Piano trio

I'm a great fan of jazz piano trios, such as the Brad Mehldau Trio with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy or Jeff Ballard, and the classic Bill Evans trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. But until today, I never realized that the first piano trio I ever got into was not a jazz trio but a rock trio: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Consider the piano/bass/drums passages of "Take a Pebble," from their first album:

This was definitely the first such music I ever heard, several years before I got into jazz.

[I was listening to ELP this morning because of this post about ELP by Don Brown.]

Creepy Universe

My seven-year-old daughter Sara is getting into planets, and my nine-year-old daughter Luisa was looking at a book about the planets with her. There was lots of astronomical information in the book, including a projection about how long the sun will continue to shine and when it will implode (I think it said approximately 5 billion years). 

This made Luisa very nervous and upset about the idea of the sun and earth disappearing. My wife remembered that our son Miles (now 14) was nervous in the same way when we first got the book when he was about five! I remembered my own nervousness about the temporal and spatial dimensions of the universe when I was a kid. Here's a poem I wrote about that kid:

The Seven-Year-Old Atheist 

The universe gives me the creeps.

— Willem de Kooning

The seven-year-old atheist knew the sky

of California, in winter even bluer

than in summer. He knew that cats could die,

like grass beneath a stone, and children, too.

With his every breath, the universe

expanded, made him smaller. So he willed

himself to grow, energetically cursed—

"God damn it to hell!"—his puny build. 

Neither curse nor prayer could change the speed

of light or turn his energy to mass.

He did not breathe in vain. He did not need

mysterious ways. He lay down on the grass

and dreamed he was a stone that someone kicked.

He would have been surprised at his own trick,

if he had disappeared. Instead, he flew

across the lawn, then landed, woke, and grew. 

(The poem was published in Softblow, along with three others.)

Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition, "Album Album"

Listening to a jazz playlist of mine on shuffle on my pocket computer, I had the pleasure of hearing "Third World Anthem," from "Album Album", a 1984 release by Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition. I first began to listen to jazz extensively when I was a DJ at KZSU, the student radio station at Stanford University. I first did a jazz show in the summer of 1983. When I started, I knew next to nothing. But I knew Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," and John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," so I started "So What" from the former and cued up the title track from the latter, and wondered what to play after that.

Jazz albums have good lists of personnel, so I went and got albums by all the sidemen on those two albums. One of the albums was by McCoy Tyner (pianist on the Coltrane album), and one of the sidemen on that album was Jack DeJohnette. I don't remember what Tyner album it was, but I vaguely remember it being a piano trio, which means it was almost certainly "Supertrios" from 1977.

In any case, this use of sidemen to find more records to play had quickly led me to Jack DeJohnette, and when I began to exclusively play jazz in my DJ'ing the following January, his work was a staple of my shows, and when "Album Album" came out that year, I played it to death, especially "Festival," "New Orleans Strut," and "Third World Anthem."

I spent just over a week in New York just after Thanksgiving in 1984, and I went to see Special Edition several times during their week-long gig at the Blue Note. David Murray had already become one of my favorite saxophone players by then, but I was just as impressed by John Purcell and Howard Johnson. Rufus Reid is the bassist on the album, but he was busy elsewhere, so Cecil McBee was replacing him, and I remember him as being especially great. And DeJohnette was, as always, simply a wonder on the drums.

"Album Album": one of the greatest records of the 1980s, to my ears. (Up there with "Seeds of Time," by the magnificent Dave Holland Quintet.)

Same to you

Swiss speakers of English tend to say "same to you" where I would say "you too": that is, after someone says something nice like "have a good time" or "have a nice day." I would only say "same to you" after something mean, as a response to an insult, say. I assume this is just a feature of my personal usage; other native speakers of English must use "same to you" the same way the Swiss do, or they wouldn't put it that way, presumably. But perhaps it's a Helvetism from Swiss German or from French? In any case, this morning when my daughter Sara wished me a nice morning when she left for kindergarten, I said, "You too!" (Sometimes, I think I should say REM instead of U2.)

The One I Love

There's a playlist on my iPhone that I call "AA playlist": first, I tried to write an "A playlist" of all my favorite artists (hey, why is my computer "correcting" the spelling of "favorite" by putting that British U into it?; time to check my settings, I guess). But that playlist was way too long to fit on my phone, so I split the A list into a AA list (my very best stuff) and an A list (the stuff it would be nice to have but that I wouldn't miss if it's not on the main list). 

