Beginning in 1996 things would change, starting with a tour in Europe the sound and the demeanor of the band would quickly transform. By the late ’90s the band pushed forward to reach their career pinnacle on the eve of the millennium only to spiral out of control over the next eight years. By 2000, the band was in enough turmoil that the needed to stop. At the same time, the majority of the fan base from earlier that decade were struggling to find a path in adulthood. Things had gotten real. Jobs, relationships, priorities, all weighed in a manner they didn’t previously, when you could hop in a car and say fuck the blizzard I’m going to Albany. Before The Clifford Ball. Before Remain In Light. Before cow funk. Before Cypress. Before designer shirts and jeans. Before addiction. There was December of 1995. It is THE moment. They may have evolved from that point and beyond what they were, but it was at this moment they were perfectly Phish. It was the end of their innocence and probably, for a majority of us as well.

Shut out? Can't go? Watch Phish's NYE pay-per-view streams on your big screen TV

If you don’t know your HDMI cables from your S-Video port, but want to watch the Phish live stream on your high def large screen TV rather than your laptop, you’re in luck.

Phish.netter Alex Knoll (@Alexknoll) has written a “couch tour guide” to connecting your computer or other internet connected device (Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii etc.) to your large screen TV.

It’s a Phish.net forum thread here. Feel free to ask questions to Alex and other helpful phriendly geeks.

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Wow, this is something that people talked about but now the band is actually doing. I hope there's enough interest in this that we can have webcasts for summer tour. Perhaps time to invest in a better TV so I can hook my computer up to it.

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Phish, in its second year of touring after a five-year hiatus, remains a powerful box-office draw, with $33.2 million in gross and 658,000 in attendance to 43 shows.

"They will always do business," says Paradigm's [Chip] Hooper, who is Phish's agent. Of the 2010 tour, he says, "They were having fun, the fans were having fun, they were great shows, they were very thoughtfully booked, and it did really well."

Phish.net now has a its own dedicated servers in a data center, hosted by End Point Corporation.

After the Hampton reunion last year, the Mockingbird Foundation, with IT director Adam Scheinberg (@sethadam1) at the helm, decided to build a new database-driven website to update the static "billboard" of text setlists of the Phish.net archival site, which had operated pretty much unchanged from 1994.

The site architecture of Phish "setlists" hosted at Phish.net is now a huge relational (MySQL) database that connects the showdates, songs, venues and individual site users to provide not only instant information on all 1,504 Phish shows by date and the 814 songs Phish has played at those shows, but users' own personal "stats" and "gaps charts". Phish.net was also built with an open API architecture so it could "feed" information from its setlist databases to many other phan sites, and its "smartphone" mobile site, m.phish.net.

After months in beta, and through 2010, Phish.net has grown to over 10,000 registered users, many of whom participate in a lively relaunched community discussion forum and have added "their" shows to their profiles and stats "seedfiles".

During the recent late Fall tour and Halloween run, Phish.net on its former "virtual" (shared) server began to fail under the load of more than 20,000 fans trying to get setlist information at the same time, and the server was repeatedly "crashing" under the loads. With our new dedicated servers, this will not happen, and Phish.net can now accommodate almost unlimited traffic and growth for years to come.

If you haven't checked out the new Phish.net site, especially the information you can get about any song by clicking on the link (history, lyrics stats) or the smartphone optimized site at m.phish.net or the discussion forum or blog, check them out and you will be pleasantly surprised by all the new, cool stuff there.

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I once knew a woman with a weird problem. Apparently her brain chemistry was such that her normal condition was that of someone on LSD. Jokes aside, this was not a fun thing for her at all. Normally she was blissfully unaware of her issues and would just tell her surreal stories and try to do her work as best as possible but every now and then she'd have a moment of clarity. She had goals that would never be realized because she was stuck in this weird internal world and there was nothing that she could do about it. The release of "Idea (Another Idea)" as a Mossbonus track caused me to think about her.

