u/justtohaveone

Greatest Hits Vol. III is really fucking good. Joel is more prominent than at a lot of later points in the discography. Brendan is a guitar wizard on his own. I prefer that take of Divisions to the one on Safety in Numbers.

Jake rocks, no question, and he's one of the big reasons you can turn on any UM jam and immediately recognize them, but I've always felt like he's... well, you ever had a cheeseburger? What about a bacon cheeseburger? What about a bacon chili cheeseburger?

Jake is the chili.

I was sold at cheeseburger. Fuck yeah bacon cheeseburger! Oh shit, chili? Well, that's still awesome, but it's kind of a lot, and it sliiiiightly overpowers the rest of the flavors at times. (And honestly, of the bacon, cheese, and chili, I prefer the chili's singing voice the least of the three.)

I hope he comes back. I'm not holding my breath. I hope he's healthy and happy and has a long life and career ahead of him more than anything.

Some y'all motherfuckers seem to think he owes y'all an individual private performance of 40's Theme or some shit and it's weird.

Who is at that? I'm getting hype as hell. The bummer of Jake being on leave is balanced by the openings that leaves for Joel to step up more often.

Who's there? You there? I'm there! Be there.

This will be my 18th UM show, and I'm still chasing Divisions, just in case anybody in the band or production team felt like uh... making that known.

My two main things are jam and prog. I believe they're two sides of the same coin, honestly - both are about bringing music (of whatever genre, but let's stick with rock to make it easy) to new heights. New sounds, new arrangements, new vibes, all that. New.

When I was a kid I kinda hated listening to live music, because most of the live recordings I encountered seemed to be "the way it was on the album, but with audience noise added" and fuck that. If I was there, OK, maybe it would be cool, but why do I wanna listen to a tape of somebody else's good time?

In high school, however, I got into the Allman Brothers Band. In college, a dude showed me *studio* Umphrey's McGee. Trying to see UM led me to a festival where I found Leftover Salmon, Railroad Earth, Perpetual Groove, and more. It was specifically PGroove that led me to discover "Oh... oh this isn't the same set every night! Oh they do different takes of the song? Oh fuck there's tapes of each show?" and you know how it goes from there.

Just before that festival, I happened to discover smoking weed, which also explains the immediate sharp uptick in exploring prog rock.

So for all of my canonical adult life, I've been into tunes that are about hearing something new and different. Exploring sound is kinda baked into the experience. It's what I'm chasing, and given the limited appeal of jam (for reasons I must admit I don't understand [I have my understanding of why people don't dig prog, but it's an insult]), I kinda figured it's what everybody's chasing.

But one thing that I find bizarre as a result of being in this community - in person as well as on Reddit - is the vast proliferation of primacy bias among the crowd.

Like 50% of people in here don't actually seem to like anything right now, because every band you mention *used to be* good.

"Yeah, this show was OK, but they played too many of their new songs."

"Man, why don't they ever play this song they haven't played since George HW Bush was Vice President?"

"That was an alright jam but nothing will ever be as good as 3-12-1995. Yeah, you were 11, but dude, you should have been there."

Like why the fuck are these cats even at the show?

And God forbid a band be young.

"They're competent for college dropouts not old enough to legally rent a car, sure, but they can't hold a candle to this other group of dudes that have been doing it longer than these guys have been alive."

"These guys just want to write catchy songs that people enjoy. It doesn't count as good unless sorority girls can't dance to it."

Just some hating-ass hatey haters out there and it got up my ass today.

I ain't talking about any one or three bands in particular, ain't no group immune from assholes in the audience, but I feel like a preemptive "a hit dog hollers" might save me some time in the comments.

Thank you for your lack of attention to this matter.

(ETA: TL;DR - How the fuck did the jam scene wind up with people obsessed with wanting to hear the exact same thing they've already heard?)

\Yes\ and \Time and a Word\ anybody?

Folks act like their discography begins with \The Yes Album...

Hey did one of y'all see two boys dancing in the courtyard at Coca-Cola and give each of them a poster? I can't figure out how to ask this in the Goose sub as they have a poster discussion ban, but I wanted to throw out a Thanks, Friendo!