An hour or so ago, I was listening to the AA playlist on shuffle (as I am wont to do), and up came "The One I Love," by REM. I've got REM on the AA list because I like so many of their songs, but if pressed, I would have said I actually only truly love one of their songs: "You Are The Everything," which is quite close to being perfect; if it didn't say "eviscerate your memory," which is a bit too weird, then it would be perfect.

But when "The One I Love" came on, I had one of those moments where a song could be said to do just that: "eviscerate your memory." The rush of hearing that song everywhere back in 1987 came back to me: what a joy it was that a band that had been putting out such excellent music right from their first album had finally struck it big. What a joy that the song that was everywhere was so good. What a joy to hear them live, and what a surprise to discover that they were a hard-rocking band, not just the jangly light sound of their albums.

What a joy to feel those feelings again. A Robert Creeley poem:

AFTER

I'll not write again

things a young man

thinks, not the words

of that feeling.

There is no world

except felt, no

one there but 

must be here also.

If that time was

echoing, a vindication

apparent, if flesh

and bone coincided—

let the body be.

See faces float

over the horizon let

the day end.

Television static; how science works

"Front Row at the Dawn of Time," Lawrence M. Krauss's wonderfully titled editorial in the International Herald Tribune today, has two tidbits I wanted to note, both of them a little too long for a tweet. (At least for me, Twitter has become the replacement of blog posts that mostly just refer to an interesting article.)

The first has to do with cosmic background radiation, and it teaches "those of us old enough" something we might not have known:

... for those of us old enough to remember television before cable, when the TV stations went off the air and the screen filled with static, about 1 percent of the static visible on the screen was due to this radiation from the Big Bang.

So on the few occasions when I woke up in the middle of the night after falling asleep in front of the TV, mostly in the summer when time seemed to behave differently during the school vacation, and I would sometimes get into a rhythm of staying up until dawn to avoid the heat and humidity of the long days — on those few occasions, almost lost in the white noise, I was a witness to the Big Bang.

*

The second point is a reminder about the grain of salt necessary when reading science journalism in newspapers:

It is an unfortunate facet of science reporting that it isn’t often made clear that most anomalies in experiments tend to go away, just as most theoretical ideas turn out to be wrong.

Instead of attributing significance to potentially strange results, it is the business of science to try and prove them wrong before we blindly move forward. Skepticism is the business of the day, and it is wise to remember this next time you read an astounding discovery claimed in the press.

Science is about results, and proving things, but it approaches proof as much by disproving as it does by proving.

A Boy Waiting To Be Punished

I gave my son Miles Watership Down for Christmas. I must have been about his age (13) when I first read it; I went on to read it four or five times. Yet I have only the vaguest memory of it—or so I thought. Then Miles showed me a paragraph that he liked so much that he wanted to post it on Facebook, the second paragraph of chapter 12 of the book. As I read it, it came back to me with complete vividness and familiarity, as if I had only read it the day before myself:

Here is a boy who was waiting to be punished. But then, unexpectedly, he finds that his fault has been overlooked or forgiven, and at once the world reappears in brilliant colors, full of delightful prospects. Here is a soldier who was waiting, with a heavy heart, to suffer and die in battle. But suddenly the luck has changed. There is news! The war is over and everyone bursts out singing! He will go home after all! The sparrows in the plowland were crouching in terror of the kestrel. But she has gone; and they fly pell-mell up the hedgerow, frisking, chattering and perching where they will. The bitter winter had all the country in its grip. The hares on the down, stupid and torpid with cold, were resigned to sinking further and further into the freezing heart of snow and silence. But now—who would have dreamed it?—the thaw is trickling, the great tit is scented; and the hares bound and skip in the warm wind. Hopelessness and reluctance are blown away like a fog and the dumb solitude where they crept, a place desolate as a crack in the ground, opens like a rose and stretches to the hills and the sky.

Dream of publication

The other night, I dreamed that I was looking at a list of forthcoming titles from a poetry publisher, and one of the titles was a collection of my poems, something like "Poems 1988-2011." In the dream, I was surprised, because I could not remember having heard anything from the publisher (and I wasn't even sure I had sent the publisher a manuscript). Then somehow I was talking to the publisher, and he said, "But I was told you were dead, and somebody gave me all of your poems to edit for a book." I was most emphatically not dead, even in the dream, as the publisher admitted. That's all I remember from the dream, except this: the overall tone was not weird or uncanny; it was just funny.

