Mississippi Nights St. Louis MO: September 25, 2002
20 years ago today, they played this classic venue for the first time. The encore, Visions of Parin into Ringo is special. They are playing Visions for the 5th time, and they’re really nailing it. The solos, and band cohesiveness during the beautiful quiet parts, make this a great version. This is one of those songs that they develop further after the debut, where the first group of performances from about the 5th through the next 10, are increasingly excellent.
Notable:
The show starts strong with a really good 12-minute All Things Ninja.
A strong Walletsworth, into an 11-minute jam.
Resolution also has a killer jam making it a 10-minute version.
The Stranger starts with a classic piano part, and the band does the Billy Joel tune justice with this great version,
A great Hurt Bird Bath, then a fast Glory to end the first set.
The 9-min jam with Joel synth exploration to start the second set warms up to a Jake-led start of The Triple Wide, which is really starting to get some improvisational exploration now.
In Blue Echo they haven’t started going into the double tempo part which is now present in every version of Blue Echo; in this version they play the slow version of the main instrumental riff a second time, and then go into an improvisational jam with Mike on drums and Joel on the synth.
It morphs into a real funk jam with Joel on the Hammond organ and Jake on the rhythm guitar, which is the beginning of the Mike vocal song Get Down.
It’s a 17-minute All in Time. Always excellent, and still retains it’s written instrumental beginning, which is missing from more recent versions.
The encore, Visions of Parin into Ringo is special. They are playing Visions for the 5th time, and they’re really nailing it. The solos, and band cohesiveness during the beautiful quiet parts, make this a great version. This is one of those songs that they develop further after the debut, where the first group of performances from about the 5th through the next 10, are increasingly excellent.
Ringo is almost a year old here, and is quite the creative vehicle for them. You can really hear Mike’s vocals supporting Jake in the ending chorus.
Setlist from allthings.umphreys.com
Set 1:
All Things Ninja, Walletsworth > Resolution > The Stranger, Hurt Bird Bath[1] > Glory
Set 2:
Intro > The Triple Wide[2] > Roulette > Push the Pig[3], JaJunk-> Blue Echo > Get Down[4]-> All In Time
Encore:
Visions > Ringo[5]
Footnotes:
[1] with Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (Bach) tease
[2] with Hella Good (No Doubt) tease
[3] with brief Roulette tease
[4] with Carter on percussion
[5] with Uncommon tease
Links to Audio and Apps
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.
