Concert banter/one-liner: POO

"Well, this song's about an invasion of Scotland by England, you might have seen the movie Braveheart, yeah? An invading force coming in to a country, saying that they had to get rid of threats to the English crown in the name of good and freedom, but all the Scots starting fighting them back.

*very quick pause*

So anyway, 'The Clansman'!"

I remember one from around 1990 - kept repeating "How y'all feeling?!"

Dave King from Happy Apple/Bad Plus is a pretty funny mc, too bad I can't remember anything specific.

I have a good sample of him doing some VJing on MTV back in the day where he says "Daddy's home!" in the most effeminate voice ever and all these girls go "oooooh" and "aaaaah"! It's hilarious.

"Looks like we got a Trey fan in the audience, looks like you're in the right place buddy...c'mon, SUCK HIS DICK! GET IT OVER WITH!"

Trey Spruance:
"Dude, that's my cousin!"

"This one... I'm sure you allll now!"

"I need your love...."

"BIG!!.... EYES!!!"

"I want YOU... to want... ME!"

(band start playing "The Ripper")

*Halford roars onto stage and beats Ripper up*

Two songs later, Flansberg:
"This is a cover of a Cheap Trick song, I think it's off Live at Budhokon."
[TMBG tear into "S-E-X-X-Y"]

(have a guess)

-some drunken Santa Monica DJ, introducing Becker and Fagen before a live performance of "Bodhisattva". The whole thing is fuckin' classic; he sounds like a countryfied Bill Cosby wonked out on vodka.

Jonathan Richman was always funny but unfortunately I can't remember any of it, I just remember laughing a lot.

I once saw Alex Newport of Fudge Tunnel introduce three songs in a row with "This is a song about the shitty, fucked up world we live in."

Plus, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra are hard to beat in this dept.

I dunno why I find this funny, but after Moore's guitar synth fucks up slightly at a Black Box Recorder show:

Moore: Apologies for the intro to that last song, nobody should have to put up with that...
(silence)
Haines (staring mockingly): THEY DIDN'T NOTICE.

"It's Halloween night in.. Gamehendge.."

(loud Gamehendge applause)

"Somewhere on the outskirts.. Somewhere on the outskirts on this Halloween night in Gamehendge, there's this old man. An old man right now is walking down this hill and he's walking down the hill towards the town and it's late late at night.. People are pretty much snug asleep in their beds and uh, this old man is walking down the hill and he's walking down next to this dog that I was just singing about of course, and you guys know this story, it's the famous HARPUA.

(Huge cheering to which Trey answers with a simple "yes..")

"Anyway, it's Halloween night and on Halloween night, Harpua sometimes takes on some of the most evil shapes of all, his fangs growing longer, ugly mucous coming off his face and turning into an awful killing machine. And so these two people are walking down into town and um, as they walk into town the people in town are all asleep and they don't know what's coming, but these two people, the evil people are coming towards them as they sleep, they're all dreaming together and if you can picture this, as they sleep they're all having this terrible nightmare and as they're having this terrible nightmare, the eeriest thing about it is that they're all dreaming the same dream simultaneously and here comes the man walk into town and the people are dreaming the same simultaneous dream..

(Now at this point, things completely stray from typical Harpua narration as Mike, notorious lucid dreamer, steps up to the microphone to narrate the 'dream')

"I'm in my parent's . . . House.
I'm downstairs.
I start walking, upstairs,
One step at a time.
I am upstairs at my parent's old house.
All of the rooms are empty.
I walk down a hallway.
I see something SCURRY!
So I walk towards the bathroom...
I walk in the bathroom . . .
and it's a raccoon.
I say . . . "WATCH it ROCKY!"
I push the raccoon into the bathtub,
Quickly,
And walk back towards the bathroom door closing it.
I turn around, heading towards the bedrooms
Suddenly, I see motion
In the bedrooms.
I walk towards that motion,
And I can start to see
Many Raccoons in the Bedroom!
Hundreds of Raccoons . .
in the bedroom . . coming at me!
So I walk TOWARD those bedroom DOORs
Trying to push, what would be the raccoons backwards
into the bedroom
One raccoon at a time
But it seems like there are many many too many raccoons
And they start coming towards me
And I start coming towards them
And I start to notice that they're TINY raccoons!
BABY RACCOONS!!"

(Trey's Harpua narration riff starts up again as Mike steps back, and Trey continues with the story)

"Everyone was dreaming this dream at the same time. Just as YOU will all dream this dream when you go home tonight.

(The audience goes nuts after that.. I have to say that at the time
it was the most energetic audience I'd ever been at a show with, though there were times when things on stage were quiet, where I kind of wished they'd chill a little. Just as an ed. note, no one I talked to who was there had the dream, though we were all asking about it the next morning)

"One person wasn't dreaming the dream. And that one person... was Jimmy. Jimmy wasn't dreaming the dream, because, Jimmy wasn't asleep.

Jimmy was actually sitting on the couch with his little pussy cat,
Poster Nutbag. . .

(Typical Poster Nutbag craziness from the audience)

"Jimmy was sitting with Poster Nutbag and playing his favorite album, which lo', was the very same album that Phish was playing as their Halloween album at Rosemont Horizon that night...

(Here they go into "Beat it" by Micheal Jackson for about 20 seconds or so while the audience goes nuts. They had been teasing random Jacko songs for the past week of the tour, so after hearing this from Trey, we were all set for Thriller in the next set. Of course, it was the Who's Quadrophenia...)

"When suddenly, Poster Nutbag runs outside, encounters Harpua... They battle. . .

(After that, things proceed somewhat normally, except that when the rest of the band sings "I.... waant . . . a dooog", Trey substitutes "raccoon" for "dog". So Poster dies, Jimmy wants a dog, the set ends. )

also

"Do we have your permission to jam? Then jam we must!"

*cue "Slow Ride"*

James: Wow, what the hell was that, Billy?
Billy: That's what we down here call a "good ol' boy".

but the best i've seen was at a one-off show by Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog (voiced/animated by comedy writer robert smigel). one loud ftrat-boy type repeatedly yelled 'triiiiiiuuuuuuuummf!' after each bit, and got no reaction. finally, he started yelling 'smigel!' without missing a beat, triumph/smigel replied:

'when you deconstruct, the show gets fucked.'

"Stop! I'm sorry, Ladies and Gentlemen -- there's no reason to do this song here. OK -- Radio, Radio...1, 2, 3, 4." -- Elvis Costello, SNL.

"Well, after eatin' that chicken vindaloo.....I wanna be well!

...from It's Alive by the Ramones.