Habits

I recently had to replace my water boiler in the kitchen, which had started to leak. The new one is bigger, and it also boils the water much faster. So only now, when the water is done boiling much sooner than I unconsciously expected, have I noticed that I was in the habit of putting the water on and then taking my time in preparing my coffee filter to make my cup of coffee when the water finally boiled.

In this case, I only noticed that I even had a particular habit once the habit no longer functioned as such. It reminds me of this poem, which I wrote shortly before my second child was born:

HABIT

We've moved into the dining room,

and Miles into ours,

to make room for number two.

And every couple hours,

I head to what was once our room to get

something no longer there,

then turn around, amazed by habit,

by what I live in, unaware.

Light Quarterly 50, Autumn 2005

Footnotes

The main period of my life when I used a lot of footnotes was, unsurprisingly, in graduate school from 1988-1995. I wrote my dissertation on a Mac Classic (or perhaps it was a Classic II), using the version of Microsoft Word that existed way back then, and footnotes were added by typing apple-E. But since I veered away from scholarship into translation after finishing my doctorate, I have rarely written anything since then that called for footnotes.

This weekend, I'm translating an academic text with footnotes, and whenever I want to type a footnote, the old apple-E reflex takes over, and I end up with the text centered instead of with a footnote. It's not that I want to know what keystroke produces a footnote (I'm perfectly happy to go the Insert menu and select Footnotes). What strikes me is that this ancient reflex is still there, as it has never been over-ridden by a different reflex for generating footnotes or by a different use for apple-E.

There's probably a bit of deep psychology to be done here, but it's all just an anecdote really.

Part of the Ritual

I remember a Stanford professor (Mark Mancall) asking a roomful of freshmen if we were nervous about the exam the next day. (The course was the wonderfully titled "Structured Liberal Education," SLE for short; the students in it all lived in the same dormitory, and we were all a little bit crazy.)

So he asked us if were nervous about the exam, our first in the course.

"Yes," we cried.

"Good," he said. "That's part of the ritual."

Just One

So I wanted some chocolate with my cup of coffee after lunch, but we're out of chocolate, in part because I intentionally did not buy any so that I would not overindulge.

But we have a box of Walker's Belgian Chocolate Chunk Cookies, so I thought I would eat just one. Then I wondered whether I would be able to resist eating another after eating the first one.

It seemed like that would be a really hard thing to do, as these cookies belong to the category of "you can't eat just one" (one of the many old advertising slogans still slithering around my brain). So I thought about giving myself a reward if I managed to eat only one.

But all I could think was this: "If I manage to eat just one, then I'll give myself another as a reward."

I See Alps

In the summer of 2003, we took Miles, then three and a half, on a boat tour of the Seattle harbor. As the boat turned back towards the harbor and gave us a great view of Mount Rainier, Miles exclaimed, "Look, Mommy! I see Alps!" This amused not only his parents but also all the people within earshot. The others probably did not know that he is a resident of Switzerland.

I found this photo the other day while going through old photos to put them on a memory stick for our new digital picture frame. It reminded me of Miles's exclamation, of course, but it also reminded of the gigantic cranes that can be seen in the photograph, which were designed and built in order to be able to load and unload the gigantic container ships that the Seattle harbor specializes in serving.

Seen up close from the tour boat, they were huge; from this perspective, they are dwarfed by the mountain in the distance. Someday, the Seattle skyline will surely be gone, and with it the cranes, but the mountain will remain.

"World's greatest bass line"

I put a link to my post about The Smiths on my Facebook profile, with this comment:

The Smiths as "the commodification of the critique of commodities." Oh shut up and dance! :-)

That led a friend to say, "What difference does it make?" And that reminded me of this story: It was sometime in the mid-eighties. I was at a party at Synergy, a co-op at Stanford, and the band was playing "Mystery Achievement," by The Pretenders. Jack Sayers was on bass, but I don't remember which of the specific bands he was in that was playing that night (Missy and the Boogiemen; The Heptiles?). And while that killer bass line was throbbing along, I found myself next to my friend Paul G., and I said to him, "World's greatest bass line!" And he agreed. A few moments later, I asked Paul, "Do you think the bassist knew it was the world's greatest bass line when he came up with it?" And Paul stopped dancing for a moment and said something like, "That's the question, isn't it? Did Rilke know how good 'The Duino Elegies' were while he was writing them? Or was he just writing them, so caught up in the act of creation that he did not think about how good they were? Does the genius know when he has produced a masterpiece?"

And then we went back to dancing!

Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983

It was a Sunday evening, and I had already gone to Grateful Dead shows at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford on the Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and I was exhausted and wired, but I went to see Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Keystone Palo Alto anyway. I was right at the stage, to the left of SRV's mic in the middle of the stage, and quite close to his wah-wah pedal. After he played two of his fast instrumentals, he stepped over to that pedal and started doing this crazy stuff with it, and I could not really see him, but I watched his left-handed shadow playing on the back wall. Here's what he did (from a different 1983 performance):



And the moral of Stevie's story is: don't ride helicopters during storms.

Music as skin

There are passages in Göran Sonnevi's Mozart's Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser) that are just exactly perfect, such as this one:

Music covers us with skin, touches with skin
We are painfully described there, even in great delight

The feeling of being surrounded by music, and touched by music, as something physical, even erotic (skin on skin), and the way that overwhelming music can be painful and delightful at the same time. At my last Grateful Dead show (March 18, 1995), which was also my wife Andrea's only Dead show, she turned to me during the space jam and said, "It's really scary." But that's just why I loved it!

Upcoming events

More info to follow on all of these, but I thought I'd get them out there.

My band Human Shields will go electric on Saturday, October 24, at the drum school Basel's annual Open House—with my son Miles Delpho (9), a drum school student, on the drums. Time TBA.

Human Shields will then shrink back to its normal, trio size and go back to being acoustic at the Offene Bühne in Basel on November 1. Showtime is 8:00 p.m. (And we have another show scheduled for Sissy's Place in Birsfelden on January 22, 2009.)

Matthew Sweeney and Tim Turnbull will be reading at the Literaturhaus Basel on November 4 at 7:00 p.m as part of ESP, the English Seminar Poetry Series. The reading will be bilingual, with translator Jan Wagner reading the poems in German. I'll be introducing the readers.

I'll be reading my own poetry at the Poetry Hearings in Berlin on November 21. I have the pleasure of sharing the bill again with Matthew Sweeney and Tim Turnbull, as well as with Donna Stonecipher, Alistair Noon, Ivy Alvarez, Tom Chivers, Mary Noonan, Hannah Silva, and Maurice Scully.

Crème de la crème

In 9th grade, in the late 70s, my sisters Sara and Ruth went to France for a month of French language immersion school with our Great Aunt Betty and Great Uncle Bill. Here's Ruth's funny story about that trip (remembered on the sad occasion of Bill's death this week):

The best France story was the last night when we went to a restaurant and Betty and Bill ordered coffee at the end. Betty mistakenly asked for de la crème, s'il vous plait, and the waiter and Bill (whose French was BAD) asked her several times if that's what she wanted, and she kept assuring them she wanted crème, so they brought her a vat of sour cream, and hovered around watching if she would really put it in her coffee, and Bill kept shaking his head and saying "Mom" (cause they called each other Mom and Dad) and she with nerves of steel scooped a dollop of the sour cream and plunked it in her coffee and we all watched aghast as she drank it down. We rolled on the floor with laughter as we fell out the doors into the street!

Jazz artists I have heard live

So my concert list was just about pop-rock-folk-reggae-country-bluegrass bands. Here's a list of jazz artists I have heard:

