my birthday weekend

Friday night my old housemate, Heidi, was kind enough to take me out to the hip new boulder restaurant, Frasca, for some tasty foodies & wine. Afterwards we hit trilogy for a spell, then I woke up on a couch with a dog barking at me. Not too excited on the canine alarm clock, I grabbed my bike and headed home in the chilly overcast morn.

Despite the weather being somewhat dismal for the Trey show at Red Rocks saturday, the rain held off while we were in the lots Q-in, only to turn into a light mist later. This was a highly anticipated show, the last of only a handful (eight, maybe?) of re-scheduled dates after the {thankful} demise of a monday night Zooma date. And, as a bonus, STS9 was the opener. They played a great, hour long set during which we unfortunately lost a couple members of our party.



It had been since spring 2003 at the fillmore since we last saw Trey, and now he's touring with an entirely new backing band, 70 Volt Parade:

Trey Anastasio - guitar/vocals
Les Hall - keys/guitar
Tony Hall - bass
Ray Paczkowski - keys
Skeeto Valdez - drums
Jennifer Hartswick - backing vocals
Christina Durfee - backing vocals
(Kuroda was on lights, I can only assume Langedoc was on sound)

Although I miss the horns a little, the change in the band dynamic is a welcome refresher. It definitely brings about a heavier, darker sound which was pretty staunch(!) on the night. All the new material was extremely toOoight-tah as well. Another intersting thing to note was the absense of a 'set break' - instead trey played 4 solo acoustic songs before the rest of the band came back for the '2nd set'. According to trey, this started sometime last week because he just wound up playing acoustic guitar backstage during the breaks anyway. The show lasted 2h45m. There was a boom video camera and other random cameramen in the crowd (one decided to film jacq for like 5 minutes!), so maybe we'll see an official dvd sometime in the future. The rain seemed to deter a huge taper section, although there were a few brave souls with mini umbrellas hovering over mics in the pit. This pull is the first to surface. I'm certainly looking forward to the new studio album...



-neph-tah-