Ever since Phish announced that they would be hosting their own three-day festival, which will be taking place on October 30 & 31 and November 1 in Indio, California at the same site as the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, speculation launched immediately about what the band would do for their "musical costume." One of the group's many traditions is to cover a classic album in its entirety on Halloween (past costumes include the Velvet Underground's Loaded and the Who's Quadrophenia), and this year will be no different.
As a way to build anticipation for the Halloween show (and the weekend itself, which is simply being called Festival 8), the band's official Web site currently contains a massive gallery of album covers. Each of these covers will be eliminated one-by-one (via a scary animated axe, complete with horror movie blood) until the last record standing gets crowned the victor. (It should be noted that we managed to guess a whole bunch of the potential albums in the above blog posts, and we still think the best idea is Billy Joel's 52nd Street.)
So far, the band has ruled out the following albums: Duran Duran's Rio, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, Pink Floyd's Meddle, the Beatles' Rubber Soul, Firehose's Flyin' the Flannel, the Who's Who's Next, Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man, David Bowie's Scary Monsters, the White Stripes' Elephant and Peter Gabriel's So, among others. The remaining albums are a mix of the strange (Hall & Oates' Private Eyes, Frank Zappa's Hot Rats), the divine (Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, Radiohead's Kid A, Love's Forever Changes) and the too-on-the-nose (the Grateful Dead's American Beauty, the Allman Brothers Band's Eat a Peach).
Of the remaining albums, it's probably reasonable to eliminate all of the metal (which means Metallica's Master of Puppets and Black Sabbath's Paranoid can take a walk) and hip-hop (say goodbye to the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty). Since the newest album the group has ever covered was Talking Heads' Remain in Light, it seems unlikely they'd roll out anything too new (like Radiohead's Kid A, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or MGMT's Oracular Spectacular).
Any of the remaining albums could probably get the nod. The Newsroom's vote? Go ahead and jam on Purple Rain, boys. You've earned it.