The sixth season of Lost starts tonight so we wanted to re-run Ryan’s Phish Style preview of the upcoming final season of the show.

This is it, folks. After five amazing seasons filled with countless characters, twists, love interests, and sci-fi mind benders, Lost fans finally get to answer those burning questions, put the harebrained theories to bed and close an important chapter in their TV viewing careers.

[Image From the Coventry Blog]

Having watched Lost since the onset and obsessed over it with endless email debates – a topic that perhaps poses the only email subject line rival to that of Phish – my buddy Sean Lalley and I (whom some of you may remember from our short lived Story of the Ghosts days ages ago here on HT), decided to devise a little bloggy preview for the final season. And we figured what better way than to run through the long list of characters with their Phish song counterparts – a job made easy by the fact that roughly 40% of all Phish lyrics reference time.

The Smoke Monster – Walls of a Cave

“It might have been an etching on a marker of a grave, or maybe on the walls of the cave.”

Etched on an underground blast door of one of the Dharma stations existed a map which revealed the other remaining Dharma stations as well as four iterations of the letters “CV.” Later, at some comic book convention, the producers of Lost admitted “CV” stands for “Cerberus Vents” and that they actually refer to the Smoke Monster by the name Cerberus.

In ancient Roman mythology, Cerberus was a three headed watchdog who permitted spirits to enter or leave the underworld. In the case of Lost, the Cerberus seems to act as the watchdog of pointless randoms who don’t belong on the show like Shannon and Nadine, both of both since got waxed by the Smoke Monster. This secret represents arguably the biggest question mark to be answered in Season 6.

READ ON for the rest of our Lost Season 6 Preview…

Over on the HeadCount blog, Phish: The Biography author Richard Gehr recently posted the highlights of his conversation with Phish: The Biography author Parke Puterbaugh. These fine writers have probably spent more time interviewing the band and the extended Phish family than anyone else and they have both covered music for Rolling Stone and other publications, so it’s no surprise that they seemed to have hit it off.

One topic we hit on a bunch in 2009 was the mainstream media’s coverage of Phish. While the mainstream was much more accepting of the band upon their return, back in the mid and late ’90s they were generally ignored. Richard’s first question touches on this…

Richard Gehr: You write in Phish: The Biography that Rolling Stone didn’t run the Phish feature that they’d assigned you for nearly two years, which must have been frustrating. Why do you think the mainstream music press resisted reporting on the band for so long, despite their obvious popularity?

Parke Puterbaugh: I got the assignment in 1995, at which point they were ready to do something big on the band. Between assignment and delivery, however, there was a shakeup in the music department and the new guys who came in – Keith Moerer and Jim DeRogatis – their orientation was much more indie-rock. I think Phish were somewhat of a victim of indie-rock snobbery. Even so, they realized they had to run something on them, and every half-year or so Moerer would call up and say, “Hey, I think we’re going to run that Phish feature after all. Can you freshen it up for us?” And I’d be sent off to some big event of theirs, like a New Year’s Eve concert, and totally redo the story and bring it up to date.

It was a blessing in disguise, as it turned out, because I really got to know them and it laid the groundwork for doing the book by giving me the opportunity to write for them. Every so often their management would call me to write an album bio or “Phishbill” or something along those lines. I did that two or three times a year starting in ‘96, and basically continued through the breakup and even afterward with some of the solo projects. So I have no complaints about how that Rolling Stone episode turned out, because when the piece ran, it was an enormous story. It may have been one of the last huge rock ‘n’ roll features in the magazine. It all worked out, oddly enough.

Richard also chats with Parke about his first Phish show, adventures in covering the band, whether certain topics were off-limits and much more. About the only thing they didn’t discuss was the biography’s terrible cover. The conversation makes for a fascinating read, so check it out.

Nearly 11 months after the release of the Clifford Ball DVDs, the LivePhish archive has finally opened again with the release of a show from November 19, 1992 at St. Mike’s College in Colchester, VT. Phish archivist Kevin Shapiro hinted at this show’s release when he played the epic Divided Sky from 11/19/92 during one of his From The Archives radio shows at Festival 8.

Proceeds from this LivePhish download will benefit Haiti Earthquake Efforts – Partners In Health and American Red Cross. The St. Mike’s show opened Phish’s Fall Tour in 1992 and featured the first-ever versions of Axilla, I Walk The Line (Johnny Cash cover), Big Ball Jam, Fast Enough For You and Lengthwise. Longtime Phish friend Gordon Stone joined the band on pedal steel for Poor Heart, Fast Enough For You and Llama.

The show is currently available for download at LivePhish.com on both FLAC and MP3 formats. The FLACs will run you $12.95 while the MP3s will set you back $9.99. St. Mike’s ‘92 was recorded by Paul Languedoc and mastered by Fred Kevorkian. What do you think of this release?

To promote Big Red’s upcoming tour, the Phish YouTube channel has been updated with two classic Trey videos – one of 8 Foot Florescent Tubes debuting First Tube at Higher Ground in 1998 and the other features TAB throwing down Last Tube at Red Rocks in 2001. Here’s the latter…

Trey Anastasio Band – Last Tube

• Trey Anastasio Tour Dates

Ex-Vida Blue keyboardist Page McConnell sat in on keys for Spanish Moon > Skin It Back last night during Little Feat’s show at Higher Ground. McConnell shared Billy Payne’s keyboard setup for the two tunes. Page has plenty of experience playing Little Feat songs as Phish has performed Skin It Back, On Your Way Down (Allen Toussaint) and Time Loves a Hero over the years.

