Over their 27 years, Phish has made sport of injecting others’ songbooks with their patented jammery, spiking sets with songs by everyone from Talking Heads and Zappa to Ween and the Stones. On Halloweens they do a whole album (The White Album, Dark Side, Quadrophenia, etc. and etc.). This tour they’re unveiling a new cover at each show, and lately they’ve begun aiming for bits that make hipsters tick: not so long ago it was TV On The Radio, on Saturday they upped the ante with their first stab at Neutral Milk Hotel, at the venue called Merriweather Post Pavilion. Double whammo. If you’ve always felt “Aeroplane” needed more guitar solo, this is your lucky day. Otherwise you should probably pretend this didn’t happen.
(Thanks for the heads up, jambands.com and CoS)
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Dark Side was actually not played on Halloween. 1998′s musical costume was VU’s Loaded. Phish has been actively irking hipsters with covers for over a decade now… See Gold Soundz…
i mean … yeah.
Keep your jam bands off my favorite album. TAKE BACK THE MUSIC!
In this scenario, I am George McFly and Phish are Biff Tannen to whom I say: Hey, you! Get your jam hands off of my band!
Phish has also covered Only Shallow. Loveless was the album they were going to do on Halloween 98, but two of the members vetoed it. Also, the rumor floating around about why they played Gold Soundz is that they wanted to do Crooked Rain x 2 for Halloween 99.
Trey Anastasio (the guitarist) is a huge indie rock fan.
Painful. Phuck Phish anyway, you know, just for being Phish.
No one should be allowed to touch this song. This hurt my ears.
i see the ‘aeroplane-as-sacred-text’ crowd is still going strong. it’s always funny how people think other people aren’t qualified to listen to/like/interpret nmh because it’s just that magical. you sound like a hardline muslim cleric.
I guess it’s just my lucky day.
yeah “phuck phish”, that’s a good one you phucking hipster….”this hurt my ears”, wah my phucking penis hurts…get over it…the band appreciated the song enough to learn/practice and play it at one of their biggest gigs….
Bands need to stop covering “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”. It’s an okay, but not great song, and the constant need to cover it is not only repetitive and pointless, but mildly obnoxious. So… stop. Now.
Barf.
It’s just annoying because jam band fans that ONLY listen to jam bands are so close-minded. Now that Phish has covered Neutral Milk Hotel, all of a sudden this band will be deemed as “legit” to the jammie crowd, whereas before the same fans might have said NMH is “emo” or “hipster” or whatever. Phish appropriating good music for the enjoyment of their ignorant fans is annoying because those fans won’t recognize good music until their beloved Phish does a cover.
I was at the show and was surprised at how many people actually recognized the show…sweeping generalizations are dangerous…
i definitely love that NMH song, though i don’t think there’s any song that’s ‘untouchable’ (in the sense that it should Never be covered). however, there are certainly songs that are hard to cover well. normally Phish do a decent job (or at the very least an interesting take on the original) but i have to admit that i find this cover freakin’ awful! Trey’s singing is downright terrible and during his solo i was repeatedly asking myself ‘what the hell is he doing here??’ sounded like some amateur guitar player fumbling around. disappointing methinks.