Whenever the band Phish plays on Halloween, they pretend to be another famous rock band and do an entire album by that band. This year, they did one of my all-time favorite records, "Exile on Main Street" by the Rolling Stones. It's a double album, 18 songs worth of blues boogie, and I was very curious to hear whether they pulled it off.
Friday morning, a relative who knows of my fixation with that record sent me a link to the show, but the link--as is so often the case--wasn't working. Of course I could have purchased the entire set for 99 cents a song from the LivePhish.com site, but the samples on that site are only 30 seconds long, and I wanted to try it out before committing with a credit card. So I did a little hunting on my own. Lala didn't have it. Imeem didn't have it. I couldn't find it on a Google search.
I used Grooveshark's playlist feature to arrange the songs from Phish's cover of "Exile" in order.
So I turned to old reliable Grooveshark. Sure enough, a search on "Phish Ventilator Blues" (one of the song names from "Exile") turned up a hit. From that result, I saw that the name in the "Album" column included the date, 2009/10/31. I ran another search, "Phish 2009/10/31" and there it was, the entire show. I took all the songs from "Exile" and arranged them in order on my playlist, and soon I was enjoying the band's faithfulness to the original recording, down to the horn parts and backup gospel singers, mixed with some very extended jam sections. The bit between "Ventilator Blues" and "Just Want to See His Face" is miraculous.
One of my complaints about Phish is that they often sound too perfect and clean, especially the singing. But in this particular case, it was great because Phish obviously studied the lyrics very carefully, and I could finally understand whole lyrical sections ("there's fever in the forecast now") that I've never been able to figure out despite hundreds of listens. (Mick mumbles, and he's buried pretty deeply in the mix on the original.)
I have no idea whether the recording was posted with the permission of the band. Probably not. But the beauty of Grooveshark is that users post the content themselves, in a similar fashion to YouTube, so you're not reliant on content owners.
Correction 2:22 p.m. PDT, Nov. 13: This post mischaracterized how Grooveshark gets content. All content on Grooveshark is uploaded by users. Grooveshark says it complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and pays appropriate royalties for live and other types of recordings.
I'm not a huge Phish fan. I've only seen them once, at the Warfield, a 3,000-set venue in San Francisco, back in 1994. I skipped their subsequent arena shows because I figured they couldn't top the intimacy of that experience. But I know from that one show that they're a great live band, and now they're back together and touring for the summer after a six-year hiatus. They haven't announced a Pacific Northwest date yet, but if they do, I'd be tempted to go.
Here's the thing, though: six years is a long time. What if they don't have it anymore? Even some hardcore fans I talked to said their last few tours weren't as great as their heyday at the end of the 1990s. (There's this story, probably apocryphal, that guitarist Trey Anastasio knew it was time to take a break from the band when a certain trio of fans he used to see at every show stopped coming.)
Doubt no more. Now you can find out for yourself whether they've still got it because Phish has made a full recording of every show on the 2009 tour (three, so far) available, in its entirety, for free. Start here, click on the "DOWNLOAD FREE MP3s" link at the bottom of each page, and you're in. If you're a big fan, you can pay for higher quality FLAC files or ar triple CD of the show. You have to register with an e-mail address (you could enter a fake if you're paranoid) and password, and you might want to install a small Java applet to download entire shows at once (downloading individual songs requires the old right-click save-file-as kludge).
The site itself has short samples of each song. Want to see whether that performance of "Rock and Roll" on March 7 was the Led Zeppelin song or the Velvet Underground song? Find out here. Can't imagine their first-ever performance of George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care" from last night? Right here.
See, most bands are scared to give recordings away. Why would anybody come to the show if they can already hear it online? But Phish is so confident in its live abilities, it knows that posting live recordings for free will serve as an incentive to draw fans to its show. So when will other big-name live acts start doing the same thing?
Music forums were abuzz all weekend about Live Nation's inability to handle the millions of simultaneous online requests for Phish tickets. The fabled jam band is reuniting for a summer tour after several years off, and is playing some Live Nation-owned venues, which means that tickets for those shows were available only through Live Nation. Unfortunately, Live Nation (a spin-off of Clear Channel) is relatively new at ticketing and its Web ticketing service couldn't handle the strain. The worst: apparently some would-be purchasers were offered seats, only to have the system break down when they tried to complete their purchase.
Maybe they should have tried the phone.
While I've never bought a ticket from Live Nation, I've turned to phone orders with Ticketmaster twice in the last year--for Bruce Springsteen and Sigur Ros--when the Web site was slow or offered only undesirable tickets. Each time, I got a much better seat than I could have gotten online. I imagine Ticketmaster allocates a certain number of seats at each purchase level for phone, and the lines aren't nearly as busy as the Web site, meaning the decent seats last longer.
Tony Markellis played bass on this live Trey Anastasio recording, but you won't find that information very easily if you use one of the big downloading services.
Last night, I had an interesting experience that pointed out a drawback of digital music services compared with the tried-and-true CD (or LP, or cassette). For the last few years, I've played with a very occasional pickup band--maybe one party a year, preceded by a half dozen rehearsals, then everybody back to their jobs/families/"real" bands. This year, we're playing a St. Patrick's Day party, and in the past, we've done a version of the Phish instrumental "First Tube." We wanted a quick refresher, so one of the guitarists fired up his copy of Rhapsody, found a live solo version by Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, and we were on our way.
Until, in typical self-absorbed bass player fashion, the bass player (that's me) asked "so who played bass on this song?" I asked because I admired the bassist's restraint--he stuck exactly to the original bass line, which consists of three notes repeated in the same quick figure over and over and over again. (I lack such restraint.)
Rhapsody offered no answer. iTunes doesn't carry the album in question, but does have another live version of the song from an Austin City Limits compilation. Alas, no artist information there either. The Zune Marketplace offered a bio on Trey himself, but nothing about the particular band on this album. Yahoo Music has a full review from AMG, but no album credits. Instead, I had to go to the AMG site itself, find the live album "Plasma," and click on the "Credits" tab to find out that it was one Tony Markellis.
Hats off to you, sir. And a big bass raspberry to all the major music services--this information's available, it's coded in an online repository that's widely accessible, and none of you are offering it. Or if you are, it's so deeply buried that mere mortals can't find it.
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