1. Ralph Towner
2. John Abercrombie (those two as a duo: my first jazz concert; JA also in various other formats)
3. Oregon (1984 was a Towner-intensive year!)
4. Miles Davis (twice, once with Scofield)
5. World Saxophone Quartet (several times)
6. David Murray (with WSQ, with Jack DeJohnette, as a leader of quartet and octet)
7. Dave Holland (with the Wheeler-Coleman quintet, with the Potter-Eubanks-Nelson quintet, solo, and in various other groupings)
8. Sonny Rollins
9. Dizzy Gillespie
10. Max Roach
11. Sun Ra (twice, perhaps even three times?)
12. Cecil Taylor
13. Mark Feldman (with New and Used, with Sylvie Courvoisier, with Zorn)
14. Dave Douglas (as leader, with New and Used)
15. Bill Frisell (in all sorts of settings)
16. Paul Motian (with the Frisell-Lovano trio, and with Konitz-Swallow)
17. Joe Lovano (with Motian, as a leader with Hank Jones)
18. Lee Konitz
19. Steve Swallow
20. Charlie Mariano
21. Jasper Van't Hof
22. Hank Jones
23. George Mraz
24. Marc Ribot (in all kinds of settings, and with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello)
25. Julius Hemphill (with WSQ, with his Sextet)
26. Charlie Haden (with Quartet West, with Metheny, with Kenny Barron)
27. Pat Metheny (with the Group, with the Grenadier-Stewart trio, with Hancock-Holland-DeJohnette)
28. Herbie Hancock
29. Jack DeJohnette (in all sorts of settings)
30. John Surman (with DeJohnette, with Anouar Brahem and Holland)
31. Anouar Brahem
32. Kenny Wheeler (with Holland)
33. Robin Eubanks (with Holland)
34. Chris Potter (with Holland)
35. Steve Coleman (with Holland)
36. Steve Nelson (with Holland)
37. John Purcell (with DeJohnette)
38. Howard Johnson (with DeJohnette)
39. Cecil McBee (with DeJohnette)
40. Billy Hart (in various settings)
41. Larry Coryell
42. John Scofield (with Miles, as a leader)
43. Tom Harrell
44. Larry Grenadier (with Harrell, Henderson, Metheny, Mehldau)
45. Joshua Redman
46. Brad Mehldau
47. Jorge Rossy
48. Jeff Ballard (Mehldau's drummers)
49. Bill Stewart (with Scofield, Metheny)
50. Paquito D'Rivera
51. Mark Walker (with D'Rivera)
52. Billy Cobham
53. Denny Zeitlin (duo with Haden)
54. John Zorn (with Naked City, Cobra, Bar Kokhba)
55. Fred Frith (with Naked City, as a leader)
56. Wayne Horvitz (with Naked City, as a leader)
57. Joey Baron (with Naked City and elsewhere)
58. Kermit Driscoll (with New and Used, with Frisell)
59. Jan Garbarek
60. Eberhard Weber
61. Rainer Brüninghaus
62. Marilyn Mazur (the last three with Garbarek)
63. Marc Copland (duo with Abercrombie)
64. Philip Catherine
65. Richard Galliano
66. Bireli Lagrene
67. James Blood Ulmer
68. Hans Feigenwinter
69. Art Ensemble of Chicago
70. The Leaders (Lester Bowie, Chico Freeman, Kenny Barron, etc.)
71. Ornette Coleman
72. Barbara Hendricks (singing Gershwin with a jazz quartet)
73. Wayne Shorter (as a leader, with Santana)
74. Brian Blade (with Redman, Shorter)
75. McCoy Tyner
76. Michael Brecker (with Tyner)
77. Dave Liebman (with Lovano, would have been with Brecker but he was sick)
78. Billy Higgins (with Haden)
79. Alan Broadbent (with Haden)
80. Ernie Watts (with Haden)
81. Ron Carter
82. Don Pullen
83. George Adams
84. Cameron Brown
85. Dannie Richmond (the last four = the Pullen-Adams Quartet; Richmond died a week or ten days after the show I saw at Yoshi's)
86. Leroy Jenkins (another Yoshi's show)
87. Phil Woods (in Santa Cruz)
88. John Carter
89. Bobby Bradford
90. Richard Davis
91. Andrew Cyrille (the last four as a quartet in Santa Cruz)
92. Wynton Marsalis (with the Lincoln Center Orchestra, and maybe once with a sextet with Marcus Roberts?)
93. David Torn (with Bill Bruford on drums!)
94. Adam Nussbaum (several times)
95. Marc Johnson (in a nonce band with Sco and Nussbaum and Lovano and Jim McNeely)
96. Jim McNeely
97. Geri Allen
98. Roy Anderson
99. Steve Lacy (solo and as leader)
100. Steve Potts (with Lacy)
101. Bobby Few (with Lacy)
102. Henry Threadgill (Sextett)
103. Fred Hopkins (with Threadgill)
104. Don Cherry
105. Steve Morse (solo, opening for ...)
106. John McLaughlin
107. Al DiMeola
108. Paco DeLucia
109. Louis Sclavis
110. George Gruntz
111. Fritz Hauser (solo, in a concert for kids!)
112. Rory Stuart
113. Lounge Lizards
114. Colin Vallon
115. Egberto Gismonti (solo)
116. Evan Parker (solo)
117. Joe Henderson (at Pearl's in San Fran with a very young Grenadier on bass)
118. Abdullah Ibrahim
119. Diana Krall
120. Russel Malone (with Krall, Ron Carter)
121. James Carter
122. Jazz Passengers (with Debbie Harry)
123. Curtis Fowlkes (with JP, Frisell)
124. Ron Miles (with Frisell)
125. Eyvand Kang (with Frisell)
126. Stanley Jordan
127. Koch-Schütz-Studer
128. Charlie Hunter (duo with Previte)
129. Bobby Previte
130. Greg Osby (with DeJohnette, with Hunter and Previte as special guest)
131. Gary Thomas (with DeJohnette)
132. Mick Goodrick (with DeJohnette)

I'm sure I'm forgetting at least a couple of dozen more (sidemen for the above at least), but that'll do as my second bit of self-exposure.

