Welcome to the 354th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first and easiest of December. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery clip. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, a hint will be posted. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Reminder: For the first MJM of each month, only folks who have never won an MJM are allowed to answer before the hint. If you have never won an MJM, please answer as a blog comment below. If you have previously won an MJM, but you'd like to submit a guess before the hint, you may do so by PMing me; once the hint has been posted, everyone should answer on the blog. If that's confusing to you, check out the handy decision tree that @ucpete threw together to help guide you. If you're not sure if you've won before, check in the MJM Results spreadsheet linked below.

Answer: A single clipper that seems to have initially stumped both newcomers and veterans alike! But a sharp ear and attendance of this jam allowed our freshest member to join the MJM hunt for 7 wins, @SolarGarlic505, his very first download code. He was able to edge out the only vet to answer over PM, @Mshow96 - who seems to have a knack for solving single-clip Baker's Dozen jams. Both were able to identify one of my personal favorite and heavily underrated jams of the Baker's Dozen: the Coconut Tweezer from 7/21/17. Stay tuned everyone, for next week the puzzles increase in number and difficulty by a count of 1!

For the past few episodes, we've spent a lot of time talking about 2018, with good reason. But for the 20th anniversary of this legendary show, we're going back to revisit the wild and wonderful 11.27.98 from Worcester. Check it out.

Read more...

Gobble Gobble Mystery Jammers, @ucpete back at the controls for a moment to mess with you before sending you off deep into the tr0nZ to get all the discounts ($7 box sets? Done.). Did I forget to mention – forget to mention: Welcome to the 353rd edition of the MJM, home of Phish nerds, and the ancient art of jam recognition? (No, this isn't a "Cities"-themed MJM.) The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of the three mystery clips. These three clips are connected by a theme, but the theme needn't be part of the correct answer. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, a hint will be posted. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck! You'll need it.

Hint: It's three versions of the same song, about three years apart from one another (though the clips are not necessarily in chronological order). I thought for sure someone reading the forum yesterday would've figured this one out by now...

Answer: For the sixth time this year, the Blog has the pleasure of crowning another MJM Emeritus. @lostboy01 burst onto the MJM scene in April 2018 with his first win, and proceeded to go on one of the fastest sprints to seven wins we've ever seen, including winning five MJMs between MJM340 and MJM347 alone. After a five week dry spell – an eternity for @lostboy01 – he solved the most difficult MJM of the year (with a generous hint, to be fair) to finally reach the promised land. This week, he catapulted across the finish line by identifying the 6/29/00 "Catapult," 7/18/03 "Catapult," and 3/2/97 "Catapult." For his efforts, in addition to the standard key card to The Vault from Kevin Shapiro and addition to the massive group text with the band (Mike's emoji game on fleek), @lostboy01 receives a copy of the new Baker's Dozen remastered box set on 56 8 track tapes presented in a carboard box Fishman tucked for all three Gorge shows this summer, a copy of the Curveball soundcheck "Turbidity Jam" (with Mike on plunger), a Kasvot Växt-signed rock that doubles as a one-way ticket to the Subterranean Arctic Neuro Technology Orientation Station, and most importantly, an open invitation to stump the MJM regulars at this beautiful game. Congratulations My Friend, My Friend – you'll always remember where you were when you were elected into the MJM Hall of Fame. Stay tuned for MJM354 on Monday, when wumbo returns for an easy single clipper.

Beyond the Pond is a bi-weekly podcast in which Brian Brinkman (@sufferingjuke) and David Goldstein (@daveg924) use the music of Phish as a gateway to introduce the listener to many other bands, the vast majority of which are not jambands. An episode generally begins with a deep dive into a designated portion of Phish improvisation, and then can spin off to any variety of musical themes and other acts, the overarching purpose being introducing the listener to as many new and different bands as possible.

Read more...

Welcome to the 352nd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the third of November. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of the two mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, a hint will be posted. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Answer: Congrats to @The_Blob, who gave the blog less than an hour to fantasze about using a funny hint to describe how Horn-y this puzzle is: 5/7/94 "Horn" and 6/20/97 "Horn." In doing so, he continues his meteoric rise onto the MJM scene with his third win, all in 2018. Speaking of 2018, we've only got a handful MJMs left the year, so stop by Monday for MJM tree-fitty-tree when the blog guarantees* the difficult puzzle lasts more than fitty-five minutes. *guarantees not guaranteed

[The following does not necessarily reflect the opinion(s) of anyone who works for, or who has ever worked or volunteered for, Phish.net or The Mockingbird Foundation. It is dedicated to @RSTurner, who requested it. So blame him. It's entirely his fault. -Ed.]

