Give a man a Phish record and he’ll ask questions like “what exactly defines a jam band?” or “what’s Trey Anastasio’s solo stuff like?” But teach a man to phish and you’ll both end up doing time in a supermax Federal penitentiary. That’s unless one of you decides to testify for the prosecution in return for a more lenient sentence and a guarantee that your eventual witness protection destination (immunity guaranteed) ideally has a dry heat. If you’re legitimately bronchial, the government tends to be understanding. However, you’re still better off preparing for the worst: an outpost in northern Maine near the Canadian border where the last sign of winter leaves around the 4th of July.
Here's a free tip: if you have no identity, then there's nothing for identity thieves to steal. Don’t leave a mark and you won’t be a mark.
With a few notable exceptions, this is how the learning process usually goes. Giving someone a record at all goes against the very essence of life in the digital marketplace. Records are absurdly cumbersome and next to impossible to shove in your pocket. If you’re still blessed with baggy pants that contain pockets the size of a Thoroughbred’s feedbag, consider yourself the exception. Most of us have decorative holes in our denim and khaki that are barely deep enough to hold a single stick of gum.
You might say that recording music ruined music. And if you were to say such a thing, you’d be right. Music was free in the days when it was distributed in reams of sheet music or by itinerant troubadours drunk on life and Madeira. When that needle first came down it changed things. It changed how alive the art form felt. A song was DOA, mummified into a ubiquitous recording that everyone now had to endure.
Some might argue that live music is very much alive in all-day concerts with more toilets than mandolins and enough psychedelics to send everyone in attendance on an inter-dimensional journey neither NASA nor Musk have the stomach for. Bands playing forever without actually playing a thing. Because being memorable is your first step to being forgotten.
Make no mistake about it, this is not the golden age of music. Though there are some advantages. You can, for instance, spend hour after hour searching for that perfect Arcade Fire-inspired tune within a stock music library that would make the good folks (long dead, of course) from Alexandria, Egypt tearful with pride. Sadly, too much music tells pointless stories about lost love or lost sandwiches, profoundly unrelatable situations that endear the artist to no one in earshot with a conscience.
It’s why I listen to music as superficially as I can. I let it pass through me like a ghost or mild case of food poisoning. This is next to impossible living in a city where nearly every hot dog vendor has his griddle auto-tuned for maximum ordering pleasure. Of late, I’ve been more into the natural music of our shared urban environment. Car horns, wind gusts, screeching bus brakes and rats haggling with hungry pigeons. The real music of a city that’s beating every nanosecond with passion and mania. Except for the occasional seagull soliloquy found near the sublime acoustic backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean, there are very few extended solos here. Animals instinctually know when to get off the stage.
Unlike say, Trey A. and the boys.
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