08-15-98 Loring Air Force Base

Phish Live Shows
#1

08-15-98 Loring Air Force Base, Limestone, ME

1: Mike’s Song > Simple, Beauty of My Dreams, Roggae, Split Open and Melt*, Poor Heart, The Moma Dance, The Divided Sky, Water in the Sky, Funky Bitch > Cities** > Weekapaug Groove (1:51)

2: The Wedge > Reba, Gumbo^ > Sanity, Tweezer > The Horse > Silent In The Morning, Chalkdust Torture, Slave to the Traffic Light^^ (1:25)

3: NICU > David Bowie, Strange Design, Limb by Limb > Brian and Robert, Loving Cup

E: Halley’s Comet > Cavern, Tweezer Reprise (3/E 1:20)

4: Ambient Jam+ (0:55)

Lemonwheel Day One. *“By request, for a little boy named Sam.” **Third verse was about “The Garden of Infinite Pleasantries,” instead of the normal verse about Memphis; with “Sneakin’ Sally” teases. ^Jam out of which sounded very much like “Tweezer Reprise.” ^^With glowstick war. +After Tweezer Reprise, Trey explained that the band wanted to do something to combine ideas from The Clifford Ball and The Great Went, going into detail about the band/fan artwork from last year, and announced that the band would do a free-form ambient jam (lyric-less; nearly an hour long; “in the Brian Eno style of ambient music”), surrounded by candles that were made by the audience throughout the day. There were no other lights used during the jam (the band used only the light from the candles), which Trey explained is similar to the idea of what happens during a glow-stick war, with the light for the band coming from the fans. Because candles were placed througout the stage, Trey explained that they were in fact playing in a “temple of fire” (as advertisements for summer tour shows had announced). After finishing the jam, the band picked up tiki torches, lit them using the candles, and lit a small stone (?) temple (which was left burning overnight and throughout the band’s performance on Sunday).

#2

So this was a fun show.

Nugless Dougless, remember the vial of THC?

Remember how effing cold it was.

Show was off the chains IMO, another great time in Limestone.

This was trip that we clogged the toilet at the border hotel with the weed and called the janitor to come plunge.

:wave:

Oh yah, 14 YEARS AGO?!?!?!?!?

#3

Hahaha. Good times.

I also remember sitting in our little tent city on that red collapsible picnic table with all of the '98 kids constantly blazing while my dad kept coming back with all kinds of bags of really good weed for us to smoke.

I think Bibs called him the “magic weed ferry”.

#4

I have some memories on Lemonwheel, before they get less vivid:

I remember my friend and I wandering the lot, can’t remember which night, but it was LATE night. And we were just walking around cuz we finally found some sketchy filthy mofo to sell us doses, and it was just weird, that experience. Not an especially special or fantastical experience, whatever that was we got. And I remember that we couldn’t figure out a way to just find somewhere cool to be. Didn’t want to disturb whomever was sleeping at our campsite, and so it was just walking for hours really! … and we’d already walked a ton because that’s what you do at an airforce base/festival after you park your car.

I’m trying to remember if it was Lemonwheel or the Great Went that I saw Deep Banana Blackout in the lot. They were great. I still have some live tapes of them.

I can remember that it was our third year together as a crew, having been to Clifford Ball and the Great Went. There were a core of like six to eight people, and each year we had a couple extra people, so it was really like ten you know? … I remember I used to bring my guitar and just play songs at our campsite … must have been so awkward and weird to have your friend just start playing songs at you.

Anyway at Lemonwheel, my friend Steve played some harmonica with me … known this dude for years and never ever played with him (at CB or GW either, though he was there) … blew me away with how good his playing was. Haven’t played music with him since. Though we’ve seen some shows together since for sure.

I have this show playing now, and I remember there were no giant screens to watch the band on at Lemonwheel; so I wonder if there isn’t footage of Lemonwheel. I kind of expect that The Great Went will get the DVD treatment (hopefully!) … but I don’t know about Lemonwheel, and I wasn’t at Oswego, so I don’t know about that either.These potential festival DVDs, shouldn’t they be trying to sell that stuff to us sooner than later?

I liked Lemonwheel. I think it was hot out. Musically my perception of this show is a little blurry. I feel like I liked it a lot. There seemed to be a sense of forward progression in the presentation … new material being rotated in … new albums still comin out … I was feeling like a happy fan, and that’s my memory of the Lemonwheel experience. A continuum of great experiences with Phish.