Yeah, I know that if I was them I’d never dream of doing a show without “The Gash” and “What Is The Light?” and “Psychiatric Explorations…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hnzkvJlqaI

Race For The Prize / Silver Trembling Hands / Yeah Yeah Yeah Song / Fight Test / In The Morning Of The Magicians / Convinced Of The Hex / Evil / See The Leaves / Yoshimi part 1 / Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung / The WAND / She Don’t Use Jelly / Do You Realize??

The set was bogged down with fairly uninspiring covers, however (Bohemian Rhapsody, War Pigs). Hopefully those were killed to make room for Embryonic material.

Zaireeka is so much more than just a rock record. I had just started my freshman year of college when it came out and I only had one friend who wanted to listen to it with me, so we gathered up some CD players of wildly varying quality–we had a couple of sony discman players hooked up to cheap portable speakers, along with a boombox and a proper stereo. The sound was terrible, it’s hard to get the volume levels close, and it’s almost impossible to get the sync perfect. But with Zaireeka that was never the point. The songs are good, but even they aren’t really so much the point. The point is that my friend and I had that experience. And I love that about that record. We listened to it a handful of times and it always sounded different, and that kind of made it fun.

I didn’t hear Zaireeka again until around when Yoshimi came out, and another friend ran all 4 discs through audacity or garageband or something and made a regular stereo mix of the album and converted it to mp3 files. So I still have that on my hard drive. It makes the album seem human, and it turns out there are still some great tunes on it that stand up to other Lips material in a conventional rock record setting, but I do feel like I’m breaking the rules if I listen to it that way–alone, through headphones from 1 hard drive, in proper sync, with the volume levels all correct–so I’ve only done it a couple of times.

So yeah. I need to read this book.