Concerts I've attended

So there have been some lists being posted in various places about concerts you've attended. Here's my contribution to this bit of self-exposure.

1. The Grateful Dead (80+ shows)
2. Jerry Garcia Band (dozens more, including the acoustic band and the acoustic duo with John Kahn)
3. Linda Ronstadt (my first concert)
4. Livingston Taylor (opened for Linda)
5. James Taylor (years after Livingston)
6. Kansas
7. Boston
8. Billy Joel
9. Sammy Hager (opening for Boston; 3-9 are still in the 70s)
10. The Police (now we're in the 80s)
11. Laurie Anderson
12. The Who
13. The Clash (opened for The Who and blew them away)
14. T-Bone Burnett (opened for The Who)
15. Santana (five or six times)
16. The Fabulous Thunderbirds (opened for Santana once)
17. Stevie Ray Vaughan (four or five times)
18. Talking Heads (twice)
19. B-52s
20. English Beat
21. The Blasters
22. The Bangles
23. Los Lobos
24. Asleep at the Wheel
25. John Hartford
26. The Seldom Scene
27. Sweet Honey in the Rock
28. David Lindley (opened for Santana and the Grateful Dead at Angel's Camp)
29. The Neville Bros. (opening for the Grateful Dead a few times)
30. Penelope Houston (a few times in Germany)
31. Lou Reed (in Berlin, but not performing Berlin)
32. Bonnie Raitt (opening for Lou and once for Jerry Garcia)
33. Violent Femmes (opening for Lou; Gordon Gano and Bonnie did the "colored girls" bit on "Walk on the Wild Side")
34. Lyle Lovett (also opening for Lou)
35. 17 Hippies
36. Oingo Boingo
37. The Vapors
38. Bob Dylan (eight or nine times)
39. Neil Young (about the same)
40. The Minutemen
41. The Meat Puppets
42. Van Morrison
43. Joni Mitchell
44. Leonard Cohen
45. Tom Waits (just before Big Time was filmed in LA)
46. Elvis Costello
47. Michelle Shocked
48. Billy Bragg (with Michelle opening for him)
49. Richard Thompson ("Pump It Up" on solo acoustic, rocking as hard as the Attractions)
50. Greg Brown (sadly, only twice)
51. Chris Smither
52. Alison Brown
53. David-Jacobs Strain
54. Northern Lights (the last four all at a festival where I went to see Greg Brown)
55. Arlo Guthrie
56. Wenzel
57. Al Stewart
58. Doc Watson
59. The Dinosaurs (not Dinosaur, Jr., but a band with Barry Melton, John Cipollina, and Robert Hunter)
60. Black Uhuru
61. King Sunny Adé (with Black Uhuru opening)
62. Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman
63. Tuck and Patti
64. Michael Hedges
65. Eric Clapton
66. Joe Cocker
67. Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers
68. Ronnie Lane (these last four at the Cow Palace)
69. Pink Floyd (in Hannover in the post-Roger Waters era)
70. Phish (sadly, only twice, in Paris and Strasbourg)
71. Henry Kaiser
72. Peter Gabriel
73. Glass Eye
74. John Wesley Harding (opening for somebody, but I don't remember who it was)
75. Varmint (Wayne Horvitz's cover band)
76. Jefferson Starship
77. Kaki King
78. Dream Syndicate
79. Dave Matthews (opening for Dylan once)

Then I'll add in local bands in places I have lived (and post a separate list of jazz artists I have heard):

80. Union Soul
81. The Verre Perdu
82. The Druids
83. Phil Dolby
84. Zsa Zsa House
85. The Heptiles
86. Missy and the Boogiemen
87. Walking Down Brenton Road
88. Natterjack and the Lost Passengers
89. Fucking Beautiful
90. Pseudo Boys
91. Robert Rich
92. Eliana Burki
93. Markus Bachmann
94. Basement Bros.
95. Blues Nettwork
96. Debonair
97. Handsome Hank and His Lonesome Boys
98. Seraina
99. Leonti
100. Arf
101. Cloudride
102. Mañana
103. Crop Circles