2021/8/14 Phish @ Atlantic City Beach
The only rule is it begins.
It was the first show since the last show–isn’t that always how it works regardless of the passage of time–but this one felt a little different as my last taste of live music was June 23 when Trey Anastasio reopened The Beacon Theatre in front of a fully vaccinated and sold-out room. The following morning I headed to Camp Westmont in Wayne County, PA, where I work as a group leader with thirty-four eleven year old boys under my care. The last of those, including my two sons and nearly six hundred others boarded their respective busses home last Saturday morning, August 14, and with no charges remaining, I promptly hightailed it home to hug my wife and dog, drop off my stuff and hit the road to Atlantic City where the Phish from Vermont had two of three shows remaining after an opening night heater.
Having lived in a COVID bubble out in the sticks where camper safety was priority number one for every minute between June 23 and August 14, going from the country to the casino was a sensory overload of the highest order as upwards of 40,000 phans, phriends, and capitalists gathered on the Monopoly board of Atlantic City’s lawless streets in search of good times and opportunity. From the purple squares of Mediterranean and Baltic to the dark blue of Boardwalk and Park Place, it was nothing short of a total shit show. Yet, despite the fact that the colors bled and the board(walk) was washed out and in disrepair, everything was absolutely perfect and I honestly can’t think of a single problem, hiccup, or hassle.
State of the city aside, sea air is always full of positive vibrations and never more so than when Phish plants their flag in the sand. So while camp was one type of rewarding, livemusic’n with the ones I love fills my cup with spiritual nourishment in a totally different kind of way. I’ve been overwhelmed with love and positivity since first passing Go on Atlantic City’s lawless boardwalk and now three days later, I can happily aver that the afterglow is real and it’s spectacular. Soul food like this makes me who I am; it’s the answer to both what and why I’m always chasing.
So while some people choose to wade into the velvet sea, others, still, run like an antelope out of control, leaving no opportunity to change their minds or back out of their decisions. Guess which one I am??? Just four hours removed from a fifty-two day COVID-free bubble and adjusting slowly to all the stimuli as I got my bearings, I jumped into the chaos that is Atlantic City with both feet. After a brief jaunt on the boardwalk and a stop at a meeting spot in which I literally ran into another phriendly face with every turn of the head, it was time to enter the ginormous makeshift venue. A seamless and easy process, this was the first major event in as long as I can remember that featured neither metal detectors nor wands, bag checks nor lines.
Phish Inc. are the industry leaders in creating a travelling road show, and the local 68 erected the equivalent of a small city on a three-quarter of a mile stretch of Atlantic City’s expansive oceanfront between Caesar’s and the ferris wheel. To give you an idea of how massive the space was, the beach was marked with letters “A” to “G” and the soundboard was located halfway between the stage and the “A”. In front of the soundboard, there was an MSG floor’s length of space with at least double that much space to both the left and right, packed body to body with a sea of people. If you’re trying to keep score at home, that’s roughly two hockey rinks per letter which is about fourteen front to back and four left to right (if you trust both my math and my estimation). Here’s some recently released drone footage.
After some brief exploration, we settled with some friends in the dead center close to the giant “A” which didn’t last too long as the crowd space wasn’t really to my liking. So after a good bit of first set wandering down to the sides and into the ocean (terrific space but poor sound), I decided the best space for me was in the wayyyy back, where the sound from the relay stacks was spot on and the sights–though almost half a mile away (!)–were perfect with the city skyline and the ocean to my left and right, respectively, and the stage and LED-tricked out ferris wheel to my front and back.
It’s all about the music.
My first live song in fifty-two days (sleep away camp level entertainment notwithstanding), “Slow Llama” opened the show with its purposefully sultry and sexy vibes. I like slow and deliberate Phish a lot and the evening’s offerings were tailor made for my re-entry. Just for the sake of committing to this in writing, “Slow Llama” > “Llama”, and I’ll take it (almost) every fucking time. Of its five or so total performances, this was the first one I caught live and I ate that shit up. Every note and song choice seemed both inspired and intentional, not least of all the ensuing “Tube” whose lyrics allude to the vaccine that allowed for a gathering of this size in post-pandemic America to be (mildly? passably?) safe: “Rather give myself to science, thought that I could help.”
