Dragonfly |
This was the first of the summer tour shows featuring the Giant Country Horns. It happened in Battery Park which is on a cliff overlooking Lake Champlain and has a small no-frills band shell. It was a free concert and maybe two hundred people or so showed up. It was a great concert. Hearing the horn arrangements was awesome, they added a lot to the songs, though it did limit a little the amount of free-jamming the band could get into. At the time, I lived just a few blocks away on N. Champlain St. above Stanard's Market, so I went over with a friend of mine and we split a bottle of wine and a "J". Fishman was funny, singing "Touch Me", standing at the mic wearing that odd doughnut dress. I got up and slam danced to BBFCFM as if it was a punk show at 242 (if you remember 242, give me a high five!!). The scene was pretty mellow, warm sun, light breeze, the sparkling surface of Lake Champlain with the blue-green-grey vista of the Adirondaks in the distance. People were doing their thing, sitting or noodle-dancing. There were some cops there but they were mellow also, until a group of freaks decided to surround a police cruiser and try to levitate it. The whole concert experience was a lot of fun, very informal, and it is the kind of scene I really missed after 1992 when Phish became a huge international success and lost that small gig intimacy. |
|