“ÍT comes in threes,” some say about bad news.

First, there were several vicious, cowardly attacks on a few fans at the Gorge in July, possibly by one or more white supremacists who were apparently in attendance. Then there was the seemingly last minute cancellation in late August of what was promoted to be, and likely would have been, Phish’s greatest festival ever, Curveball, which led (among other things) to “Curvivors” commiserating for weeks about their (and our) unfortunate—and for many, truly heart-breaking—curveballing. And, now, there is the fake-covering of a fake album by a fake band with a fake backstory, in the all-hallowed second set of Halloween: a set with a legendary history, a history replete with Great Performances that are still wondrous to this day, years —even decades— later.

Read more...

Although it only lasted just over two weeks, this Fall Tour was a doozy. We have come to outlive our brains, maybe? We have plenty to talk about, including the Hampton Simple vs. Hampton Golden Age, the lyrical improvements of this tour, the secretive nature of the Kasvot Voxt set and Kuroda's continuing magic.

Read more...

Welcome to the 351st edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second of November. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of the two mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, a hint will be posted. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Answer: After a whopping six and a half years, @MiguelSanchez pulls out his third win, now on track to reach emeritus status by 2030! #MiguelSanchezForEmeritus2030 - I'm pulling for ya, dude. In rather short time he sniffed out the theme of NYE '17, with the featured jams of choice being the 12/28/17 No Men In No Man's Land and 12/29/17 Chalk Dust Torture; both have been getting lots of spin on my end in preparation for the upcoming NYE run. I invite all of you to join next week, where @ucpete has helped to concoct a tough but solvable MJM.

Beyond the Pond is a bi-weekly podcast in which Brian Brinkman (@sufferingjuke) and David Goldstein (@daveg924) use the music of Phish as a gateway to introduce the listener to many other bands, the vast majority of which are not jambands. An episode generally begins with a deep dive into a designated portion of Phish improvisation, and then can spin off to any variety of musical themes and other acts, the overarching purpose being introducing the listener to as many new and different bands as possible.

Read more...

Welcome to the 350th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first and easiest of November. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery clip. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, a hint will be posted. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Reminder: For the first MJM of each month, only folks who have never won an MJM are allowed to answer before the hint. If you have never won an MJM, please answer as a blog comment below. If you have previously won an MJM, but you'd like to submit a guess before the hint, you may do so by PMing me; once the hint has been posted, everyone should answer on the blog. If that's confusing to you, check out the handy decision tree that @ucpete threw together to help guide you. If you're not sure if you've won before, check in the MJM Results spreadsheet linked below.

Hint: A real-time look into how this clip was selected, at the time of its performance...

@ucpete, mouth agape: "Dude, this would make a dope MJM!"

Me, turning to @ucpete: "I was just thinking the exact same thing hah!"

@ucpete: "Good thing you're taping tonight, let's use your recording!"

Answer: No, this MJM was not a giant crustacean from the Paleolithic era. Quite the opposite, in fact - this jam was a young 'un, the 10/17/18 Mercury. As the hint suggests I had the good fortune to catch this show with @ucpete. We may have gotten our rage on that evening, but more importantly @RageWithPage wins his very first MJM code! Will he be a one-hit wonder, or will he now enter the fray as a new challenger on a path to the promised land of emeriti? Stay tuned next week to find out!

Congratulations! We made it. Another Las Vegas Phish run is in the books and with its successful conclusion, Fall Tour 2018 draws to a close. Is everybody ready to be spoon fed some perception? Long time readers of my recaps will know to either bail out now or start limbering up your fingers so they are ready to tap out some “Shade” about how you don’t want to know what I think about while listening to Phish work their magic, because you are just here to find out what happened during the show. In the simplest terms possible THEY CRUSHED IT...again...have a nice day!

Read more...

I went to the MGM Sports Book before the show. I had a question. An important one. "What is the largest sum of money I can bet on Phish winning the show tonight?" The attendant's raised eyebrows hinted that I was onto something, perhaps, that the other patrons knew not, "Sir, we don't bet on Cirque du Soleil here - that's only legal inside the confines of Circus Circus." I'll play your game, you rogue, thought your author, and off to Circus Circus I went, fistfuls of cash at the ready. This was a sure bet. I just knew it. This is what seperates Phish fans from the more "amateur" gambler: we know that we are always playing with house money; we know the odds are always weighted in our favor, after all, Phish remains undefeated since 1983.

