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Phil Lesh Appreciation Society: Enter the Philzone...

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#35
FretlessMainly said:
http://archive.org/details/gd1983-06-18.beyer-m88.morrone.119438.flac1644

SPAC, 1983. Phil destroys the world during Morning Dew. I think I stepped on my jaw more than once during this one.
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This was a great show. I had a bass revelation that night. After I got into the venue and before the show started, I watched a girl try to teach a guy how to do a cartwheel. She had a very easy, graceful way to do it that just flowed. He tried to copy her arm and leg movements but it wasn't working because her movement wasn't about the arms and legs, it was about her spine. All she had to do was lean over at the right angle and set up her spine so that it would curve and then straighten out and her arms and legs could just go along for the ride. For some reason, best left to the imagination, watching that got me in tune with seeing people's spines. When the music started, I was watching everyone dancing and I realized that despite the many different dancing styles, everyone's spines were all sync'ed up to the bass. Arms, legs, heads, all the other body elements were different but the spines were all locked into the bass groove. So, I experimented with playing to that concept, playing to the spines in the room. It changed the way I played, for sure. That summer, one of the songs on the radio was My Spine Is The Bass Line. Coincidence?

I also have to give a shout out to the Bird Song. It was the first one I saw and hadn't really heard any versions of it since the early 70s versions, which are my favorite, but it was great to hear.

Of course, the Scarlet->Fire is epic. That big roar in the crowd that you hear on the very first note of Fire isn't for the entrance of the riff, it's for the huge bolt of lightning that hit right on the note. They even had the weather in sync!

Sadly, there is no soundboard known to exist for this show. The audience recordings are OK, and even capture the intense humidity and sense of electrical potential in the air with the impending thunderstorms, but none of them really capture the impact that it felt like that night.

The rest of the night and the journey home were also epic stories, with both hardship and serendipity. It should not take 10 hours to drive back to Boston from Saratoga!
 
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#37
edwinhurwitz said:
Of course, the Scarlet->Fire is epic. That big roar in the crowd that you hear on the very first note of Fire isn't for the entrance of the riff, it's for the huge bolt of lightning that hit right on the note. They even had the weather in sync!

Sadly, there is no soundboard known to exist for this show.
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Indeed; they also had the weather in sync for The Wheel, during, "if the thunder don't get you then the lightning will."

That was a crazy good show. I think we ended up sleeping in our car from about 4-7 am, then taking the Pike back to Worcester, uneventfully.

I linked to as good a version as there is. I believe all copies seem to originate from a Nakamichi deck source that has this swirling effect going on. My copy from 1984 sounds exactly like the ones on Internet Archive.
 
#39
spacebassed said:
Right, I meant that its not a straight 7, it's almost like he divides that 7 into 4-3, then 3-4 the next time... however you envision it - it WORKS!
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Interesting; I've written several things in seven, and often it has this feel (two bars of seven makes the complete phrase):

ONE two three four FIVE six seven
one TWO three four five SIX seven.

Something similar to what you mean, I think.
 
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