I received yesterday the 4 Miami shows in miniSD USB Slots, like the Festival 8. I ordered them from livephish.com and they arrived in 10 days, so still quicker than Dry Goods.

I still have to take pictures of my Joy Box but I'm quite busy with a baby to take care of and a new game system to play with.
Yes, I finally bought a Xbox 360 to complete my video game collection. Yes, the one I told I wouldn't buy in the first place... I'm glade I only pay 29€ for it but I bought some games too...

Despite all of that money spent, I wonder if I wouldn't go to the USA this summer to finally see Phish. If Phish doesn't come to you, come to them !

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW HERE

After the New Orleans Relief back in 2005, Phish release today another archival show to help Haiti.

This one looks as fantastic on paper than the previous one, I can't wait to listen to it.

Thursday, 11/19/1992
Ross Arena, St. Michael's College
Colchester, VT

Set 1: Maze, Fee -> Foam, Glide, Split Open and Melt, Mound, The Divided Sky, Esther, Axilla, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Run Like an Antelope

Set 2: Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Bouncing Around the Room, It's Ice, I Walk the Line, Tweezer -> Big Black Furry Creature from Mars -> Tweezer, Big Ball Jam, Poor Heart, Fast Enough for You, Llama, Hold Your Head Up > Lengthwise > Hold Your Head Up, Cavern

Encore: Bold As Love

Notes: Divided Sky, Antelope and Weekapaug featured teases of Those Were the Days. This show featured the debuts of Axilla, FEFY, and Lengthwise and the Phish debut of I Walk The Line. The start of the second set included an Owner of a Lonely Heart tease. Mike’s Song included an Under Pressure jam. Weekapaug included a vocal jam ending and Price of Love teases. BBFCFM featured lyrics from I Walk The Line. Big Ball Jam also debuted, as Trey explained the concept and mentioned that it was written for Pete Shaw. Poor Heart, FEFY and Llama featured Gordon Stone on pedal steel guitar. Trey introduced Fish as “Eyeball Man” before Lengthwise, which was performed in more of a reggae style than other versions and featured a vacuum solo from Fishman. Bold As Love was played for the first time since April 18, 1990 (318 shows).

Version française ici : gamusik.netsan.fr

I'm still up side down with the music.

Ok, I don't listen to Phish for 26 years but still there first show was on 2nd December 1983.

Part of my little celebration here will be to catch up with the present by listening to the Set II of the 29th November show in Portland. This way, i'll be ready to listen to MSG I tomorrow.

I hope that this flyer will be well spread amongst phans tonight for a big Happy Birthday chant !

I also got some presents by post this morning and one of them made me laugh.

So I received Phish: the Biography, a book about the band written by former senior editor of Rolling Stone Parke Puterbaugh. I read good and bad reviews of it (respectively in PT and Relix) so I can't wait to read it. The book is bigger than expected and with a hard cover.

Don't expect a lot of picture like in The Phish Book. It's all text with a small bunch of pages with some black and white photos in the middle. Some of them are really old and quite funny.

The laugh of the day was provided by livephish.com.
I ordered on sunday the 22th the 3 Limited Edition slotMusic cards of Festival 8. And yes, I received them today, a week and a half later. The small usb mini-sd card reader come in a plastic cd-size case with a custom Festival 8 cover. There is no track listing on the back because the 3 inlays are exactly the same (it reads "10/30, 10/31, 01/11/2009"). The only difference between the 3 is a little sticker with the date written on it on the back of the case. There's a big picture inside the sleeve but I don't know if it was taken during the festival.

I wonder if the micro Sd given (or sold ?) during the festival (or here) came with this same case. I could be as it could have been printed before the shows (if the inside picture is from this summer).

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for my Joy Box which should have been shipped (thanks to a 59$ fee) on the 17th November. I will sure check the date and price written on the parcel when it'll arrive.
I got a blank space where my Joy Box should be !

LivePhish.com 1 - Dry Goods 0

Although some phishheads keep saying that the Dave Matthews Band isn't a jam band and can't be compared to Phish, I'm a little interrested in the recent announcement of a European 2010 tour.

The main reason for my interrest is that both Phish and DMB are in the same management company, Red Light Management. While I'm not really sure the management company and the ticket selling are related, it's a fact that the bands also shared the same TicketMaster ticket selling system.

I will sure take a look at the ticket selling process with DMB to prepare for a hypothetic Phish tour. A big difference already is that DMB has a paying fan club (The Warehouse) where fans can purchase tickets before their public release. Phish doesn't have such a private selling website. I will also check if the tickets will be available through regular european markets.

I can see that there is a 4 mounths gap between the anouncement (20th oct. 2009) and the first show (13th feb. 2010). If the rumors are true, we can expect an announcement for a Phish European tour by december 2009. We can only wait...

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On a side european note, I received a nice mail from a German based jam band radio show called Stash. Recent shows can be downloads as mp3 file and showcase bands like Phish, Grateful Dead or Cosmic Fingers.
Take listen at stash-radio.de and myspace.com/stash_radio !

I wanted to keep this one for a latter post about my collection but the announcement yesterday that Phish will play a full acoustic set during Festival 8 made me dust off this CD earlier.

This is a 1 track promo CD edited by Electra Records showcasing an acoustic radio show Phish did on the 3rd November 1998 in Boulder, CO. The radio is KBCO and the show is part of the "Live in Studio C" serie.

The first link with Festival 8 is that it's an acoustic set. The songs played (Driver, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Possum and Roggae) are perfect for this outfit. It's also funny to see that they choose thoose songs so that each band member can sing : Trey on Driver, Page on Vevet Sea, Mike on Possum and Fish (with the 3 others) on Roggae.

