For the third edition (or fifth, depending on how you count them) of From the Tapers' Section, I've chosen Halloween, 1998. Yes, today is the 20th anniversary of this show – Phish's first multi-night Las Vegas run, and their first Las Vegas Halloween show. It seemed fitting to share this show today, with the high anticipation of what will be their fourth Vegas Halloween show in the past two decades. But beyond the obvious historical significance of this show, I had been wanting to use this show in the FTTS series for some time now simply because the sound quality of this particular tape is unbelievably good. About a year ago, I wanted to hear the "Wolfman’s Brother" from this show as an AUD; searching through quick snippets of each circulating recording, this tape stood out as a cut above the rest. Since first hearing this source, I kept coming back to it, stunned by its quality – it is quite possibly my favorite sounding 1.0 tape. So, while this show is both famous and infamous for various reasons, my decision to select this recording for FTTS3 was more about the merits of the tape and less about the music contained within.That isn’t to shortchange the music – there were plenty of musical highlights inside and outside of the Velvet Underground Loaded "musical costume."

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