Set 1: The Curtain > Runaway Jim, Foam, Llama, The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony > Suzy Greenberg > Alumni Blues > Letter to Jimmy Page > Alumni Blues, The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu >The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, Split Open and Melt, Bouncing Around the Room, Frankenstein

Set 2: Chalk Dust Torture, Guelah Papyrus > The Divided Sky, Flat Fee, Paul and Silas > Lizards, Stash, HYHU> If I Only Had a Brain > HYHU, You Enjoy Myself

Encore: The Landlady

It’s been a while since my last post, but I do have some good stuff coming up.  I initially had a different show from ’93 in mind for this post, but this week being the 20th Anniversary of the Horn Tour, I decided to go for something with the brass.  The Horn Tour was highly anticipated when they announced it in late May and it did not disappoint.  I saw all of it except for 3 shows and every night was a treat to attend.  Berkshire Performing Arts Center was the third show of the tour which started with a free afternoon show at Burlington’s Battery Park.  The second night was at the Colonial Theatre in Keene, NH, and then this show, which was the night before the 3 set blowout in Townsend, VT.  It was a great start to the tour, especially since all the shows were relatively easy drives through beautiful countryside.  Also, the Horn Tour was the first tour where there were multiple groups of people doing the whole tour. Previously, people were doing strings of shows in 1990 and Spring  1991, but nobody was doing whole tours.  The Horn Tour changed that, in part because it was in the summer, it was fairly short (14 shows), and it stayed on the east coast. It was also due in part to the fact that the band’s popularity was snowballing.

The BPAC is apparently gone now as I could not even find a single picture of it online.  I guess it turned into the National Music Center in the mid-nineties, but it looks like it is now defunct, probably surpassed by the beautiful (and outdoor shed-type) Tanglewood which is only a mile or so away.  I am pretty surprised because this was a great venue from what I remember.  I don’t remember too much from this show however, because they had a closed concession stand  in the hallway with a beer tap.  Even though the tap handle did not have the thingy on top saying what kind of beer it was, we pulled it down and ice cold beer flowed out.  It was some kind of crappy Bud Light or Miller or something, but we didn’t care, we drained that thing by intermission.  Practically the only thing I remember of the show itself was the Curtain and If I Only Had a Brain (which I always love, they should bring it back).  The rest is a little hazy!  It was a cool little venue though, went out and up from an orchestra pit, no balcony.  It would probably hold 1500-2000, but there was definitely less than 1000 at this show.

Musically, there is a lot to like about this show.  Almost everything is solidly played (except for Trey’s botch in Divided Sky after which he jokingly calls it the “jazz version” ) and the show is certainly worth a download.  The link to the MP3 of the entire show can be found here (the lossless on etree currently has no seeders):

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e64969679d601a07ab1eab3e9fa335ca22b44ee4b419fd6d

The horns bring something to special to a lot of the tracks, I especially like the Avenu Malkenu and the Split, but I didn’t pick those to showcase here.  From fairly early in the first set is a great Alumni Blues which we had heard as the soundcheck at Battery Park, but this was the official debut with the GCH.  This song is made for the horns:

Speaking of made for the horns, this first set closing Frankenstein is tasty as hell and features a bad ass vocal jam taboot: