll change my mind later and want every jazz album every made, but whatever.  Things are so easy to find nowadays anyway. 

And now:  The K’s.

Oh hell yes.

My alphabetical-by-artist has hit a bit of a snag.  I have over 24 hours worth of Grateful Dead in my iTunes: all their studio albums plus several of their named live releases (not including Dick’s Picks or Download Series, etc).

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Dead, but just prior to coming up them I’d been listening to a bunch of thrash metal.  And since I’m going by year of recording in my listening order within the Dead, I ended up listening to Europe ’72, Hundred Year Hall, and Rockin’ The Rhein in a row, which, since I wasn’t really in the mood, got to be a little much.  That’s a lot of time listening to a specific era of the Dead’s live history.  Hearing Pigpen ranting out 18 minute versions of Good Lovin’ three times was especially irritating.

Anyway, I decided it was okay to skip live recordings from now on. Which I just now noticed, that, since I finished Shakedown Street and don’t have any of the Dead’s later studio albums (IMO they’re not really worth listening to more than once), I can now be done with the Dead!  LOL

So, my previous plan of listening to everything in my iTunes in artist-alphabetical order is progressing nicely. I broke my way into the C’s this morning and listened to a whole bunch of Cake, which was fun.

Therefore, I’m obviously going to scrap it and listen to a buttload of Phish.

Whaaaaa…???

Actually, I’m just going to take a break. The reason being that Phish is playing their first live show in almost 5 years a week from today, and I was perusing phishhook.com and came across a three-page discussion of people trying to guess what the first song they’ll play will be. As I was reading this, I realized again what I love most about Phish: anything is possible. They could quite literally play anything as their first song. It may be something from their own extensive catalog; it may be one of the many covers they’ve been known to play; it may be a brand new song; or it may be 10 minutes of them chewing on cardboard. (That last one is a metaphor).
With most bands, they generally play the same set over and over on any given tour. They may switch out a song or two from show to show to keep things relatively fresh, but mostly, it’s the same. With “jam bands”, the setlist is different from night-to-night, and, obviously during songs, or after songs, there’s often a lot of jamming (improvisation), usually conforming to some pattern, like they have some songs that are open-ended, and so they jam out the ending for 10 or 40 minutes.
Phish takes that a step further, in my opinion, and it’s mostly because of their talent. Sure, there are a lot of shows that start out with Punch You In The Eye, and there are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of encores that end with Tweezer Reprise, but there’s always a chance that they’re going to play something that you never would have expected. For example, in 1999, I saw them play at Alpine Valley, and they opened the show with Guyute, followed by Fluffhead (in itself, kind of a rare thing), both of which are very constructed songs, with lots of parts, some of which include improvisational elements, but prior to that show, Fluffhead always ended the same way. For some reason, at that particular show, it ended slightly differently, which led to a completely off-the-cuff improvised jam that lasted a good 20 minutes. At that same show, they played a 4 song encore, two of which were songs that hadn’t been played in a long, long time (one of them had been almost 10 years). And it’s not like this was some special show, celebrating an anniversary or some landmark event. It was just a regular stop on their summer tour. And, honestly, most of the show was really sloppy. But those couple shining moments more than made up for it.
The real point, though, is the unknown. I love that when I go to a Phish show, there’s a possibility that just about anything can happen. Not a theoretical “well-the-world-could-end-today” kind of “anything-can-happen”, but more of “holy-crap-that-guy-at-the-counter-is-literally-insane” kind of “anything-can-happen”. Except, you know, without the imminent threat of death. Phish is mostly about fun, after all.

Anyway, after thinking about all of this, my new listening plan is to listen to nothing but Phish for the next week. Woo Phish!

Also, I’m super-excited to bring my wife to her first (and second) Phish show this summer. Wooo Phish!