Trey Anastasio Receives Reduced Sentence

E!Online published some wonderful news today about Trey Anastasio (The Wagger's favorite musician). According to the story, a Washington County, New York judge reduced Trey's sentence, a result of last year's drug conviction and DWI snag, from five years probation to three after he completed the court mandated drug counseling and treatment program in full and on time.

Additionally, Trey met all of the terms of his probation, except for that one unexplained incident earlier this year where he missed a counseling session and ended up spending a couple of nights in the clink.

Oops!

The article goes on to say that Trey's plea was reduced to a misdemeanor, which is really lucky for him considering the charges, because he'll graduate from the drug program on time in June, and because he completed his community service. No word on how many hours he was required to do, or what kind of community service he did. My guess is that he held a lot of talks with youths at risk about doing drugs and his negative experiences with it.

The best news of all is that Trey is scheduled to perform a solo acoustic show, which is about as rare as spotting Santa Claus flying through the air on his sled at Christmas Eve, at the Newport Folk Festival on August 2 (yes, the Newport Folk Festival - the same one where Bob Dylan became famous, cementing his place in pop culture history, and then three or four years later returned to perform an electric set, pissing off most of the folkies in attendance who did not have the benefit of hindsight to realize they were witnessing rock'n'roll history).

Trey also posted some tracks off his "new" (new as in never released, but of course there is no new material on it) live album Original Boardwalk Style on his MySpace page. (I know it's a common thing now, but I still think it's weird that Trey is on MySpace.)

The coolest thing about the new album is that Trey is donating 100% of the proceeds to create scholarships for his artist-in-residence program at The Barn, part of the nonprofit Trey created in 2006 called the Seven Below Arts Initiative, which is focused "on the visual arts - specifically, sculpture, painting, and related media - as its primary area of activity. An outreach component features educational opportunities for students of all ages."

So, at least he's not tossing out some album full of re-treaded material just to make a quick buck, which he could have easily done.

I'm just glad to see some stirrings from Big Red up there in Vermont. Nevertheless ... Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that our hero is back!!!

It's been almost a year-and-a-half since Trey last performed live with his own act. I would imagine the first show with his full band is going to be scorcher. Start checking the tour dates page regularly, because I sense a Summer Tour announcement coming up soon.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that The Wagger is going to do everything possible to make that first show (excluding the guaranteed warm-up performance at Higher Ground.)