Read more...

[we'd like to thank guest recapper Brian Brinkman, @howard_roark / @sufferingjuke and @_beyondthepond on Twitter, for sharing what went down last night for the blog - ed.]

Perhaps there are no Phish dates more closely aligned than November 1 and January 1. Both have received scant performances - 5 for 11/1, 3 for 1/1 - and both follow the two most celebrated holidays in the Phish calendar: Halloween & New Year’s Eve, respectfully. Yet the similarities all but end there. While New Year’s Day has been treated as a moment for pause and reflection before moving onwards and into a new year, November 1 has historically allowed the band a moment to collect the new sounds and ideas they’d been secretly brewing up over the last few months, and share them freely with the entire fanbase. One needs only to think of the stunning “Light” from 11/1/09 that displayed the band’s renewed trust and dedication to their own creative future, or the regal peak of “Twist” from 11/1/13 that seemed to signal their elation over debuting an entire album’s worth of new material the previous night, or the “Light -> Dogs -> Lengthwise” from 11/1/14 that contained all the raucous energy and zany Phish nonsense from the previous night’s Chilling Thrilling set to hear how fascinating this night can be and how important it is to their annual development.

It was with all this in mind that I settled into the MGM Grand Garden Arena for my 70th Phish show, first in November, and 5th in Sin City. Following the bizarre mind-fuck that was the Kasvot Växt set - seriously, they crafted an entire non-band’s history to throw their fanbase off and live debut their 3rd new album in 5 years - I had a feeling the band was going to approach November 1, 2018 with an outsized portion of creativity and stress-free jamming. For the most part, I was correct.

Read more...

[we'd like to thank Suzy Barros, @SuzyDrano (Twitter), for recapping last night's Halloween show - ed.]

Having heard the rumor that Fishman had been spotted wearing a T-shirt by an obscure-ish (but real) band called “The Residents” and having seen a screen-shot of a text with him and someone else alluding to the fact last night's cover would be an obscure album from 1981, I knew it could be a remote possibility, being Phish and all, but it still seemed a bit far-fetched. So many other (slightly) more plausible rumors were being floated and when the anticipation had reached an absolute fever pitch and doors opened we got our first glimpses of the Phishbill. The album would be i rokk by the band Kasvot Växt. An aside here - I was at the Wingsuit Halloween show when speculation was super high for The Allman Brothers Band's Eat A Peach, which I was mega excited about. I sat in my seat and read the Phishbill and immediately started laughing. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but the Phishbills are written in the most bizarre, stilted way where everything about it, especially the quotes from the band, made it seem like a total joke. Which is the exact same vibe that I got from THIS Phishbill, making it more likely to me that it may in fact be true. Also, I was sober this time around, and reading the Phishbill a few times before the show started, it did seem pretty plausible??

Anyway, speculation and rumors and much internet sleuthing were all happening in a major way, but it all finally came to an end as the lights went down and we went into the first “extremely uneven” set of the night. I love a fast opener like ‘“Buried Alive” (nice call Russ); it’s got the ability to whip the crowd into a frenzy right from the get-go. "Buried" has always conveyed this dissonant sense of chaotic unpredictability to me, and this version didn’t disappoint.

Read more...

For the third edition (or fifth, depending on how you count them) of From the Tapers' Section, I've chosen Halloween, 1998. Yes, today is the 20th anniversary of this show – Phish's first multi-night Las Vegas run, and their first Las Vegas Halloween show. It seemed fitting to share this show today, with the high anticipation of what will be their fourth Vegas Halloween show in the past two decades. But beyond the obvious historical significance of this show, I had been wanting to use this show in the FTTS series for some time now simply because the sound quality of this particular tape is unbelievably good. About a year ago, I wanted to hear the "Wolfman’s Brother" from this show as an AUD; searching through quick snippets of each circulating recording, this tape stood out as a cut above the rest. Since first hearing this source, I kept coming back to it, stunned by its quality – it is quite possibly my favorite sounding 1.0 tape. So, while this show is both famous and infamous for various reasons, my decision to select this recording for FTTS3 was more about the merits of the tape and less about the music contained within.That isn’t to shortchange the music – there were plenty of musical highlights inside and outside of the Velvet Underground Loaded "musical costume."

Read more...