Live music

I'm listening now to a Glen Phillips concert from about a year and a half ago. It's about an hour and forty minutes long. He was the frontman for Toad the Wet Sprocket, gone solo now. He gets a guy named Levi from a local band to do "Walk on the Ocean" with him, covers Gillian Welch, and sings a song that begins "I was the driver for the drive-by / of the neighbor's dog /" and ends with a bang. Pure gold.

And it is totally free. Somebody taped the show, and uploaded it to the Live Music Archive. And it is totally legal; permission granted and all.

You too can download one of 2775 Grateful Dead shows, or String Cheese Incident, or Yonder Mountain String Band, or many more. A lot have streaming audio, low to high quality mp3s; I think to be included in the archive, the show has to have a CD quality version, too.

The best is the Mutual Admiration Society, a collaboration between Glen Phillips and my favorite band, Nickel Creek. They toured last summer with John Paul Jones (the bassist and mandolinist from Led Zeppelin) and Pete Thomas (the drummer from Elvis Costello). There are no words to describe how cool this music is. Just download July 21st, 2004 at Largo (sans rock stars) and August 17, 2004 at Lime Kiln (two recordings: show, 2 hours; aftershow, 1 hour). Then buy all their albums and drive your wife crazy. Like me!

Thanks to some more downloading, I have seventeen hours of live music from these guys. I've been listening to it for the last three months. Maybe by the time the next album comes out in August I will be ready to move on. It has been three years since "This Side" (which won the Contemporary Folk Album Grammy). How did I survive?

Now back to your other music.