Phish at Jones Beach

I was at Mountain Jam last week, when I got the news. I had asked my editor to put in for either the Thursday or Friday Phish shows at Jones Beach, hoping with a little luck to get one, instead I found out they had confirmed both! As it goes, this is easily the largest venue I have ever been at over 15,000 people. Another personal fact about the venue, is my first job working in New York City was for the architect Jack L. Gordon . JLGA was the architect of record for the expansion of the 2nd level at Jones Beach back in the early 90's and I would often see photos of the venue when working on projects and presentations in the office.
So with expectations high we got to the lot early on Thursday afternoon, eager to see old friends, walk through lot, and enjoy the carnival-like atmosphere of Shakedown Street. It was wonderful, fans hawking t-shirts, crystals, beers, sodas, red bulls, grilled meat of every kind, even the ellusive Trey Anastasio bobblehead doll.

I also had a chance to visit with an old friend and artist Jon "Crazyredbeard" Blake who had just finished his latest painting based on the music of Phish from the famous reunion shows at Hampton, VA.
Soon enough though it was time to head on over to the side entrance and await instructions from our Livenation contact. The rules, no pit, just the front of an aisle for the four photographers to squeeze into, three songs, and absolutely no photos of the crowd (due to legal reasons). Of course with Phish 3-songs can last anywhere from 15-45 minutes depending on their song choice)
Luckily however they started off with an acapella Grind allowing us a chance to shoot the guys standing all together as an intimate shot.


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another lucky break as the contact for Livenation decided not to count this song against us, so we still had three more songs to go!
So then it was a series of working on a close up for each of the guys. For Page and Fishman, this meant getting a clear shot of their heads from 30' away and for Trey and Mike trying to get shots of them singing and jamming and hopefully capture a Trey "orgasm face" in the process.





well some things you get and some you miss, but you keep trying (I also need to look back and see if there's any other shots I can salvage)
But we got the signal it was time to go. Nicely enough it was time to pack our cameras and head out, but I was able to sneak a few from the crowd and got these this shot.

The problem of course with long shots is you never know what you are going to get. Was the band in focus? Were they blown out? Did you get any crowd in that shot, or are they showing up completely black?
Friday night was more of the same, except we switched isles to Fishman's side and it was raining. Constantly raining, with over an inch of standing water in the front rows. Basically what this meant was every time you went to switch lenses they got wet and every time the lights shown on them they flared up. On top of that, I no longer had an angle on Fishman, as he was now directly behind the drum kit from my angle and now we were actually farther away from Page, with no better angle on him. So I decided to focus on the long group shots, doing my best to get the whole band and the lights in one shot.

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throw in a few closeups of Trey and Mike again


and then it was time to hustle up to the upper levels before the sun completely set and grab a shot of the crowd in the venue.

The sun went down and I got a long shot of Fishman on the vacuum cleaner

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and a nice long shot to end the night

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as I keep trying for that "A thousand barefoot children outside dancing on my lawn" shot.
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all the reviews from Hidden Track are located here.
http://www.glidemagazine.com/hiddent...beach-night-2/
http://www.glidemagazine.com/hiddent...ght-3-setlist/
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This week we're gonna try and get some rest and get caught up on Mountain Jam photos and thank yous and emails and actually go to a show without the camera.
Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood at the Izod Center, should be nice