I was first introduced to Phish back in the summer of 1992. I had just graduated from high school, and my best friend and I took a day trip up to Northfield, Minnesota to hang out with some guys who were a year older than us. My friend had been the drummer in a band with them the year before, and now one was a student at St. Olaf and the other at Carleton.
This was a time of extreme prejudice for me personally against any music recorded after 1980. So I was blown away when the guys popped in a bootleg cassette from a recent Phish show. There are bands playing music like this? Now? Later that day when we returned to our hometown I stopped by Musicland (remember those?) and picked up a copy of the latest Phish album at the time, A Picture of Nectar. I played the hell out of that CD that summer, and over the next few years I became a loyal Phishhead… minus the cannabis and the driving around the country in a beat-up Vanagon selling homemade burritos to scrape together the cash for a concert ticket.
But over time, the luster wore off for me. Maybe it was the fact that their later albums… well… sucked. The last good Phish album, as far as I’m concerned, was Farmhouse, and even that was an anomaly among their later works.
And yet, I still can’t resist buying the latest Phish album whenever one comes out. I stumbled upon their latest album today at Target, not even aware they had a new one out (and only barely aware that they had reunited).
So far I haven’t listened to all of it, and what I’ve heard has not impressed me much. It’s probably their best since Farmhouse, but that is weak praise indeed. But among the first few tracks, “Sugar Shack” seems to be the standout, and so I’m featuring it here for your… enjoyment?
Continuing my “moon” theme in honor of Apollo 11… The Dark Side of the Moon is arguably the most popular rock album of all time, judging by the fact that it was on the Billboard charts for 741 weeks… that’s over 14 years. It still occasionally cracks the top 200 whenever it’s re-released in a new format, and according to Wikipedia it still sells on average over 8,000 copies worldwide every week. It makes sense, I suppose. Every year there’s a new crop of 15-year-old stoners who need music. I wonder how that number correlates to weekly bong sales. And The Wizard of Oz DVDs.
But seriously… it’s hard not to like this album. It runs the gamut of just about every human emotion and experience, it’s beautifully written and (especially for 1973) masterfully produced. And in my own experience, it has healing properties: both when I was suffering a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning and when I was experiencing withdrawal from quitting caffeine cold turkey, I found the only thing that soothed my misery was lying on the floor in the dark, listening to The Dark Side of the Moon through headphones.
I was hoping to find some nice film of the band performing some of this material live back in the day. Unfortunately there’s a frustrating dearth of such footage on YouTube. The best I could get was the low-key jamming of Any Colour You Like. Not bad, but I really wanted one of my two favorite tracks from the album, “Us and Them” or “Breathe.” So I had to settle for this latter-day performance by Dave Gilmour, half of Nick Mason (since he only seems to be half there anymore), and their legions of hired musicians. Certainly it’s not a bad performance, but Pink Floyd’s volatile interpersonal relationships (and Rick Wright’s death) means we’ll never again see the classic ’70s lineup performing together.
Pink Floyd is a band that polarizes its fans (almost as much as it polarizes itself). People who are more into ’60s psychedelia prefer the early years — ideally featuring Syd Barrett — and those who are more into prog (or at least concept albums, or at least better production values) prefer the later albums.
The fulcrum point between these two Floyds is 1971′s Meddle. Here’s the first track from that album, a churning, brooding jam that culminates in one of the most disturbing vocal utterances in all of music.
Ozric Tentacles were always a bit of an anomaly, even in the inherently anomalous world of progressive music. They were psychedelic space jam rock before that style had really made its ’90s comeback with Phish and their copycat followers. And by the time the style had begun to flourish, Ozrics were mostly washed up.
The string of albums the band made in the late ’80s and early ’90s were amazingly consistent — which was both good and bad. The music was fun and expertly performed, but each album was largely indistinguishable from the others: an even mix of up-tempo jam rock, reggae-tinged toke-up tracks, and trippy ambient psychedelia. It worked, but even serious fans only really needed to have one Ozric Tentacles CD in their collection.
Of course, I owned maybe five of their albums before I figured this out.
I think their two strongest albums were 1989′s Pungent Effulgent and the 1990 follow-up, Erpland. Erpland is definitely the one to own, and its title track gives you a good indication of the nature of their “up-tempo jam rock” side, heard here in a 1991 live performance when the band was at its peak of success.
This is a pretty good live version: decent sound (even though the video is subpar), lots of energy, and mostly good playing. The one jarring element for me (as a bass player) is the bass. If I remember correctly, the band did go through a number of bassists, and the one playing here was either exhausted by this point in the gig or was simply not up to the part. Disappointing.
Here’s another track iTunes turned up on a random shuffle today.
If asked to cite the most commercially successful prog rock album of all time, the first two albums that would probably come to mind are both by Pink Floyd: 1973′s Dark Side of the Moon and 1979′s The Wall. These two albums bookend Floyd’s peak period of creative and commercial success, and both are unqualified five-star classics.
The Wall, of course, also became every high school stoner’s favorite movie, a 1982 feature starring Bob Geldof as “Pink.” It’s a disturbing trip into the festering psychosis of a rock star driven over the edge by life on the road and inside the corporate music machine. This clip is one of the most troubling scenes in the film, and it perfectly encapsulates the artistic success of the movie as the ultimate music video. Pink, the character, rarely speaks. He lashes out at the world around him and the unfortunate prostitute who happens to be in his hotel room when he cracks. The voice of Roger Waters in the song becomes the voice in Pink’s head, crying for help, screaming to get out, and yet silenced by the mental wall Pink has defensively constructed around his subconscious. He can’t speak, so he acts, rashly and without explanation.
