October 2024: Deep dives on Phish, Dylan and the Band, and The Softies
Howdy folks!
One of my favorite things to read it when an author goes really deep into something. September hit the mark with an embedded perspective on what it’s like to experience the community around Phish, a review of an absurdly large collection of Dylan and The Band’s live tour recordings, and an interview that goes way beyond surface level with The Softies.
Honestly, I saved a bunch of pieces in September towards the end that I haven’t even gotten to yet. So next month’s email may include some of those.
Phish in Water
Grayson Haver Currin makes his return to the newsletter with an incredibly fun piece on Phish and the community around it for GQ. (Full disclosure: Grayson assigned and edited work of mine when I wrote for Indy Week).
I think most music fans outside of this community, at some point, have tried to imagine what it’d be like in it. I know I’ve wondered what it would’ve been like to drop everything and follow a band around. Haver Currin did it and seems to have come away a convert.
Over four days, amid constant interactions with people who’d slept in crowded fields to see a 41-year-old quartet play for a dozen hours, I’ve encountered just one grumpy person—in the United States, in 2024.
Phish has been the butt of many jokes over their career, but by taking them seriously, Haver Currin shows how these musicians and fans have navigated the tension between Phish the band and the larger idea of Phish.
431 tracks, 27 Discs, All Live
The new collection of live recordings from the 1974 tour of Bob Dylan and The Band is clearly for obsessives only. I’m never going to attempt to listen to all of it.
Which is why I’m glad Steven Hyden did just that for Uproxx. Much like the Phish story above, this dives deep into the realm of the truly committed and reveals something to the rest of us looking through the glass.
Hyden sets up the context wonderfully - by 1974, America was already mythologizing the previous decade - and provides a reason why this collection matters.
Together, these men faced a daunting — if not impossible — task: Live up to the most mythologized rock tour of the sixties, the most mythologized decade in all of rock music. The miracle of The 1974 Live Recordings is that it shows, more often than not, they pulled it off.
I love how he compares the previously available recordings of this tour (Before the Flood, mostly taken from the last shows of the run) and compares it to the more vigorous early shows while responding to the modern criticism of this tour.
Not all of these criticisms are fair. At the time Before The Flood was released, overfamiliar warhorses like “All Along The Watchtower” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” had never been played live before Tour ’74. And the arena-rock bluster of Dylan’s new delivery was in keeping with the times; the very idea of “arena-rock bluster” was still in the process of being invented.
The Return of The Softies and The Power of Friendship
I cannot say enough good things about this profile of and interview with The Softies by Nina Corcoran for Pitchfork. They’re release their fist album in over two decades this year.
Corcoran describes the “big, deep platonic love” between Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia in ways that will make your heart twitch and gut yearn.
Right on cue, with no need for prompting, Melberg’s eyes dip with affection and she chimes in, “I’m so proud of you, Jen. I don’t know if I tell you enough.”
The interview dives deep into this friendship and how it powers their music and writing. I found the moments Melberg described waiting for Sbragia to want to return to music particular affecting. To wait kindly and with empathy is a rare love.
Corcoran expertly questions them about how their approach to music has changed since their younger days to get really insightful answers. Often, I feel musicians asked about writing when their older gets a pretty stock answer, but Melberg and Sbragia are clear eyed about it.
When we were younger, we wrote really vulnerable songs because there’s this inherent bravery to youth. We felt we had very little to lose, and we did, but that gets a little harder as we get older. So we had to remember that so many good things come from that kind of courage, the courage to be publicly vulnerable.
Thank you for reading!
See you next month!