[Photo via @OhKeePahBlog]

The Phish/Little Feat connection works both ways as Feat covered Sample In A Jar for 2000’s Chinese Work Songs and the track also was included on the Sharin’ in the Groove compilation that same year. Also, Mike Gordon guested on Feat’s latest album, Join the Band, for a rousing This Land Is Your Land. Little Feat continues their tour tonight at the Colonial Theater in Keene, NH and Saturday at Sugarloaf before they head off to Jamaica.

• Previously on HT: Review – Little Feat @ the Concert Hall, Interview – Billy Payne of Little Feat talks Join The Band

Our buddy Jeff Weiss and his friends put together this hilarious video of the scene in the parking lot at Festival 8. Check it out…

Phish Parking Lot – Brilliant Comrades

All year long, we’ve noticed the writing of blogger Scott Towler for his Great Scott! blog and have really enjoyed what we’ve read. Last week, Scott wrote a great piece giving his opinion on how the year 2009 played out for jam-rockers Phish. If you missed it, here’s the article in its entirety…

[All photos by Jeremy Gordon for Glide/HT]

2009, the year that marked Phish’s return from a five-year hiatus, has come and gone. The end result? Phish is back! The band performed some 48 shows over five distinct periods: their official reunion at the Hampton Coliseum, an early summer tour, a late summer tour, Festival 8, a fall tour and the new years run in Miami just last month.

According to phish.net, this also marked Phish’s most diverse year in all of their 26 so far with over 244 unique songs played in 2009. And while the band has always prided themselves on the diversity of their set lists, it goes a little deeper in the age of Phish 3.0. Unlike years past where a die-hard fan could determine the band’s mood based on the length of their jams and how they segued from one song to the next, 2009 was completely unique. Song choice played a much larger role for the group than it ever has, and the jamming, while still prevalent, became more concise. While many could contend that this marks the end of the Phish “we all know and love,” I would argue against that. The band is communicating in a new way while still using the same language, it just may take a more active listener to appreciate it.

READ ON for more of Scott’s thoughts on Phish in the Age of 3.0…

Last Week’s Sauce features recordings of shows from the previous week. This week we’ll look at almost exclusively shows that took place on New Year’s Eve.

[Thanks to sonicsound for this week's photo]

Artist & Title: Assembly Of Dust – Brown Sugar
Date & Venue: 2009-12-31 Tupelo Music Hall, Salisbury MA
Taper & Show Download: SmokinJoe

“You should have heard him just around midnight”. A few covers, an acoustic section and a fan requested bustout of Strangefolk’s Far From Yourself round out this New Year’s show from Reid Genauer and Assembly of Dust. Reid hits the road again solo for a few shows to start 2010. Catching him solo is highly recommended, I’ve said it before, Reid is one of the best screamers of our generation.

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READ ON to hear highlights from many other bands New Year’s Eve shows.

Time is the fourth track on Pink Floyd’s 1973 release Dark Side Of The Moon. Well, this song called Time is anyway. Let me tell you, rounding up the renditions for this week was no easy task as: a) There are lots of other songs simply called “Time” and b) There are thousands of songs with the word “time” in them, and you can’t always make search terms do exactly what you want them, no matter how hard you try.

The Contestants:

Dream Theater: According to the 3,585 comments there are on YouTube for this video at the time of publication, this cover is both the best ever and fucking awful all at once. The YouTube comments section is an interesting cross-section of humanity. Anyway, one very frequent comment is that guitarist John Petrucci really rips, and that is hard to deny. Couldn’t tell you the date of this video, I read about 50 of those 3,000+ comments and nobody mentioned it.

READ ON for the rest of this week’s contestants.

This afternoon, former 70 Volt Parade vocalist Trey Anastasio announced a solo tour that puts together the members of his Classic TAB ensemble with a three-piece horn section for three weeks worth of shows. For this run of shows Anastasio will be backed by Classic TAB members Tony Markellis on bass, Russ Lawton on drums and Ray Paczkowski on keyboards as well as a three-piece horn section featuring Jennifer Hartswick, Russ Remington and Natalie Cressman.

The tour which features 16 shows in 21 days opens in the city that Coran Capshaw built, Charlottesville Virginia at the Jefferson Theatre. Trey is bringing his band to a few states that Phish hasn’t been able to hit in their first year back, most notably Georgia as well as Kansas and the District Of Columbia. The venues are exclusively clubs and theaters and for some reason their New York City stop is at one of the cities most hated venues, Terminal 5.

Let’s take a look at the players:

Tony Markellis [bass]: The “Meatman” first performed with Trey in 1998 as part of his Eight Foot Florescent Tubes project that opened the original Higher Ground in Winooski. Trey enjoyed the experience so much that he asked Markellis and drummer Russ Lawton to join him on his first solo tour back in 1999. Tony was a member of TAB through the 2003 Spring Tour and returned for the Classic TAB shows in 2008.

READ ON for profiles on the rest of the members of Trey’s band and the full list of tour dates…