"Idea" by itself just seems to be one of Mike's weird songs. There's surreal imagery and the like but nothing too out of the ordinary, well if you ignore the line, "And I see you yelling and I don't know why." It's easy to miss that with all of the wacky imagery. I wrote the song history and never really noticed it despite pouring over the lyrics to figure out what it's about.

"Idea (Another Idea)" is the flip of "Idea" that takes that line as the core. It's the moment of clarity, admitting that, "Don't care what I leave behind/When I get caught up this way." The first two verses all seem to be about the struggle to cope. "Idea"'s "I've been lost," gets morphed into "I've been wrong," (and the concern is to stop messing it up instead of the weirder stacking it up) as he talks about his desperate attempts to stay off of the slippery slope into his delusions. It's a repeated motif - "I've rejoined the human race," the moment is one last strand of grace - but one that is doomed for failure. By the end of the song, we're back to surrealism.

While I doubt Mike had the thought of someone fighting with their sanity in mind when he wrote these two tracks (without my personal history, I never would have thought of it myself), it works as an interpretation. What was a goofy little song now comes across as rather bleak, but also rather powerful. It's too bad that the track is only an iTunes and Amazon bonus track, as it changes the one song that Phish have played off of the disc. Thankfully, it's available for only the 99 cent charge (as opposed to requiring a purchase of the entire album) and it's streaming on Relix: http://www.relix.com/audio/relix-radio/2010/11/16/mike-gordon-idea-another-idea-version

Moss is definitely a project where the bonus tracks have been interesting.

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WISEGUY HACKERS PLEAD GUILTY IN FEDERAL COURT

After professing their innocence for months, the three Wiseguy defendants pleaded guilty yesterday to hacking the Ticketmaster system for several years, scooping up all tickets at onsale, including the Phish Hampton reunion shows among many other concerts and sports events.

According to an article and the above photo from yesterday's Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, "Today, three men who set up the sophisticated network of computers that locked out legitimate fans and netted more than $25 million in profits pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges.

Kenneth Lowson, 41, and Kristofer Kirsch [shown in above photo to the left of his lawyer], 37, both of Los Angeles, admitted to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and exceed authorized access to computers engaged in interstate commerce. They face no more than two years in jail, fines of $250,000 and forfeiture of more than $1.2 million when they are sentenced in March.

Joel Stevenson, 37, of Alameda, Calif., pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of exceeding authorized access to computers engaged in interstate commerce. He could get up to a year in jail and a $100,000 fine.

Lowson and Kirsch owned Wiseguys and directed all of the company’s operations. Stevenson was the company’s chief U.S.-based programmer."

Give someone a token of your affection for the Holiday run with this pure silver wearable token commemorating the 2010-11 NYE shows by Vermont artist and jewelry maker Jennifer Kahn.

The token is available in an archival coin display holder for $25, a pendant on black waxed cotton cord (16" or 18") with sterling ends and a sterling lobster clasp for $35, or on a sterling chain for $45.

In addition to the commemorative fish and apple, and "NYE, NYC, MSG", all three show dates are inscribed among the lines on the edge. A limited edition of only 100 tokens will be made to order.

Ordering details from the cashortrade.org website here. Jennifer is generously donating 10% of her sales of this commemorative token to the Mockingbird Foundation.

MMMMMMMMmmmmmmm….soup!

In this case, Potato Cheddar Chowder soup from the upcoming PhanFood cookbook, by the “Healthy Hippie” newsletter’s Taraleigh Weathers, ”PhanArt Pete” Mason and dozens of contributors.

Here’s the recipe.

PhanFood is available for pre-order for $19.95 from the its publisher, the State University of New York (SUNY) Press (yes, SUNY Press, way to go Taraleigh and Pete!).

Click on the photo or this link to pre-order or for further information about the book.

There will be also be a book release party with free admission from 7pm to 9pm followed by music from Dopapod until 2am on Saturday, December 11th at Nectar’s Restaurant, 188 Main St, Burlington, VT. For further details contact Pete at PhanArt.

