I won’t apologize for not posting sooner this time…a girl’s got to have some fun, right? We just spent last night in a very nice hotel which was just what we needed after 3 nights and 4 days of camping at Festival 8…Phish’s 8th festival! After we left Arizona, we drove about 3.5 hours to Indio to meet our friend, Jesse, who we would be camping with. A festival first for me was the fact that we had absolutely NO TRAFFIC going into the venue!!! I’m not sure if it was due to the fact that we arrived a day early or that the event didn’t attract more people. I think the fact that Phish decided to do the festival out west deterred countless phans. I can name at least 10 people I know that couldn’t make it. Phish is an east-coast band after all, but why wouldn’t they have a festival in the most laid-back state in the U.S.? To me, California just seemed to be a perfect fit….up until we hit the security check point going into the venue. We were pretty much strip-searched….I’ve never seen security like that at a show before. They made us dump our valuable Long Trail Blackbeary Wheat due to the fact that they were bottles as opposed to cans. It was over-the-top madness…taking away our microbrews…..brews that had traveled the entire country, only to be dumped near some trashcan as if they were garbage. I hope the Long Trail Brewery doesn’t get wind of this. After feeling a bit violated, we headed to our campsite, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic (named after the 1973 album by the British progressive rock group King Crimson). Each campground was named a different potential album that Phish could possibly cover during their Halloween set. Other campground names included Hunky Dory, Electric Ladyland, and Purple Rain! The festival site was gorgeous with a beautiful mountain range surrounding the venue which created the perfect backdrop to the lush, grassy fields and miles of palm trees that we would call home for 4 days.

Phish ended up performing the Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street…which was pretty rockin’, but sort of unexpected at the same time. Phish covers Loving Cup all the time so maybe this just seemed like the perfect album to cover. I mean, who doesn’t love the Rolling Stones? My personal favorites from that set included Shake Your Hips and Stop Breaking Down. Sharon Jones and Saundra Williams provided the soulful sound Phish needed to pull off this masterpiece. I’m not convinced it was their best Halloween musical costume, but I still enjoyed every minute of it.

I really enjoyed Phish’s Friday night show, especially, the second set…and the last two sets on Sunday night. The Down With Disease was amazing…Page through down some funky goodness on that song. The 2001 from Sunday’s nights show was ridiculous and is always a favorite of mine and Jon’s. We had talked earlier in the day about how cool it would be if they played Sparkle…and they ended up playing it Sunday night! Jesse had dressed up as Esther for Halloween and they ended up playing that as the 2nd encore song of Sunday night.

I ended up wearing my Marge Simpson outfit for Halloween, but left the strapless green dress behind and found a cool blue dress from one of the vendors inside the concert grounds. People seemed to really enjoy my costume as I kept hearing people yell, “Marge”…I even had a couple photographs taken of me! Jon’s costume took too much time and effort to put together so he bagged the glowstick costume altogether. He’s not really one for dressing up anyway!

We are heading north up to San Francisco to visit my dad and step mom and partake in a Segway tour of the city. More to come…