The first leg of our journey to see Phish in Lake Tahoe was grueling. After two amazing shows at the Gorge Amphitheater had left my wife and I in a state of complete disarray, we loaded up the truck and began the long descent from the Columbia Plateau to the Klamath Lake Basin. The drive seemed interminably long, owing mostly to the fatigue of three solid days of raging hard against the dying of the keg, but also due to some severe wildfire smoke inhalation. At times the road ahead was lost in a hazy mirage. My whole face seemed chapped from the dry heat of the high desert. After nine hours of hard labor, we pulled up to the Running Y Ranch and settled into our lodging for the night. We were so tired, we couldn’t even be bothered to pull the lid off the hot tub we had at our disposal. The ascent from Klamath Falls to the liquid sapphire in the center of the Sierra Nevada uplift was, in stark contrast, the driving equivalent of a cool mountain breeze blowing up the leg of my cargo shorts. Incredible what a good sleep can do for your performance. If I had any sense I would pay attention to that lesson and take a nap before I wrote this recap. Since I took two, and drove home to Portland, I apologize that you may not read this before the Bill Graham shows begin. Hell, I was only signed up for writing the recap for night two in Tahoe...but since my esteemed colleague Phillip Zerbo was busy training for his epic second place finish at the Phamily Poker Classic and couldn’t stop shuffling his deck long enough to put fingers to keyboard, I had to combine both shows into one ball of earwax. So let’s get to burning it.

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Back in the early age of the internet, and before widespread use of cell phones, fans would usually have to wait until the next morning to find out what happened at a concert. I have three vivid memories from undergrad when, while I was sitting at a computer, I felt myself filling with excitement and joy in reading what had happened the night before. One was March 20, 1995, when I read on rec.music.dead that the Grateful Dead *finally* played Unbroken Chain to close the previous night's first set in Philadelphia (stories were coming back that a few chosen fans held up their cell phones for friends; others rushed to use pay phones at setbreak -- it was a big deal). The next was November 1 of that same year when I walked from Studio near the Pantheon to one of the only computer labs in all of Rome, just north of the Vatican, to find out that Phish played Quadrophenia for Halloween. The third was in the Fall of 1996, reading about Phish's famous "M" set from St. Louis, complete with Mean Mr. John Popper (just a week after seeing my fourth and fifth shows).

Fast-forward seventeen years to yesterday morning, when I woke up to hundreds of messages on my phone in the form of Tweets and GroupMe posts describing what had gone down just a few hours earlier in Tahoe. If I had stayed up, I could have even listened along to the Tweezer by means of a fan's stream from the show. Instead, I quickly downloaded the show and was able to listen to the eighth-longest song Phish ever played twice before I even got into work. And by early morning, I was up to my fourth listen (compared to seventeen years earlier, when I was resigned that I would have to wait weeks -- or months -- before I could even hear a note; I remember anxiously awaiting for a tape Vine or Tree for that Dead show . . . ).

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