"Half-step Mississippi Uptown Toodeloo" is a name for the way Jerry plays guitar.

"Get yourself a powder charge/and seal that silver mine" suggests a plan to close off some pathway of pleasure with a spectacular, ultimate act of violence, conceived perhaps not in a moment of clarity but at the height of the fever of intoxication, when images of the evil of digging into one's brain are crowding in, and it seems that only some form of selective suicide could solve the problem all at once, like maybe taking a massive dose of the object of pleasure itself, like, this one last giant powder charge may finally do the trick.

Paper Radio

NEON PARK did the swinging CAKE SLICE FRAGONARD album cover for Little Feat; & the TOMATO WOMAN w/sideways face in hammock (the one that Phish did)

RAINBOW MALL ROAD is a right turn off Washington Ave on my ride to work. The former Rainbow Mall is now a private community college.

PAPER JAMZ is a line of cardboard guitars for children. Flame motif. (Hilary and I read the Wal-Mart Christmas catalog that came in the mail. The game was to choose a present for Tessa from every page.)

Biking down Cumberland Ave I saw a DEFLATED YELLOW AND PINK SOCCER BALL in the center of the road. Its panels were flaking off, revealing something fibrous. Should've fucking kicked that ball from my bike.

Realized that if I posted the sentence that just occurred to me, I could never use the key phrase in my novel, should I ever write it. Words die instantly on the internet, even if they live forever in the Search Engine's data farm, creating whatever quantum of heat. I half remember this article I skimmed at nytimes before checking on something suddenly more pressing, it said something about the way computer light fucks with the part of your brain that reads. You can only really read things on paper. Even friends' blogs I just kind of skim.

Revolver

Beatles game: imagine the album you are listening to is the newest Beatles album, the one closest to the core, the one that makes everything else irrelevant, the most real and defining set of songs, the suddenly necessary capstone to a catalog that has just been completed; hear it as the final Beatles album.

the black and white thing: you can hear vast nothing in every song; it's anti-acoustic: the aesthetic of pure tape world; this music takes place nowhere; the sounds are cut out and pasted over white, scarily free, contained by nothing (this is more than a projection of the collage on the cover, you can hear tons of unclaimed acoustic space (the Beatles had obviously been impressed by death (the second appearance of McCartney's "Taxman" solo means no one played it in the first place. Mechanical reproduction: there are no Beatles. The meaning of "Paul is dead."

"She Said She Said": you can imagine Lennon doing the knee-bend dance, so it's still the old Beatles.

Beatles game: all Beatles is the old Beatles, Liverpool basement music, Hamburg stage smashing music (hence The Beatles, finally mastering the thing called "Beatles." With the Beatles, Meet the Beatles, all these oblique approaches, then The Beatles. It doesn't mean "just these four men," like, "the earnest men in these four photos, more or less doing things individually", "these four finite humans, epaulets off, no mystery bus, KISS without the makeup," no, it means "this force finally knows itself"

paranoid feeling listening to the remaster that this is not the Beatles; is it possible that my cut-and-pasted-over-white-space perception is actually the product of some form of digital editing, one that's primarily conducted visually? Is it the same as the Cirque du Soleil Beatles album, bits lifted and crunched and reanimated? Is this normative, final interpretation of Revolver essentially the same as Rock Band?

Beatles game: the catalog in reverse. Like, they know the nasal count-off is the first thing you'll hear after the crashing piano chord and the runout loop. Please Please Me as the final development of a spirit set in motion by Abbey Road.

Seven levels is not some abstraction. That's how many times the idea you start with is transformed into something other than itself before you're dumped back into the room where you actually are. Seven songs on each side of the record. "But there are only six chambers in a revolver." Yes, but the hole in the center of the cylinder turns makes it seven; seven/the hole/death is what makes it spin. The water swirls around the sides only if it can get out the bottom. Rubber Soul, Death Picture, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Is the revolver motif a continuation of the Rubber Soul flirtation with Country & Western (like Cowboy George on the cover)? I am personally wigged by the lost mid-career Country Beatles.

It's a Phish tradition to don a "musical costume" on Halloween night and cover an entire album by another band. Conventional wisdom says that the album they pick reflects some aspect of the band's current direction and self-image. When Phish turned their back on progressive rock and tried to become a pop group, they recorded Hoist, a jumble of cliched forms, and covered The Beatles (1994). After Jerry died and Phishtour absorbed Deadtour, Phish, who had made an artform out of real-time feedback with their audience, had to adapt to playing giant arenas; hence the football-riot rock of the Who's Quadrophenia (1995). Having worn out the multi-peaking tension-and-release jam model, Phish found inspiration that would last them the rest of the 90s in the multilayered rhythms and repetitive dance jams of Remain in Light (1996). As the drug scene, both on lot and backstage, shifted from psychedelics to club drugs and narcotics, Phish saw fit to cover the Velvet Underground's Loaded (1998), an album whose hipster detachment suited the band's newfound lack of care; after earnestly striving after the ineffable in 1997 (no musical costume during the "Phish Destroys America" fall tour), suddenly it was no big deal to be Phish. It's harder to see what the band was up to in covering Exile on Main St. (2009), which seems conceptually unrelated to both the writing and jamming that year—maybe the theme was touring the Earth as old men, and mastering the extraction of wealth from other aging males. This year, smart money was on Queen's A Night at the Opera, on the basis of a leaked photo of a printing block for a tour poster that seemed to reference its cover. Or London Calling—Trey said he listened to lots of the Clash during his house arrest. Or Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The (fucking jaw-dropping) Broomfield 46 Days (10/12/10) seemed to argue for Smashing Pumpkins—a surprise bVII-IV-I groove straight from the psychedelic 90s supplanted the usual one-chord outro jam, with Trey harmonizing through the chords in sliding octaves of fuzz. I was personally hoping for Kid A. But to the disappointment of those who thought the $400 they gave the scalper would be rewarded with a performance of Physical Graffiti, Phish picked rock non-icon Little Feat's 1978 double live album Waiting for Columbus, a record that previously existed in the consciousness of maybe 2% of their audience. Mr. Miner writes pretty well about the significance of this selection (though "Smell My Feat" might have been a wittier title than "Little Phish"). I've only checked out the first couple tunes, and Little Feat is apparently weird (I kind of don't believe what I'm hearing; the chords are sort of from Randy Newman land; the bullshit quotient is unclear; the weirdness usually wraps up well). It is amazing to hear Phish playing unfamiliar music, to be a couple minutes into a tune and realize you're in the Phish place again, but you've arrived there by none of the usual paths. It's significant that Little Feat is a band much like Phish: showy cornball hodge-podge Americana for white people to dance to, where inessential complexity is essential to the sound. The effect is like peeking into an alternate dimension and seeing this uncanny double of Phish—it's amazing to realize that they don't need any of their own material to sound that way, and could have become the same band even with a completely different catalog. (This is one reason that the first set at Manchester was so powerful: it represented a total rewrite of the Phish canon.) Conclusion: Phish is real, and totally free.

Fall tour

Some Narnia gate has clearly been stepped through.