Though not the bustout it once was (795 show gap from 11/15/91 – 2/28/03), “Destiny Unbound” remains a seldom played treat, even if it was the second offering of this summer’s repeat tour. “Ya Mar’s” reggae vibes fit the oceanside setting perfectly, as Trey encouraged a Page solo with “Play it for the Jersey Shore, Leo!”. “46 Days” and a nearly flawless if straight ahead “Reba” (sans-whistling) followed. If a Bob Marley cover is in your wheelhouse (note: everything is in Phish’s wheelhouse), then there’s no better way to feel the vibrations than a three-plus year bustout of “Soul Shakedown Party” at a sandy beach party with 40,000 of your closest phriends. The evening’s first taste of evil Phish came in the form of “Split Open And Melt” that after fifteen-minutes of exploration and improvisation gave way to another beachside inspired tune–”I saw Satan on the beach–along with a heavy dose of Page’s theatrics in the form of the set closing “Squirming Coil”.
After some wading in the velvet sea and laughing with friends new and old, I got settled into a happy place on the back of the beach with plenty of space back between the “E” and “F”. “I Never Needed You Like This Before”, the song that opened Phish’s first show in nineteen months, was played for the third time this tour to open the second set. A monster “Drowned” from The Who’s Quadrophenia kicked off the rest of the uninterrupted set. “Ghost” followed before an intro-less but otherwise gorgeous “Scents and Subtle Sounds” and an unfinished but characteristically energetic “Chalkdust Torture.” For my money, the evening’s highlight was “No Quarter”, a rarely played Led Zeppelin tune that along with the earlier “Drowned” is something of an annual offering. The segment from “Drowned” through “No Quarter” felt like one long uninterrupted jam, even as it was marked by different songs and a short breather midway.
“Slave to the Traffic Light” could have easily closed the set, just as SOAM could have closed the first, but this band just wants to play and play and play some more. Well, “Suzy’s ‘bout as faithful as a slot machine, pays off once in a while but then she robs you clean,”–was this song written for Atlantic City???– and the ever raucous “Suzy Greenberg” that followed put an exclamation point on a killer second set. Just as I always mentally insert the doo-do-do-do of the Giant Country Horns into every Suzy Greenberg I’ve ever heard since 1991, I can no longer hear “A Life Beyond a Dream” without seeing Susan Tedeschi in my mind’s eye. That being said, the encore featured a gorgeous version of the offering from Trey’s Ghosts In the Forest and would have sent me home happy, but with “Tweezer Reprise” hanging in the balance from the previous night, there’s never a wrong time to throw down the best three minutes in rock and roll and the boardwalk faithfull headed for the exits panting and longing for more.
17,199 steps, every one of which should count double because dancing in the sand is hard fucking work.
SET 1: Llama[1], Tube, Destiny Unbound > Ya Mar, 46 Days, Reba[2], Soul Shakedown Party, Split Open and Melt, The Squirming Coil
SET 2: I Never Needed You Like This Before, Drowned > Ghost -> Scents and Subtle Sounds[3] > Chalk Dust Torture[4] > No Quarter > Slave to the Traffic Light > Suzy Greenberg
ENCORE: A Life Beyond The Dream, Tweezer Reprise
[1] Performed in slow, funk style
[2] No whistling
[3] Did not contain the intro
[4] Unfinished
Full show audio:
Is this a concert or a festival?
A little bit of both, me thinks, as post-show offerings ran the gamut from Spafford to Pink Talking Fish, Cory Wong to Lettuce–that’s just Saturday night!–and I’m sure I’m missing a few. Throw in the nitrous mafia that overtook the boardwalk in plain sight, along with the timeless neon, curfew-less music and 40-50k like-minded phriends, and Atlantic City was a sight for sore eyes, especially those still hovering in re-entry status.
It’s all about the people. Here are some of them though many others failed to upload.
2021/8/14 11:59 pm Lettuce @ Hard Rock Hotel
After negotiating the casino floor with its $50 Saturday night minimums and passing a difficult hour in which my overpriced bed beckoned and the music hadn’t yet started, I persevered and somehow made it to 12:40 am (now technically 8/15) when Lettuce took the stage. My first indoor show since pre-COVID with no rules to speak of, this is what I’ve missed: massive indoor sound with seriously amplified thump coming up through the carpeted floors, swirling lights bouncing around the room, and a jazzed-up crowd of folks still riding the wave of Phish’s awesome energy who bore down to get down to the best modern funk band in the business.
