My Trey Story

Trey Anastasio Band, 5/3/99, Ann Arbor, MI, Michigan Theater (but actually the night before)

SET 1: 70's sitcom theme (about 30 minutes), fun, poppy song (lots of oooooohs!), meat intro > makisupa-esque jam > meat ending > makisupa-esque jam, 15 minute funk jam, 3 random poppy songs, 80's-sounding pop tune (played 8 times), farmhouse (trey electric solo), farmhouse (trey acoustic solo), 40 minutes of trey fucking around alone (not decipherable), come on baby let's go downtown, i can see clearly now, 10 minute jam, police cover (7 times), the silicon fairy, voodoo chile, trey drum solo

Primary Source

My plan was to tackle Trey’s inaugural solo tour by covering the first show and the last show, but some travel and dental issues intruded. The new plan is to listen along with the anniversaries and do a wrap-up at the end. Not even I am crazy enough to write an essay for each and every TAB show, sorry.

As a consolation prize, I’ll tell the story of the time I almost met Trey. As previously established, I spent my late 90s as a student at the University of Michigan, where I quickly fell in with a group of tapers and traders that encouraged all of my worst Phish-going habits. 1999 was the peak of this irresponsibility – if you like when I write about shows that I saw with my own eyes, well get ready, I saw about a quarter of them this year. 

And I saw this one, the opening date of the first official Trey Anastasio Band tour. We were all very flattered that Trey chose our little Midwestern college town to kick off this spring side gig, and I was excited to see him on the stage of the Michigan Theater, where I was mostly used to seeing films like American Movie and Year of the Horse. It seemed like the closest I’d ever get to seeing Phish in their theater days, on the same stage where Trey and Mike once laid down for several minutes in the middle of an encore.

The Michigan spring semester traditionally ends in April, so I had already returned home for the summer and had to drive the 4 hours back to campus to see the show. I left the night before, thinking that would give me all day on the 3rd to prepare and maybe run into Trey at Schoolkids or Cottage Inn. But a few minutes into the drive, I get a frantic call from my buddies Andrew and Reilly*, who were already in Ann Arbor and already stalking.

The two of them, suspecting that Trey was in town early, had decided to go for a stroll along Liberty Street, the near-campus main drag where the Michigan Theater sits. Instead of running into the man himself, they heard the unmistakable sound of his guitar drifting out of the theater, and quickly found they could hear it quite clearly standing in a back alley by the theater’s loading dock. They got there around 6pm, and proceeded to stand there for SIX HOURS listening to Trey and his new band rehearse. That setlist up there is what Reilly wrote down and immediately posted to rec.music.phish when we all got home – it’s mostly best guesses**, because none of us had heard the 8 Foot Fluorescent Tubes or 2/15/99 tapes at that point.

My somewhat inaccurate setlist from the next night. Look, there were a lot of Tubes.

They called me early in this marathon session, when I unfortunately was still around the Illinois-Indiana border. And despite my best efforts to shave some time off the usual long I-94 drive, I made it there too late to hear any music. But Andrew and Reilly (and one other head we never got the name of) were still there, by the Michigan Theater dumpster, because a security guard had told them Trey would exit out this back door to catch his ride back to the hotel. 

This news was a silver lining – at least I would have the chance to chat for a minute with one of my idols. So we waited, chatted about the music they’d heard, and kept close eye on the alley corner between the theater door and where we stood. Suddenly, a familiar face appeared. It was…Brad Sands! Our jaws dropped and eyes widened at seeing, in the flesh, Phish’s road manager, who we of course recognized, being lunatics. 

But before our brains could soak in that celebrity appearance and attempt a conversation with the famous Mr. Sands, he was followed on his heels by the man himself: Trey, looking much redder than he does onstage. Trey took one look at a gaggle of college kids with slack jaws and saucer eyes, and…turned right back around, in approximately one microsecond. The mystery head with us decided to run around the block to the front entrance and try to catch him (later, we found out he did), but our hearts sank and we shuffled home in disappointment, resigned to seeing him with 1700 other folks the next day.

In retrospect, I don’t blame Trey at all. As Reilly’s report notes, he had just finished up rehearsing for six, maybe seven hours on the eve of a tour where he would be playing mostly new songs with new people. The last thing he probably wanted to do was spend a couple minutes chatting with some chuckleheads about obscure Phish facts. But it’s also the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Trey, and I still get a twinge of jealousy whenever somebody posts a friendly selfie with him on the Upper West Side. 

At this point in my life though, I’m less interested in meeting the people I’ve spent thousands of hours listening to. I interviewed Mike***, and Trey seems like a fantastic interview if you can get access to him, but the informal fanboy stuff strikes me as more awkward than gratifying. If I ever see Trey again – by a dumpster or otherwise – hopefully I’ll have the maturity and presence of mind to just say “thanks, man” and give him a fist bump. But I’ll probably look like a deer in headlights all over again, and he’ll probably turn right back around.

* - Who I will be seeing Phish shows with this summer for the first time in 25 years, in Grand Rapids. Magical.

** - The Meat/Makisupa thing was clearly Windora Bug, the “fun, poppy song” with lots of “ooooohs” was maybe Heavy Things? 

*** - My Mike story is that I almost got both of us mowed down by a car jaywalking between the Metro and Uncommon Ground, which would have made me more infamous than Jesse Jarnow.