Category: Phish

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE FIFTH AND FINAL INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND ! Phish put on a good show, but their onstage theatrics are generally low-key; the guys stand still while playing, and the improvised light show, though extraordinary when you think about what goes into them, is still just lights. Which is to say that video isn’t really their medium. (There’s actually a proper ‘Phish video,’ which I will not share: ‘Down with Disease,’ off…

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE FOURTH INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND !   ‘Sexy’ and ‘erotic’ seem to me to be almost unrelated, though certainly not disjoint, categories of experience – eroticism is a quality of imagination, sexiness a character of perception. Doing the dishes while drinking a glass of wine, anticipating a lover’s return from a weeklong business trip, can be an unbearably intense erotic experience, but you’d hardly expect someone to call it ‘sexy’ (whatever…

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE THIRD INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND ! My book deals more with the private experience of Phish listening than with the fascinating subculture that surrounds it. There were several reasons for that choice. First off, I’m not a tour kid; when I’m at the shows lost in bliss I can easily imagine myself vanishing from civilization to travel the country and see 20 shows in a month, but over two decades of…

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND ! (Please forgive the verb-tense confusion in this one. Writing about one active and one defunct rock band creates difficulties which I’ve addressed, here, by basically throwing my hands up in the air and switching tenses haphazardly like a big jerk. –wgh.) For reasons of both concision and personal pique, not to mention a certain polemical agenda, the 33-1/3 book deals only glancingly with the great…

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE VERY FIRST INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND ! There’s no perfect place to start with Phish. Their studio albums are a mixed bag, and cover an impressively (distractingly, absurdly) wide range of styles and genres – quality, too. Their live shows, meanwhile, all feature rich ensemble improvisation, which is all about the moment of creative spontaneity rather than definitive performance, and in any case you could sample shows from 1986, 1994,…