Make no mistake, even as he is surrounded by awesome talent, this band goes as Adam Deitch goes. Deitch beats. Always. Win. Funkiest drummer around, Deitch sets the tone and his highly talented mates have no problem keeping up and following his lead: Adam “Shmeeans” Smirnoff [guitar], Erick “Jesus” Coomes [bass], Ryan Zoidis [alto, baritone, tenor sax, Korg X-911], Eric “Benny” Bloom [trumpet, horns], and Nigel Hall [vocals, Hammond B-3, Rhodes, clavinet, keyboards]. This band just fucking straight rips. I danced my ass off for ninety minutes until 2:20 am before my legs and body just quit. Doesn’t happen often, but it happens, and food and my hotel were calling.
10,700 barefoot steps, every single one in direct defiance of the message my tired body was screaming at me.
2021/8/15 Phish @ Atlantic City Beach
The Final Hurrah.
After eating a day’s worth of food for breakfast (cheesesteak with eggs) at famed White House Subs, rest and shenanigans ensued at the Borgata pool until we ultimately found our way back to the boardwalk for the final installment of Phish: Atlantic City. Having finally found the luxury that was the back of the beach, I convinced my number one to come along and even though she’s a veteran of a handful of shows dating back to The Palace at Auburn Hills in 1995, Diana is a one to my four at YEMSG type of girl. Committed to hanging in the back this time around, we were waylaid by a few friends who had a *borrowed* king size flat sheet’s worth of space to share in front of the soundboard.
Now less than two-hundred feet from the stage for the first time all weekend, I doubted that we would stay long past the opener even as I was psyched to be in it with the best company on the planet. In the final analysis, this dream crew of five held our space quite admirably for the first set–even if it felt like the walls were closing in at times–before bailing for the vast space of deeper territory.
So for the first time this weekend, I was immersed in Chris Kuroda’s new lighting rig, which fwiw loses its impact from half a mile away as the day before. But for Sunday’s climactic ending–especially the first set which was nearly as perfect as a set of Phish can be– we were firmly cast under the spell of CK5’s four-dimensional magic. Opening with instrumental “The Landlady”, the tone was set early for some serious raging in the sand before giving way to the intro of the previous evening’s intro-less “Scents and Subtle Sounds”, corrected early on this night while also letting the crowd know that the band is well aware of what they’re playing and when. Mike Gordon, looking very much like a Bohemian artist, was decked out in a full zipped up leather jacket, jeans, and a scarf, and “The Moma Dance” became his palette on just the evening’s third song. For nearly fifteen minutes of off-script improv, Mike’s bombs mixed with Page’s Hohner clavinet and Trey’s octave pedal as the band swam deeper than the reach of Atlantic City’s teenage lifeguards. And just to get it on record, Jon Fishman, often ceding the spotlight to his mates, is the best drummer in the business and I’m a big fan of his new sample pad, not yet debuted these past few nights.
Although it at first appeared that “Blaze On” would emerge from the rubble left by the tidal wave that was an unfinished “Moma Dance”, a cover of Scandinavian sensation’s Kasvot Vaxt “Final Hurrah” emerged in all its glory. Dense and white hot, it soon ceded to the classic combo of “Mike’s Song” > “I Am Hydrogen” > “Weekapaugh Groove”, a trio of songs that allow these four men to play their hearts out while those on both sides of the stage revel in every emotion on the spectrum, plus a few too complex to be quantified by mere vocabulary. While Saturday’s show was a monster front to back (“Reprise” included), “ Mike’s Groove” felt like the singular (suite of) song(s) that I waited fifty-two days to hear. As if reading my mind, Fishman reached for his sample pad for the first time in two days with a well-timed “YEAH!”, marking the first break in the action since “Landlady”. Amen.
Was “The Sloth” that followed a nod to the furry friend just to my left??? Though we’ll never know for sure, this tour debut sure felt that way. “Roggae” towered before washing away into one of the most consistently fun tunes in the catalog, “Back On the Train.” Are those really the opening notes of “You Enjoy Myself?” Yes. Did I dream this set? No, Marc, this is the real thing. We fondly nicknamed our blanket “The Truth”, and if we’re being honest, while I found Sunday’s first set to be amongst one of my all-time favorites, that opinion is highly colored by the experience of having shared the night with Diana and a small handful of my favorite people in the world. So twenty minutes of perfection later, Trey even putting his guitar down to share in the groove for a Mike bass solo, Phish opus YEM put an exclamation point on one of my favorite all-time sets of Phish. (Mind you, I’m not comparing AC N3 2021 to MSG NYE 1995 or any other show for that matter, but they say wisdom is the product of knowledge and experience and I seem to enjoy these more as the years go on. Sure, every now and again I think, if only I knew then what I know now. Alas, it doesn’t work that way and as I enjoy this ride more with each passing day, I allow for the possibility that every show will be the best show since the last show till the next show. Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare. Wrong band? Don’t think so.)
