Feels appropriate to repost this show today…give it a spin because it’s the right thing to do…
Torrent Link: https://bt.etree.org/details.php?torrentId=617455 (Likely Inactive)
Archive Link: https://archive.org/details/moe1998-11-04.Schaefer
etree ID: https://etreedb.org/shn/158684
(Originally Posted 11/28/22)
According to the record books, 11/4/98 was my 20th moe. show. It also held the title of “Favorite moe. Show” for many, many years.
In the fall of 1998, I was a college drop out, and I had just come off of living in a van for well over a month on Furthur tour. I had spent a less than amazing freshman year at the former Lyndon State College, living in a tiny room with two other dudes (one of them the size of 3 dudes). Those of you unfamiliar with the Northeast Kingdom only need to know this…not much happens up there other than snowstorms. The fact that it even has a kind of cool nickname is probably the most extraordinary thing about the area. So, I dropped out, and enrolled in Keene State College with JPR for what amounted to basically a weekend, where they put me in a slightly larger room with 3 other dudes. One was a dude that I just happened to know previously and actually thought was a good guy but who was also basically on the run, one was some dweeb that didn’t make the first night and is still probably scarred from the experience, and the other was Rog who liked nothing more than to bring back chicks to our totally open floor plan room and have at it the room with the rest of us trying to sleep, while throwing clothes, Icehouse bottles and lit cigarettes all over the room. Bold moves by Rog, but it wasn’t my scene, and none of my years worth of LSC credits were transferring, so…always having that keen sense of knowing when to bounce, I walked over to the President’s office and told him I was withdrawing. After a few minutes of trying to convince me to take a leave of absence, he finally relented. We agreed to disagree about his College and I was set free. But the fun wasn’t over yet. While walking back from the President’s office, some 100 year old lady came tearing ass out of a funeral home and ran over another dude on a motorcyle right in front of me. I hung out with fairly severely injured motorcycle guy. I screamed at slackjawed yokels who were rubbernecking from their apartment balconies to call for help (it was 1998 and I had no cell phone, obviously). And when the ambulance finally came, I wished him the best of luck, gave my story of the situation to the cops, then ran like Carl Lewis to my car (parked a mile away) drove it to my dorm room, went in, told Rog to fuck off, grabbed the four changes of clothes I had and the eight 100 racks of Maxell XLIIs I brought (I had priorities), told Rog to fuck off again, walked back out to my car which was now decorated with a fresh new parking ticket, and got the hell out of Keene and drove aimlessly for days existing on Camel Lights, Dunkin Donuts and most of the Spring Dead ’77 tour (the benefits of driving around with all of your tapes). What does this absolutely ridiculous 100 hours in Keene have to do with Installment #793? Well…I’m glad you asked.
Because I was now officially a college drop out with no future at all, I decided to do the only rational thing, I would hit the entire fall northeast moe. run with old friend Fat Rod. A decision which I still firmly believe is one of the better ones I’ve ever made in my entire life. We started at Halloween in Utica, drove to Higher Ground only to find out the show was postponed (the internet wasn’t awesome in ’98), headed down to Portsmouth for this one, over to the Somerville Theater for the next night which featured maybe the best Moon Boot Lover opening set of all time (if anyone has this set, email me now), skipped NYC, but headed to Northampton, then back to Higher Ground about 2 weeks later. It was great. It was better than taking classes over again at stupid Keene State, and it was a hell of a lot better sitting in a room with Rog who I probably would’ve killed before the semester was over.
This recording captures the pure jubilance of the band that night, the first show for Rob as a father. The music is great. There’s an extra energy in everything and this recording captures exactly what I remember from the feeling in the room that night. The second set Jam > Rebubula is clearly the highlight, but there’s a lot of first set energy in Fiction, It, St. Augustine and Hi & Lo. I know this show (and I think even this source) has circulated before, but it wasn’t available anywhere and it’s a fresh DAT > FLAC transfer so I asked Mr. Schaefer to borrow it and am pretty glad that I did. Besides, how else could I have figured a way to tell the tale of my time at Keene.
By the way, since I know you’re all on pins and needles, I went back to Lyndon State the next semester and lived in the area for the next eight years. Sometimes the devil you know really is preferable.
moe.
11/4/98
The Music Hall – Portsmouth, NH
Source: (FOB) Schoeps cmc4/mk4’s > Oade pre > DA-P1
Transfer: Tascam DA-20 MKII > Tascam DR-680 > Audacity > WAV > Traders Little Helper > FLAC
Taper Unknown
Transferred & Seeded by Bill Graves
~ Set 1 ~
1. Crowd / Banter
2. Moth >
3. Big World
4. Stranger Than Fiction
5. It
6. St. Augustine
7. Hi & Lo
8. Bring You Down >
9. Moth Reprise
~ Set 2 ~
1. Crowd / Banter
2. Fast Eddie Jam >
3. Rebubula >
4. lylelovit.
5. Threw It All Away
6. The Faker >
7. Head
~ Encore ~
8. Crowd / Banter
9. Fire
Huge thanks to Michael Schaefer for the use of his archives.
This show is a Boiler in the Basement Installment –
https://boilerinthebasementmusic.wordpress.com/
Boiler in the Basement Music 