On June 6th, 2009 I went to Mansfield, Massachusetts to see Phish at Great Woods, a venue that was by then officially called the Comcast Centre, an icky corporate name that just doesn’t have the quite same homey feel as “Great Woods” if you ask me (or anyone else in the world besides the tiny fraction of soulless human money hounds that sit on the board of directors at either Comcast or the centre that unfortunately bears it’s name*).

Anyway, it was a lovely evening and the band put on a great show. They played a bunch of my favourites (Hood, Makisupa, Fluffhead, Golgi…they even encored with Contact) and I had a really great time. The previous night we had seen the band in Jones Beach during a steady downpour. The rain had been literally ankle-deep and though it was a still good time I gotta say I prefer the non-rainy concerts. And so do my posters!

Those first couple of years after Phish returned from hiatus I was pretty seriously into buying posters. (I’m glad I got over that; in retrospect it’s pretty silly that I looked forward to waiting in a crushing lineup so I could spend $50US on something that I had to carry around and worry about for the rest of the night, just for the privilege of either a) spending a further $400 getting the thing framed or b) putting the tube in the closet with all the other posters that will never, ever make it onto the wall.)

This concert was so early in my poster days that I walked through the gate knowing I would be buying whatever they were selling, but it turned out I really liked the print for this concert after all. It’s by a poster artist named Micah Smith and it’s a tri-coloured ink pressing that shows a forest in splashy green, yellow, and black with small cursive script along the bottom listing the band’s name, the date, and the venue (though it reads “Comcast Centre” I’m glad Micah chose to honour Great Woods with the overall design concept). Strangely, the print has always been poo-poo’d by the Phish poster community in general but like I say, I quite like it.

When I got back to Ottawa the next day (or so) later I took the poster out of the tube and noticed that it was neither signed by the artist nor numbered. The posters were usually signed but c’mon now, they were always numbered. I checked the poster geek sites and sure enough they all came that way. So disappointed was I that I emailed Micah Smith and asked if he would sign and number the poster for me if I mailed it to him with return postage. He said “sure” and he did, although not until he procrastinated so long that he felt compelled to throw in four more prints as an apology (three Mike Gordon’s and a Page one from NYC, three of which I love).

And so it is that I have framed up and hanging in the hallway by my back door the only signed copy of Micah Smith’s Great Woods poster (I don’t care! I’m calling it “Great Woods”). That said, he didn’t number it (though it is a limited run of 750 posters), choosing instead to label it “AP” for “Artist’s Print”.

Great show, great poster.

(By the way, I did buy a poster at that Jones Beach concert and it made it home in mont condition, but if I remember it right there was an opportunity to return the poster to the car before the concert started and I took it. Either way, I sold the Jones Beach print a couple of years ago after I bought a house and had to finally admit it was never going on the wall.)

*After a five-year run as the Comcast Centre Great Woods was rebranded as the Xfinity Center. May they all rot in the Dairy Queen Brimstone Fun! Zone (formerly called “Hell”).

https://www.toddmanout.com