After donating our *borrowed* blanket to the good folks around us who were more than happy to receive the gesture, we took a moonlit stroll arm in arm along the water’s edge. Wait, this is still a Phish show??? Ahhhmazing! Ultimately, we made our way to the spacious area between “D” and “E” and settled in for set six of six.
As has been the case for much of Phish 4.0 (I’m not willing to engage in that debate, 4.0 is as clear as day to me), set two featured a heavy dose of improvisation and thematic jams. “Carini”, third of the tour, would start the musical theme that connected through “Set Your Soul Free” > “Beneath A Sea of Stars Part 1” > “Piper” -> “Carini” > “Waves” > “Simple” > “About To Run” before the sixth and final set of Phish: Atlantic City saw its first break in the action. The “Piper” stands out as a personal set favorite as set dos ran the gamut from dark to light, mellow to heavy, and back again, ending with a hefty dose of face-melting guitar shred in the form of “About to Run” and “First Tube”. Trey Anastasio, de facto leader of the musical quartet that assembled a portable city and over 100,000 people on the beach in three days, earned the right to raise his “4.0” Languedoc over his head like the rock and roll God that he is, and we were all right there to salute him, goosebumps covering our collective flesh as this wild ride came to a close.
Only a handful of songs could have risen to the challenge of Sunday night’s encore slot, and the first notes of “Fluffhead” were received with jubilation if not surprise. So while the flawless fifteen minute composition could have easily been the final song of the weekend, the Phish from Vermont evidently had nine more minutes in them as they graced us with a lovely “Backwards Down the Number Line”.
Happy happy oh my friend.
Full show audio:
21,803 steps.
SET 1: The Landlady, Scents and Subtle Sounds[1] > The Moma Dance[2] > The Final Hurrah > Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, The Sloth, Roggae > Back on the Train, You Enjoy Myself
SET 2: Carini > Set Your Soul Free > Beneath a Sea of Stars Part 1 > Piper -> Carini > Waves > Simple > About to Run, First Tube
ENCORE: Fluffhead > Backwards Down the Number Line
[1] Intro only
[2] Unfinished
Enjoy a ridiculous gallery of pics from Scott Harris, available for purchase at https://scottharris.bigcartel.com/?fbclid=IwAR3E4tUnwNrV0VuscE67RbFdhbyInmP6zxc5WLxnr5HUGgHz_w4jtXD6xNc
2021/8/15 Dogs In A Pile @ Anchor Rock Club
One of the great joys of the last year has been the relationship I’ve formed with local band Dogs In A Pile. Having first met when they played a backyard gig at #marckomitoville, we became fast friends and I’ve enjoyed watching their success at least as much anyone who didn’t give birth to them. I’ve seen a number of private backyard shows, a few private indoor shows, and a handful of outdoor ragers with almost five hundred people. But never have I seen this band rage a proper rock club filled with hungry bodies.
Playing a mix of originals and jam band favorites like “Feel Like A Stranger” and “Boogie On Reggae Woman”, these five young dudes from the Jersey Shore have musicality oozing from their Berklee pores. I love these guys so much that Diana coming Phishin’ included the stipulation that she’d be out till 3 am on a Sunday work night so we could catch their late set. Don’t force me to say I told ya so, just do yourself a favor and check these guys out asap.
9,307 steps.
Also, worth noting that my total steps for 8/15/2021 were 49,415, a single day record eclipsing previous highs set at Mountain Jam and Peach Fest. Revisiting my earlier question–Is this a concert or a festival?–statistics don’t lie (though they can be manipulated), and my answer lies equally in both the numbers and the eight pages of text that summarize the weekend (and I only hit 2 out of 3).
Six pages later, I still feel like I failed to enumerate how special this weekend was. It’s all about the music. Sure, okay. It’s all about the people. Getting warmer. The fact is, the two are inextricably linked and music is merely the scaffolding in which love and community come together and my spirit feels free enough to roam outside my body. If you read this far, thanks for sharing in the magic and being a part of my journey. I love you all.