When people talk about the bands they liked when they were in middle school, I like to pretend that my ninth grade self had really good taste in music. Essentially, this perception of myself is based on a single fact: I never owned a Limp Bizkit album, and Limp Bizkit are probably the number one band that people born in the first half of the 80’s are embarrassed for having liked in middle school.
Recently, I’ve been using a website called GrooveShark to stream all kinds of music that I haven’t listened to in years. As I comb the archives of my brain, I find that, despite having dodged the Limp Bizkit bullet, I did in fact listen to all kinds of music in late middle school and early high school that most people would find questionable.
For instance, everyone I know seems to hate the band Phish. Conveniently, I seemed to have forgotten over the years that I used to listen to A Live One all the time.
I pulled up A Live One on GrooveShark the other day, secretly hoping that I could chalk my Phish phandom up to youthful indiscretion. Unfortunately, this has not proven to be the case. A Live One still sounds great to me. The fact that I like Phish seems strange to, because I normally don’t enjoy long-winded “jam band” type music. Still, I can’t help but think that Phish are the Miles Davis of the hacky-sack/Bonnaroo bands; just as most people who don’t listen to jazz might still like Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, tons of people who claim they despise jam bands might still like A Live One. When you get down to it, Phish took classic rock to its logical, bombastic conclusion, and they did it with an infectious sense of humor.
The ending of “Stash” is really great. When the crazy guitar and samba piano snap back into the groove and that chorus of “maybe so / maybe not” comes back in? Really good stuff.
This just goes to show that, when you are really honest with yourself, your taste in music will never make any sense, ever.
-Warren
