Liz Phair followup

Just wanted to post a quick followup to my previous Liz Phair post. Found this pretty cool shot of her performing at Foellinger (courtesy of the Daily Illini).

I lost count, but I believe she rotated between 3 Fender electrics and some sort of acoustic during the course of the show with her roadie retuning between swaps. She claimed she had to swap out guitars a lot because he would have to retune depending on the song. Apparently she used to smoke and had a much deeper voice, which is noticeable if you compare her older stuff to the current stuff. Hence, the guitar has to be retuned based on what era a song is from to account for her now higher voice.

She also mentioned that her white Fender recently had to undergo an overhaul after she took it underwater in a recent video shoot (certainly got me curious to see if I could track down some of her videos). She has a habit of stuffing her pick behind the pickguard when she plays, and I guess loses a fair number because when they opened it up they found all sorts of old picks hidden in there.

Speaking of guitars, I’m not sure what the problem was, but she kept losing the high E string on the same guitar. I’m not sure if it kept snapping because it was tuned too high, or more likely coming detached (I honestly don’t know enough about electrics to say).

Very cool experience overall. Being in the fifth row kicked much ass (even if my ears were still stuffed with cotton till noon the next day), and the size of the theater gave the concert a nice intimate feel. Foellinger’s much more cozy than say, Assembly Hall. Not that being in a venue of that magnitude would be terrible, but I liked the more personal feel of this concert. Anyways, I’m now on a quest to get my hands on tons of Liz Phair stuff. Her 4 main albums should be relatively obtainable (considering I already have the oldest and newest), but trying to get my hands on out of print EPs and such (not to mention concert bootlegs) should prove more interesting. So if anyone ever runs across a good source of Liz mp3s (unobtainable stuff only, not her main albums as that would be wrong), especially the original Girlysound demos, please hook me up!