![]() ![]() “I need to have a good talkin’ with you,” she said. Lisa, quiet and gentle-spoken, was snapping her seat belt. ![]() We continued talking as we, including Tink, piled into the car. My understanding was that they had to resuscitate him several times during surgery.” “She was (bassist) Leon Wilkeson’s nurse in ICU.” She was on duty the night the plane went down,” Lisa explained. When I came down to the lobby to meet the Dickersons, they introduced Mary Thornton. Now, much of the timber has been harvested and replaced with the smell of long, narrow chicken houses. Back then, it was mostly thick timber with small farms scattered about. Somewhere in Amite County near the tiny town of Gillsburg is the place where one of the most famous crashes in music history happened one night around 6 p.m. It requires turning off a major road onto a black-top road that leads to another old black-top back road that has crumbled mostly to dirt. The Dickersons kindly agreed and, thank goodness for that, because I don’t know that we would ever have found the spot. The band was minutes away from Baton Rouge where they were to perform at Louisiana State University. 20, 1977, when their plane ran out of gas. I had a better plan: Visiting the swamp land where the Southern rock group Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed on Oct. Woman,” “ Rocky Mountain Way,” “ China Grove,” “ It’s Ice,” and “ The Divided Sky”), 5/27/94 (with the audience playing boxes of macaroni and cheese as percussion), 6/30/95 (first “Possum” out of “ 2001”), 12/29/97 (with “ Can’t Turn You Loose” jam), 11/24/98 (arises out of “ Tweezer” and burns the house down with old school panache), 11/3/98 (acoustic for KBCO), 1/3/03 (first post-hiatus version and a favorite of many this was a great visual spectacle as the band switched instruments during the rave-up ending), 12/1/03 (Jeff returns to sing the song he wrote), and 8/7/09 (normal jam shelved for a cool call and response between Trey and Page).Lisa and Randy Dickerson were being hospitable when they invited us to lunch and/or church in McComb, Miss. Other standout versions are 2/16/91 (“Rocky Mountain Way” jam), 12/6/91 (with a maddeningly annoying yet fascinating “Wait” theme in the intro), 5/17/92 (teases of “ L.A. During the early ’90s, the introductory part was considered a prime location for Secret Language signals the versions on 3/13/92 and 3/20/92 were preceded with instructions on how the language worked in order to prepare the audience. Both the mid-song jam and the introductory section slowly extended over the years until the average “Possum” came to be twice that length. Early versions – such as the one that mysteriously appears at the end of Trey’s thesis – are under five minutes long. More than half of its performances are as an opener, closer, or encore. The energy of the song makes it quite popular as a set opener or closer. What keeps it around is that it rocks and rocks hard. It’s a rocker, very similar to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “ Swamp Music.” The jam – with a few exceptions – tends to go to the same place. Musically, there’s nothing complex going on. Outside of the double meaning of “your end is the road” and the pun on “opossum,” this is a straightforward song about roadkill. What makes this song so popular with the band? Lyrically, there’s not much going on here. As a result this is the second most frequently played song in Phish’s history. Appearing first in the tenth show with a known setlist, it has never suffered a lengthy gap – outside of a brief attempt to avoid the creature in 1997. Ironically, this song about the untimely death of a marsupial is one of Phish’s most enduring tunes.
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