Hi everybody and welcome to this week’s episode of Attendance Bias. I am your host, Brian Weinstein. I am so excited to share today’s episode with you, because it’s one of my favorite kind’s: the kind where I just ask one question or bring up one topic, and the guest gets to be the story-teller. And boy, does today’s guest have a lot of great stories to tell.
That guest is Matt Busch, who has held several jobs with bands that you and I are familiar with but his current post is as Bob Weir’s personal manager. He’s been part of the Grateful Dead family for about 20 years. But before he became associated with the Grateful Dead Family in an official capacity, Matt was an employee at Prime Cuts, the Long Island shop that has been covered and mentioned several times on this podcast. It was through there that I got in touch with him, and it should be no surprise that he was and is a big Phish fan before he became professionally well-known within the jamband world.
You may notice that today’s episode is a bit longer than usual. I normally try to edit our episodes down to about an hour but the more I listened to today’s recording, the less I wanted to cut. If you’re like me, you love hearing anecdotes about your favorite band, and today’s episode is a series of anecdotes about two of our favorites–Phish and all of the Grateful Dead and Bob Weir acts since the early 2000s.
To help narrow it down, Matt and I decided to go through his Attendance Bias shows like a slideshow–he thought of the more memorable or influential shows he’s seen or been a part of and it became story-time with Matt Bush. In order, we decided on Phish’s show at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, NY on February 12, 1993, the Grateful Dead 50th Anniversary Fare Thee Well celebration in 2015, Phish’s show on July 25, 2015 at the Forum in Los Angeles where Matt took Bill Walton to his first Phish show, and then ended up in Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater on October 18, 2016 when Bob Weir sat in for most of the 2nd set and the encore.
But I’m taking too long. Let’s hear Matt tell the stories about how to write Dead and Company setlists, Bill Walton vs. the Railriders, and how to pick the encores to epic shows in today’s episode of Attendance Bias.
Audio used in today's episode:
2/12/93
Fare Thee Well
7/25/15
10/18/16