Durty Nellie’s Palatine, IL: September 17, 2002
Happy 20-year debut anniversary to Wappy Sprayberry, Smell the Mitten and Visions!
You’re in for a treat; go start this recording playing through the links below before you start reading.
While on a ten day break, the band prepared for three debuts at Durty Nellie’s in Palatine, IL. They’ve debuted multiple songs before at this venue – for example back in the first show of the year on Jan 23.
Notable:
The show starts with a suite 12 minute improvisational jam with the full band and then morphs quickly into Qbert looks like a nine minute version and looking forward we could see the Qbert makes a real reappearance at the end of the second set also.
Qbert is a cool original version with some of the polyrhythms present that haven’t been played that way in modern versions of Qbert.
Sweet drum solo after Qbert by Mikey and then blending into some really weird synth work from Joel before it dips right into the beginning of Syncopated Strangers.
Wappy Sprayberry, track labeled as “Jimmy Stewart,” just has the introductory bass part that the band expands on and improvises around for a while but that’s it for the debut of Wappy. The Wappy debut exploration has Push the Pig teases.
A nice version of Resolution, which includes a quick Who Knows (Jimi Hendrix) tease right before the second verse, and then after a reggae section with a Hammond organ solo from Joel, they move directly into Much Obliged which has an older version of the arrangement of the instrumental section before each verse.
The jam after Much Obliged goes into a really smooth transition into the debut of Smell The Mitten. The debut has been a few shows in coming, where they’ve been experimenting live with sections of the original composition called Gesture Under a Mitten. Gesture was debuted only recently on 1-23-02 at this same venue, and was played only 35 times, until being rewritten into Smell the Mitten.
Gesture has a lyrical verses and a bluegrass-like section that have now been eliminated from the new version. The finishing section includes the beautiful jazzy instrumental section that was part of the original Gesture, but only gets played sometimes these days. It’s a Ryan-Joel segment with Ryan playing this interesting bass line and Joel going off on the Hammond organ.
From the jazzy section they go into a vocal jam with delay on everyone’s mics, they start experimenting with world music chanting and Gregorian chant and indigenous singing sounds, very tribal, and Brendan comes in with the delay still on his mic singing a slow safety dance lyrics tease.
Then Brendan turns off the delay on his mic and welcomes everyone to the show, saying “hey everybody, happy Tuesday.”
Before 13 days we can hear Jake say “what’s this called, 13?” And Brendan says “I think we’re calling it 13 days and if you don’t like it tough shit,” then Joel saying “all right, uh, this is the second time this has happened…if you guys ever see words to a song, don’t take them, because we need them to play the song…so if you guys see anybody walking around with words to this song, take them back and bring them back to us,” and then Brendan announces that at midnight tonight it is Andy Farag’s birthday, Jake serenading “Xanadu” and there’s a few minute delay and Joel Cummins is back saying that he found his spare words for the song, Joel saying “I found my back up version for cases like this.”
It’s a really great 13 days and then it has that sudden ending and goes right into an improv jam kind of jazzy and slowly Joel starts a Rain Song (Led Zepplin) sounding segment and the rest of the band follows through and they do a nice little Rain Song jam.
They quickly move into Andy’s Last Beer which is a great version and when they go into the odd-meter section, Jake sings it in the mic with a Louis Armstrong gravely voice and then he goes into mumbling at the end of that section, very funny.
Then it’s a really well established version of JaJunk, I think the third time it’s been played then into a related four minute improv jam it’s a nice slow and soft jam that builds just a little bit and Jake at the end starts to play the opening guitar riff to Roulette a few times hinting and telegraphing that they’re going to go into Roulette. Joel ounces after Roulette “the first song we played there is a new song called JaJunk.” I think that it’s the first time that that song is announced with a name.
Then Brendan says this next song is called Dump City. The Dump City has a really raunchy Fender Rhodes solo from Joel right before the end. Then there’s a brief Deborah tease from Brendan, and then Joel does a really nice Scenes from an Italian Restaurant tease, a little piano segment buildup by (Billy) Joel.
Get Down (cover by War) is a cover with Mike vocals they’ve only played 23 times over a year and a half, the last one way back during Mike’s last shows with the band, on 11-22-2002. That’s 2104 shows ago – wow.
Right after the verses of Get Down the jam Ryan goes into the bass line of Headphones and Snowcones which is going to be debuting live in just a month in October of 2002. I guess this counts as just a tease, at around 7 minutes into the Get Down track. Headphones and Snowcones had already been recorded on the recent release, Local Band Does OK, from 6-21-2002.
Now the jam changes again into Pooh Doggie, with the Led Zeppelin interlude of Moby Dick (listed as the full song) with Brendan on congas. A long drum solo by Mike Miro in the middle where Jake, Joel and Ryan left the stage, and then finished up with Moby Dick and then we’re heading into a beautiful debut version of Visions (then called Visions of Parin), and the written portions are basically exactly the same as they play it to this day and there’s also an improvisational section after the instrumental written portions which is exploratory right off the bat even as a debut.
The Visions jam transitions into a little more up-tempo rhythm from Mike and then they transform into a short and fast version of Glory which then ends and goes right into Haji which is a great example of weaving songs from one to the next without breaks in the music.
The Haji is a tease and then it goes into a Divisions tease before going back completely into Haji and then the goes right from Haji into Qbert again to finish the song.
The second set closer is a super-rarity, the last performed version of Got me Wrong by Alice in Chains. It’s a Mikey and Joel shared vocal song that they’ve only played 11 times, over a one-year period back in 2001-2002. Right now that’s 2136 show ago.
The encore was a nice tidy version of Uncommon and then The Triple Wide, no jams to finish. They haven’t really started letting 3x out for jams yet.
Setlist from allthings.umphreys.com
Set 1:
Intro-> Q*Bert > Syncopated Strangers > Wappy Sprayberry[1] > Resolution[2] > Much Obliged > Smell the Mitten[3], 13 Days[4] > Andy’s Last Beer
Set 2:
JaJunk[5]-> Roulette, Dump City, Get Down > Pooh Doggie > Moby Dick[6] > Visions[7]-> Glory-> Hajimemashite[8]-> Q*Bert, Got Me Wrong
Encore:
Uncommon, The Triple Wide
Footnotes:
[1] debut, original; with Push the Pig teases and The Safety Dance (Men Without Hats) tease from Joel
[2] with Who Knows (Jimi Hendrix) tease
[3] debut, original; grown from Gesture Under a Mitten; with vocal jam with The Safety Dance (Men Without Hats) lyrics
[4] with The Rain Song (Led Zeppelin) tease before segue
[5] with Linus and Lucy (Vince Guaraldi) tease
[6] with Brendan on congas; Jake, Joel, and Ryan left the stage for drums section
[7] debut, original; “Visions of Parin;” with Happy Birthday and Birthday (The Beatles) teases for Andy and Kevin
[8] with Divisions tease by Joel
Show Notes:
with Scenes from an Italian Restaurant (Billy Joel) tease from Joel after Dump City
with (Don’t Fear) The Reaper (Blue Oyster Cult) tease before Uncommon
Link to Audio
The Live Music Archive app (iOS) and the Taper’s Section app (Android) is a great way to find and listen to these shows. You can stream, download for offline listening, save favorites, and mark shows as already listened to. The app pulls all data directly from the public repository of live music recordings posted at archive.org.
