Stream the new Paramount Plus original series 1923 a Yellowstone origin story starring Helen Mirren in Harrison Ford

1923 a new series streaming now exclusively on Paramount Plus go to Paramount Plus comm to try it for free

Welcome to Switched On Pop I'm songwriter Charlie Harding and I'm musicologist Nate Sloan so over the past few weeks we've been doing this festival series uncovering the interplay of festival fashion and music

music looking at festival subcultures but I feel like we've been missing the main reason that people attend music festivals over price hot dogs

ecstatic experience of joy in a temporary utopia oh yeah and and that too that and over price hot dogs together

unmissable it feels like an appropriate time to think about the great moments that we can have at festivals

because we're in this tough situation where it felt like live music was absolutely coming back and now it's in question again and so I thought today we could take the time to tell stories

that reflect on the most ecstatic experiences at music festivals and the first story comes to us from a musician you and I greatly admire

Hi I'm Dave Harrington

Dave Harrington is a guitar player, multi instrumentalist, producer, member of the critically acclaimed band Dark Side and of course you're a long time collaborator and best friend from childhood

one of my favorite human beings in addition to one of my favorite musicians here's a story date has for us

I was working in a studio with Nick Murphy aka Chad Faker aka Nick Murphy and that whole week I've been trying to get this guitar solo together

on this one track and I just kept hating everything I was doing and I was just like oh my god guitar solos what are they even a thing anymore

I was in the middle of an existential crisis about like the nature of a big guitar solo

now this is a big issue for Dave right his bread and butter is literally long free improvised guitar solos people literally hire him for his uncanny approach to the guitar

it's like athletes get the yips you know musicians get the what is a guitar solo anyway

yeah Dave wasn't gonna solve this problem by sticking it out in the studio he had to get out into the world

a friend of mine he offered me tickets to go see fish at Madison Square Garden

I had like really no expectations and I didn't have a lot of connection to fish but it seemed obvious to me that I would go

so fish the jam band from Vermont named after their drummer John Fishman maybe way off the pop music radar

but you know for nearly 40 years tens of thousands of people have filled up stadiums to see this band

I have like one of the most long running and avid fan bases of any band in history

...