The second link takes place during the interviews between songs. The show is recorded right after the 1998 Halloween show, where the band covered the Velvet Underground's album Loaded, and a show at the E Centre in West Valley City, where they covered Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon ! As they say during the interview, the surprise for the next day show in Denver is that they will not cover an entier album !

Several FM sources have been circulated since 1998 and I remember heavily listening to the show when I was a student in Valence. But db.etree.org doesn't list the Promo CD source. I got this CD quite easily on eBay, like most of my Promo CD I'll present latter, but I can't remember when. There was a time when I bought many many CD on eBay and didn't track what I received and when.

So here is this show in mp3 320kbs direct download or Flac Torrent.

11-03-98 KBCO (97.3 FM) Studios, Boulder, CO

01 Intro
02 Driver
03 Interview
04 Wading in the Velvet Sea
05 Interview
06 Possum
07 Interview
08 Roggae
09 Outro

Acoustic.
Played between 4:30 pm and 5:00 pm for KBCO's "Studio C" series, where musicians coming to the Denver area are interviewed and perform live on the radio.

Source : Electra Records Promo CD
Promo CD > WAV > Tracking with Creative Wave Studio > Flac

While we're at it, the Facebook group about Festival 8 has released a bunch of photos of the Empire Polo Club where the festival will take place.

I'm a collector. That means when I like something, I can't help but collecting everything about it. My collections span from video games (Nintendo, WipEout, Castlevania...) to Coffee mugs, Michael Jackson and of course Phish.

I will use this little journal to showcase my Phish collection and I'll start with what I started with : the studio CDs.

I discovered Phish during summer holidays in Long Island, on the 12th July 1997. I traveled from France to USA with my best friend/sister and her own sister. During my stay, I listened to a lot of new music like Bob Marley, Les Miserables or Jimmy Buffet along with what I used to listen a lot at the time like k's Choice or the Smashing Pumpkins. I also met several fine peoples and eventualy went to a party one night in a friend's home. At some point, a guy put a song that instantly catched my ears. It had a nice groove and funny melody. After the song, they switched CDs so I could borrow the showcase organiser. Man ! Even the disc is nice to look at ! I was Junta, disc 1. I asked which song as just been played. It was Fee and I was hooked.
Some days latter (16th July to be precise), I bought the double CD and stepped onto the Phish World (I've already told this little story on my other french web site).

When I came back to France, I realised that Phish was really famous in the US but completly unknown here, so finding new CD wasn't really easy. I wasn't into file downloading yet and didn't know the taping policy of the band. I didn't even noticed they had just did 2 tours in Europe, the last european show in Spain played just the day before I heard Fee for the first time ! My only fix was my only CD.

Near Christmas 1997, I found in a shop in Geneva, Switzerland, another double CD : A Live One (not in the picture as it's a live album). I then discovered the improvisation side of Phish. I listened furiously.
The following albums I got was Rift and Hoist that my brother's girlfriend brought back for me from her USA trip during summer 1998. 

At this time, one can wonder why I didn't catch a show during Phish's Europe summer tour in 1998. There are several reasons. Beeing a student, I wasn't very rich as so couldn't go too far away for a concert. The 9 european shows this summer were in Denmark, Czech Republic and Spain. That beeing said, I also met the woman of my life this summer so my mind wasn't into going to a concert (at least without her as we went to the Paleo Festival to see k's Choice). That's the way I missed the last european Phish shows.

During my studies in Valence, France (not to be confused with Valence, Spain), while discovering at last the magic of mp3 downloading, I encountered The Story of the Ghost and Farmhouse in the local Fnac shop. Several years later, I surprisely got The Siket Disc and Billy Breathes for two consecutive christmas. My parents found them in the same (and now closed) Geneva shop where I found A Live One several years before.

Once I got free to buy stuffs from Dry Goods (aka once I earned enough money with my job), I complete my collection with The White Tape and Round Room. I guess I got Lawn Boy and A Picture of Nectar this way as I don't remember how I got them...

My last Phish studio album was of course Undermind which I pre-ordered as soon as I could and received on the 18th June 2004 (as seen here and here). I listened to it at full power in my living room, while drinking a honey flavored beer.

Soon, my collection will grow bigger with Joy as I ordered the regular, vinyl and Box editions from Dry Goods and I hope to received them by the end of October.

Still no news of confirmed dates for upcoming shows. Everybody oversea is waiting for fall and NYE dates to be announced. Maybe this week as it's when we'll see the official release of the news Phish Album : Joy. Although it has been leaked over the web for 2 weeks now and is streaming on Myspace since last week, a release date is a release date. Oh and there's this funny website that let you generate your own Joy live album : http://www.wecanstillhavejoy.com [no longer active]

I like the new album but it doesn't feel like an album. I mean It has been mostly recorded live (except for Time Turns Elastic, which I love) and it really sounds like this. It can seems silly when speaking of Phish but when I listen to a studio album, I don't want it to sound live. I love Billy Breathes of The Story of the Ghost because it has sounds and feels which are only in the studio album and not in the live version of the songs. On Undermind, songs like Scents and Subtle Sounds (Intro) or Secret Smile are really unique. When I listened to the news songs during this summer tour, I was waiting to hear the studio version, expecting another approach of the tunes. When I heard the album, I thought "Well, that's good songs and they are well played but just like in concert, minus the jams"...

So my favorite studio version is Time Turns Elastic, Kill Devil Falls and Stealing Times for the Faulty Plan are close seconds. I love the Light intro (the only studio-only part of the record), but I'm not fond of the segued and the actual song.

Here are 3 Phish songs played by me on the acoustic guitar. It's not that good but as it's already on my other website...

Prince Caspian

Billy Breathes

Waste