It's Turkey Day, I've already been up since 5 (currently 7:30), I'm waiting for my folks to get here, though that's gonna be a couple hours still, and I'm kinda bored. So naturally I start looking through some Fall '95 to eat up some time. The past couple weeks I've been going through and listening to the 12.95 shows I haven't heard yet as well as just generally filling in gaps from the entire tour. So far I've crossed of 12.12, 12.16, 10.11, and 10.29. But this morning I wanted to visit some familiar ground, so I threw on one of my favorite, and also pretty much completely overlooked, shows from the entire tour: 10.22! Everyone knows 10.21; hardly anybody knows 10.22. But perhaps I'm wrong.

When I first heard this show I wrote a stupid little review. I still agree with it but I'm going to write a better one right now.

10.22 is perhaps not that amazing within the common criteria used to rate shows. Namely "Are there hella long jams?" and "are said hella long jams stringed somewhat close together". At a respectable 16 minutes, Tweezer is the longest song of the show, but that's a far cry from a 30 minute monster that everyone will drool over on principle (Tahoe Tweezer anyone? though, for solidarity, I love that jam). Some might call this setlist "too song-y" or something, to which I call shenanigans. Sure, Tweezer might be the only big open-ended jammer of the show, but you see those segue arrows? The .net setlist writers ain't hot-doggin' it with those arrows; that shit's the real deal.

Tweezer -> Makisupa -> BBFCFM is really one musical thought (the segue to Makisupa is even led by Fish taboot) and it even happens to be 29 minutes long. **Commence drooling now** In fact, the flow from song to song is where the real strength of this show comes from. There are no shortage of shows out there with good flow, but I can't think of a single one that tops this. This show is up there with the best of the tour because we get a damn fine selection of songs that are played not less than perfectly (with the exception of The Sloth which is mildly butchered) and hold together as a whole remarkably well. Any show that has four bluegrass songs, a barbershop track, two semi-rarities in BBFCFM and Catapult, and a new cover that doesn't feel like they're being gimmicky or just trying to cram in as much stuff as possible has gotta be pretty awesome. A good 3.0 analog for this show would be Manchester '10, which everyone loves and, you guessed it, happens to be my favorite show of that year.

All that said, you really shouldn't discredit any of the jams this show has to offer either. The aforementioned Tweezer settles into a cool groove around 8 minutes with Fish playing a "Destiny Unbound" beat, striking his ride on the 2nd and 4th sixteenth notes of each beat. As opposed to the 1st and 3rd sixteenth (otherwise just known as just playing 1/8 notes), displacing those strikes by one sixteenth of note makes for a cool somewhat off-kilter sound. A very nice peak follows. Stash is very fiery. That's such an easy thing to say, especially for this tour, but this one is fiery like 7.8.94 (the ALO version) is fiery. It strikes the perfect balance between being crazy tension/release enough to put it above average without just feeling like it's dragging on ad nauseam. Pretty much every time I listen to any version of Possum from Fall '95 that version becomes my favorite. I'm all "how can there exist a more ragin' version than this?" And then I listen to different Fall '95 version and I'm all "how can there exist a more ragin' version than this?" and that just goes on forever. However, because of the weirdness after Possum ends and the appearance of Catapult, this version might be my actual favorite of the tour.

To sum: this show if pretty freakin' awesome. It's overshadowed from directly following an official release and not being in December, but the spoils are a-plenty should you take the time to listen. In fact, I'd say that 10.21 through 10.31 as a whole is overshadowed. Again, everyone knows those two book-ending shows, but the stuff in between is, on the whole, pretty strong. Specifically 10.22, 24, 25, and 29 are not to be missed. I don't think there's even an 8 show stretch in November that's a strong as 10.21 to 10.31.