On Friday night, Trey Anastasio continued his late-2018 solo acoustic run with a performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, CA. Once again, Trey mused about the location of the day throughout the show, reminiscing about amusing experiences in the City of Angels including the one time Paris Hilton declined to sit next to him at a Hollywood party, how Phish recruited Rose Stone for Hoist, and more.
The performance began with Phish‘s Undermind track “Secret Smile”, marking its first appearance in a Trey acoustic show since Rothbury Festival more than ten years ago. Next Anastasio offered up his only acoustic debut of the night, recent TAB original-turned-Phish jam vehicle “Set Your Soul Free”. The show continued with a number of go-to acoustic numbers like “Brian and Robert”, “The Inlaw Josie Wales”, and “Mountains In The Mist” before moving into the second “Free” of this young solo tour. A rare “Two Versions of Me” was up next, followed by a crowd-requested rendition of Trey/Amanda Green collaboration “Summer of ’89”.
“Everything’s Right” came next, followed by fan-favorite Hoist ballad “If I Could”. The set continued from there with “Limb By Limb”, “Prince Caspian”, and “Till We Meet Again” before Trey gave a nod to Phish’s upcoming Riviera Maya destination event with the first acoustic “Mexican Cousin” of the tour. A pair of newer-vintage tunes came next in “Mercury” and “Rise/Come Together” before Trey took things back to 1996 with Bill Breathes ditty “Talk”, marking its first acoustic performance since 2011.
Following “Talk”, Trey took a moment to reflect on a couple of Phish’s more bizarre early album covers and the way the images came about, including the awkward close-up of Mike Gordon‘s face on Billy Breathes and the horse in a harness on the cover of Hoist. On Hoist, Trey explained, the prevailing thought was, “This music is so powerful, and it feels like you could levitate, you know what I mean? It’s making me feel like my feet are leaving the ground—and there’s the line in ‘If I Could’ like ‘I wanna feel my feet leave the ground.’ We should do a cover where the most grounded of creature is, like, lifting, just slightly, into the air…what about a horse? And it’d just, like, floating into the air. … I don’t know what the album was gonna be called, but it was this concept. We got this cool photographer that was gonna do it, and they were like, ‘Where do we find… a horse?” [laughs]. And our friend Amy—our first festival was at Amy’s Farm, right?—she was hanging around. And she said, ‘I have a horse, I have this horse, Maggie, come to my farm. So we went to take this picture, we brought the photographer. And she had this contraption…that Maggie had been in before—no animals were harmed in this story [laughs]—but she’s trapped Maggie in this thing and, like, horribly lifted her up like ughh… her back was curving…It was, like, nothing, nothing like we had conceived at all [laughs]. It’s just, like, a horse in a horrible contraption.”
“We imagined this beautiful, ethereal thing,” he continued, amused, “And then they took a picture… We did the same thing with Billy Breathes—it’s like, we were out of time, we need the cover tomorrow, it costs too much money, and that’s it, that’s the cover. We’re stuck with this thing. And then we didn’t have a name, so we’re like ‘eh, just call it Hoist,’ cus it’s going up like this [makes jerking motion]… Just, like, a nightmare [laughs].” He went on to talk about the album’s photo insert, which accentuates Jon Fishman‘s “private bits and pieces—so I thought, we should just put that on the cover and call it Hung Like A Horse.”
Shifting his focus to another song from Hoist, “Wolfman’s Brother”, Trey mused, “This was my favorite part of making that album. On the outro of this tune—it’s a funky kind of tune and has these funky vocals—and we were like, ‘Man, I wonder if Rose Stone from Sly & The Family Stone still lives in L.A.?’ I will say that, when I was a kid, I used to look at these Sly & The Family Stone covers, and it would be all these men and women and black and white and singing these songs like ‘Family Affair’, all together, and I always wanted to have a band like that. I actually ended up kind of modeling TAB after that. … Anyway, we wondered in the middle of this recording if Rose Stone, Sly’s sister, who sang all those songs was around… so we called, and she answered the phone and said she’d sing on the record. She came in and gave us, like, a soul lesson. It was an incredible thing to hear. If you go back and listen closely to the album version of this, you’ll hear the same person who sang [cups hands over the microphone and sings], ‘It’s a family affair.’ So you gotta imagine Sly’s sister.” The subsequent rendition of the song featured an appropriate “Family Affair” quote.
With time left for a few more, Trey worked through “The Wedge” and “Blaze On”, which in turn segued into “Bathtub Gin”. Anastasio began to get up out of his seat as the song hit its final refrain, putting his foot up on his chair and encouraging the crowd to keep singing as he took his bow and headed off the stage. The crowd was still singing as he retook the stage for his encore, which featured renditions of “Waste”, Kasot Växt “cover” “Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S.”, and upbeat Big Boat anthem “More”.
You can watch a selection of crowd-shot videos from the performance below:
Trey Talks About The Hoist Album Cover
[Video: Mitch Dorf]
“Set Your Soul Free”
[Video: Paul Giza]
“Everything’s Right”
[Video: Paul Giza]
“Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S.”
[Video: Paul Giza]
“Bathtub Gin” > Encore (Partial)
[Video: Mitch Dorf]
Trey Anastasio’s solo acoustic tour continues tonight, Saturday, December 8th, with a performance at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, CA. For a full list of upcoming Trey acoustic dates, head here.
Setlist: Trey Anastasio Solo Acoustic | Walt Disney Concert Hall | Los Angeles, CA | 12/7/18
Set: Secret Smile, Set Your Soul Free [1], Brian and Robert, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Mountains in the Mist, Free, Two Versions of Me, Summer of ’89, Everything’s Right, If I Could, Limb By Limb, Prince Caspian, Till We Meet Again, Mexican Cousin, Mercury, Rise/Come Together, Talk, Wolfman’s Brother, The Wedge, Blaze On > Bathtub Gin
Encore: Waste, Say it to Me S.A.N.T.O.S., More
[1] First acoustic performance by Trey.