Reading the book

HARTFORD
Concrete steps stories high, Aztec pyramid-like, lead up to the lawn (a venue is a sort of temple); the lawn is littered with crushed and jagged cans (though going barefoot is spiritually required); a recurring friendly loop animates the jam of the summer (everyone stops playing and Trey dances to the loop)

MERRIWEATHER
Lindsey and I left at the weirdest point in the jam out of 46 Days. The gatekeeper made sure we knew we could not return. I looked into the illuminated fountain at the bottom of the steps and imagined microphones there, capturing the waves the music made in the pool. The way out was a path through a terraced garden, and all the kids who couldn't get in got to sit among the rocks and plants of Symphony Woods. I envied them, hearing the music as so many modifications of the lush night's air, the sound not of Phish, but of Merriweather Post Pavilion. How freeing to walk away from this concert, the object of so many months of speculation and worry! And how wonderful to hear the music all the way back to the car, possibly miles away, the whole way lit by globes that all glowed the same, for Columbia, Maryland, a modernist utopia of the 1960s, was built all at once, and according to one vision. Shapes of Oh! Sweet Nuthin' and Harry Hood floated through the vacant city. How incredible to look up at the stars and hear the most abstract summary of this music echoing off the side of a parking garage or apartment building! We heard an ambulance's siren--maybe this was Beth on her way to Howard County General, where we would meet her shortly. A woman was reading by the light of the closed library. Turning the corner we saw a man sitting in the pebbles, his back against a plate glass window, also reading. Night Phish, night reading! The city whose people love to modify their minds at night!

SPAC
Drenching rain prior to show, mud footprints on the turning calendar wheel to mark Woodstock (40, to the day). An exasperated clerk at a Massachusetts rest stop the following morning: "What's with all these kids with their wet money?"

Comcast Center

Lindsey and I took the MBTA train from South Station to Mansfield, and on the ride we talked about different Buddhist traditions' meditation practices, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to pupil, the years that lamas spend alone in meditation and study, whether Buddhism could save the world, Heidegger vs. Buddhism. I knew I was on a commuter train talking to a friend about Buddhism on our way to Phish. Thank you God! The seats were wide and leathery, and the windows were yellowed and scratched. We couldn't see out, but the people behind us knew when we were in Mansfield. The acoustics of my sun hat made it impossible to talk while wearing it, so I left it in our hotel room. We walked to the venue. There was an amazing rusted bicentennial sign in the town green. There were long roads for cars only that we crossed with caution. We walked under a couple overpasses, the kind of bridge underneaths that are always black and drippy. There were modest suburban homes with decent lawns. The sidewalks were mostly good. We talked about karma (causality), depression, drugs, Wallace, Phish. Dancing bear tie-dyes we had once owned, how we had imagined the Grateful Dead in early grades. And where were all the other walkers? We expected sleepy Woodstock masses, but it was just us. At the end of the four miles, the travel and pre-show anxiety had floated away, and we were sun- and walk-perfected, ready for Nothing. Everything was easy. The workers were helpful. The venue, though no longer called Great Woods, was still surrounded by very tall, breezily treetopped trees, and the place was overgrown with summery plant life, and the trails inside were little rock garden trails bending around shrubs, and the wooden walls were weedy. It was perfectly dense with people. Phish came out and played. No one could guess what they would play next. The songs were linked in a perfect folding twisting non-flow of substitution, risk, and reversal. How wonderful to be lost again in Phish! Trey seemed to be at the center of a tunnel of sound, and the music was science fiction. We met Beth beneath the flagpoles (America, Massachusetts, Comcast) and the three of us walked home. A balloon floating in the road ahead of us led the way.

Fenway

My friend Lindsey emailed me a picture she took at the Nikon Theater, where Phish is playing tonight (right now, blazing that weird trail of the musical present with the cutting, killing edge that exists only in the immediate performance, the always-disappearing part that makes even a familiar song impossible to understand, especially when it's very loud. She's looking down an extremely steep slope of seats toward the stage, which is contained under a corrugated shell spanning the towers of a concrete castle, and the whole thing sits in the water like it is undergirding a drawbridge or processing sewage or producing nuclear power (what is it about Phish that makes their music so uniquely suited to brutalist municipal architecture?

All day I've been thinking about the concrete underside of Fenway Park, the dark and echoey ring of corridors and chambers beneath the seats where all the human business of the ballpark is conducted. Hearing Character Zero as vibrations in the walls of the men's room seemed to confirm the many dreams I've had lately about going to Phish shows in infinite concrete basements, hangars, and locker rooms. This music is about modifying space. Whatever the music might be reduced to on a recording, however much detail it may contain in itself, the point of the music at the moment it is being made is to overload the medium in which it is resonating, to find the harmonies of this accidental surplus, the strange congruences of vibration in stuff never made for music (bridge resonance and the longer waves of rooms

Night at the science museum

The itunes picture for "Time Turns Elastic" is a black square with massy sans serif block letters in the lower righthand corner, and fellow ECM lifers will recognize the Pat Metheny Group font in these Hubble letters full of space, a little too dense with planets to be an actual astronomical view, a little sickly space-measled like a tee shirt of the solar system and beyond that may have glowed in the dark in the early 1990s, which is exactly where in imaginative time you want to be with Phish, daring to be weird, hypnotizing yourself with the alienation effects, glad to be wrong, tripping on the whiteness of the high tops. Thank God Phish doesn't care if they're cool anymore. We have been many places with Phish, and we are so relieved to be back in the planetarium, following a laser pointer tour of the story of time and dreaming of the museum gift shop outside. "While all around the rocks collide." Thank God someone is writing about rocks colliding. Phish compositions: celestial elements in no orbits the universe would ever form (true orbits only in mindless jam

I don't know exactly which sound in early Pat Metheny Group is denoted by "Oberheim," but that's my name for the keyboard in TTE that saws through the surface of things and seems to signal a documentary flyby of frozen wastes. An actual helecopter flew over on my initial listening walk and though unrepeatable was the best part of the song. I got up late yesterday and ran to the bus stop in exactly 13:30 (space turns elastic, the rolling piano keyboard undulation of crumbly brick blocks of Cumberland Avenue sidewalk I run over, when the feedback ended the bus was just peeking round the corner, I even think the song may have 13.5 sections. So glad Phish is dreaming big, even if the music is incoherent and sort of embarrassing. "This life is bending and swelling around me"—the song succeeds or fails depending on whether you believe this line when Trey sings it (this lyric is the meaning of bVII to I, it's like the chords can finally sing themselves in words). "The blossoms all scream and it sleeps around me"—thank God they are mixing metaphors again (the song would be dead without everything that's wrong (this is the key to all rock and roll. "The winds all rising in the west around me"—so glad to find myself again in the wrong grammar of this double location