I was a huge Phish fan for nearly exactly; throughout 2013 I was the voice of Phish reason, “I understand you don’t get it,” I’d say to friends and strangers alike, “but if you get them on the right night, this band will change your life.”
Perhaps I was right but the Phish effect didn’t survive a lousy concert last December where all the good will they’d accrued went out the window and I remembered exactly why I’d been born sick of them for decades on end.
If I hadn’t gone again, I would still love em, and therein lays the problem: when you’ve seen a band perform a killer set maybe you should keep your gains and never see them again. Even if Phish had been as good as they were they wouldn’t have been because it wouldn’t have been a pleasant surprise. As it happens, they performed a terrible first set and a mediocre second set and lost me again.
Sometimes the reverse happens, after a terrific Aretha Franklin concert in 2010, I went back again in 2012 and saw a better concert. Unfortunately, he took Whitney Houston dying for that to happen.
Live music effects recorded music; the better the live show, the more likely you are to forgive the recorded music its weaknesses. The two feed off each other but whereas the recorded music is essentially static the live performance changes all the time and this is never truer than when the performance worsens the second time you see the band You doubt your own initial perception and you don’t your own vision of what is happening in front of you. ]
If you have ever had a fantastic first date and followed it with a terrible second date, that’s what it is like. You wonder where you went wrong, why your true love detectors weren’t warning you off. That’s the way I felt about Phish: I thought we had something going but we didn’t at all.
The trick is to not go for the repeat experience I guess…
