Brand Spakin' New

A whole slew of venue specific shirts, along with a handful of limited edition posters from summer tour were just put up a little while ago over at DryGoods. If you're bummin' that you missed out on getting that tee from the show now is your chance.

The Believer - Great Trey interview

Here is a great interview with Trey on improvisation and touches on some other interesting things. Give it a read, you'll be glad that you did.

"Musicians come and go and they’re stewards of the music for a brief period of time. But once the music plays—it’s really between Beethoven and the listener at that point. The musicians are there to get their goddamn hands off of it. All that training! Thousands of hours! Sight-reading every day! All so they can get the hell out of the way because nobody gives a crap about them at all. The less you notice them, the better it sounds. I mean, it was the highest level of art in music that I’d ever seen, and it was performed by people who had spent countless hours of work just to be invisible."

Outside Lands Festival

Are you still thinking about making the trek to Outside Lands to catch Phish in Golden Gate Park? Well there is going to be a limited number of GA & VIP single day tickets for sale Wednesday morning at 10am PST here. But if I were you I would do the entire fest. There is a great diverse line-up for this one.

The Jim Pollock Superball Cars

As many of you know there was a set of collectable printed race cars for Superball by artist Jim Pollock. These could be obtained by making a small donation to the Waterwheel Foundation at the Waterwheel tent at the festival. If you stuck around a little while longer after getting them you could meet/greet with Jim and have him sign them as well. They are meant to be folded into the actual cars and are really cool when done so. I have heard that there was roughly 1500 of these made and some DID make it out of the festival still in the Waterwheel's hands so if you are looking, keep an eye open at some upcoming Phish shows.

Superball IX

... has come and gone and Phish has again provided it's fans with more fun than you can shake a stick at. A guesstimated 40,000 fans converged on the Watkins Glen International Raceway to celebrate the Nation's independence in the phishy fashion. The canvas for their 9th festival still couldn't compare to the lush landscape that hosted their previous festival at the Polo Grounds in Indio, but it was damn close. The infrastructure was there to make things very comfortable for everyone attending. Can you say flushing toilets? With showers... very nice. They also provided for the first time a VIP camping experience for about double the price of the normal general admission camping. This got you a nice camping spot within close proximity to the stage area and Ball Square along with private shower/bathroom houses. They also offered for the first time The Great Tent Rent. This was the option to rent a very large canvas tent already stocked with sleeping cots. They looked very comfy. You could also park your car right beside your rented tent which is a big luxury at a festival. This 9th festival also hosted the return of the Runaway Jim 5K race along with a newly instituted Wiffle Ball Tournament. There were many art installations around Ball Square to keep everyone gawking and a Pinball Lounge to keep all of the Pinball Wizard's fingers in tune. The Pinball Lounge was also ground zero for all night dance parties throughout the weekend.

As for the music, I don't think that anyone left with a bad taste in their mouths. They played 3 sets on Friday, 4 sets on Saturday and 2 more sets on Sunday. The 4th set on Saturday was a "secret" late night set that took place at the USA Storage installation in the middle of Ball Square. It was about an hour long jam with the band playing behind white semi-transparent screens, casting just their silhouettes and ambient sounds to the surrounding crowd outside.

You can view the setlists here at phish.net

They ended things on Sunday night with a satisfying fireworks display to ring in the 4th of July in style. All in all it seemed like the entire weekend went on without a hitch and most everyone was well behaved. So when and where is (insertnamehere)X ????

I'm still sifting through all of the photos taken during the weekend. They will be up soon, in a day or two. Here are a handful of Ball Square that i've cherry picked though for the time being.