Credits: Recipe by Lindsay Jones. Photo and recipe reprinted by permission, from PhanFood: From the Kitchen Pot to the Tour Lot edited by Taraleigh Weathers and Pete Mason, the State University of New York Press ©2010, State University of New York. All rights reserved.

DeMuri said he knew they got the boulder right when [rock climber and biopic subject Aron] Ralston visited the Sugar House set. He looked at the boulder and was surprised that it was a copy. “He said, ‘You see these indentations right here? This is what I chipped away with my multitool.’ Danny looked at me and winked. I knew we got it right.”

That fidelity extended to the costume design, Larlarb said. She tracked down the manufacturer of Ralston’s shoes and even outfitted Franco with the same brand of headlamp.

She made one small change, finding a different Phish T-shirt (Ralston’s favorite band) because the band’s name was too prominent on the one he actually wore during his accident. “If I had used that shirt, we would have read the word ‘Phish’ for 90 minutes, and that would have been incredibly detracting,” Larlarb said. “I went through the Phish back catalog of concert T-shirts, and I found one that was a little more abstract, but in keeping with what he wore.”

One of the best things generally about Phish's covers of other bands' music, and the Halloween "musical costume" tradition in particular, is how much great music of other bands you can discover in the process of being a "Phish phan".

Other than 1994's Beatles' "white album" choice, which most in the audience knew by heart owing to the Beatles' near universal popularity, most of Phish's later Halloween albums choices tended to reflect Phish's influences in somewhat more obscure choices that many in the audience were mostly unfamiliar with, something of a risk for Phish that its audience would share the band's enthusiasm for their own influences.

This year's choice, Little Feat's 1978 double album "Waiting for Columbus" is within that mold and perhaps is the closest to Phish in all of the choices of recent Halloweens.

As Bob Lefsetz pointed out, Little Feat was a band that toured endlessly in the early and mid 1970s but could gain no radio traction or hit songs, save for its near hit, "Dixie Chicken". But their music was really innovative for the time, they had a committed fan base (at a time when the Grateful Dead were basically on hiatus from touring), and they had a kickass, tight live show.

So, in 1978, that band released a double LP vinyl album of two live shows in London and Washington, edited together into as much would fit on 4 LP sides which each side couldn't go much beyond 20 minutes, and when recording a live show was a big deal, requiring trucks parked outside with bulky studio tape deck consoles, and snaking cables into a theatre.

Which brings me to this year's reissue of a remastered edition of Waiting for Columbus by the famed audiophile company, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs. MFSL reissues select CDs from iconic artists like Frank Sinatra and the Beatles where the master tapes are available, and uses proprietary mastering techniques and 24 karat gold CDs which are individually pressed from the master in a limited, numbered "collectors edition".

On the 10/31 setlist review page, Phish.netter @BarkleyMoo mentioned that MFSL had released a remastered WfC in a limited gold CD edition and recommended it to fans, and I went bought one immediately from the MFSL/Music Direct website here. It was $39.99, and about $6 ground shipping.

I received it two days ago, copy 000429 out of 500, and it hasn't been off my Apple TV, iPod boom box or car stereo much since. It is a terrific recording of a great couple of shows.

Without taking away anything from Phish's masterful imitation of Little Feat two weeks ago, the original performances at the height of the Lowell George period in 1978 are jawdroppingly tight, like Phish playing their own music when "the hose" of a "legendary" performance is happening. Like Phish, Little Feat sought to make these recorded gigs special, by adding the horns section from the Tower of Power, a blues band of the day.

If you enjoyed the Halloween performance and want to hear a formidably impressive recording of a formidably impressive, although overlooked band of the 70s era, you will run, not walk to snag one of the presumably less than 70 available copies left of this CD from the Music Direct link above.

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A mermaid themed chandelier in the Boardwalk Lobby of the AC Convention Hall, taken on my iPhone during setbreak last Saturday.