After Scenes

12/10/94, Santa Monica, CA, Civic Auditorium

As I said yesterday, the 12/9/94 show would have provided a perfect capstone to all the themes that have been swirling around the Fall 1994 tour. But alas, they played one more show, and it’s about as vanilla as they come, aside from the presence of the A Live One Simple and the debut of Chalk Dust Torture Reprise. The tour closer, played at the site of one of the great rock concert films, was another team-up with the Dave Matthews Band, and while there’s no horn section to crimp their creativity, both sets are short, safe, and songy.

In lieu of a big tour recap, which I’m definitely not prepared to write after 10 essays in 11 days (but stay tuned), I thought I’d look for evidence of some of the big overall takeaways from Fall 94 in this seemingly nondescript show. It’s easy to cherry-pick the tour’s highlights and talk about what they mean for the evolution of Phish, but it’s the routine nights in between the landmarks that truly mark their steady advance. The band that walked offstage in Santa Monica was very different from the band that kicked things off at Lehigh University two months and three days prior, even if the middling results of those two shows make those changes a little harder to detect.

Dark Phish

Going back to that first night in Pennsylvania, this long tour started with a pretty appropriate song: My Friend My Friend. While very much an old-school, proggy Phish composition, MFMF carries a darker edge than most early Phish, with an outro that enabled dark, textural wanderings, however tantalizingly brief. Those spooky vibes escaped to haunt many different songs in Fall 94, bolstered by the Halloween-centered calendar, Trey’s new, noisier approach to guitar, and the tendency of half-hour jams to find themselves in terrifying landscapes.

In sunny Santa Monica, these moments may be rare, but still flare up in the ghostly invasion of the last two minutes of Stash and the new, almost-final horror-movie arrangement of Guyute’s second verse. Guyute also ends in a dark ambient drone which eventually resolves into 2001, but the fact that it could have easily drifted into several other Phish songs (Disease, Bowie, Maze) at this point in time demonstrates that these new atmospheric interludes were becoming new, important tools in Phish show construction.

Set Flow

Those little interstitial passages also help establish another big advance of late 1994, the move towards more smoothly flowing set-long suites of music. 1993 was full of manic segue-fests that stitched together songs almost at random, but Late Summer and Fall 1994 start to achieve a less choppy narrative. This show ain’t 11/25, but it does carve a pleasant route through the second set, from the appetizer of Simple and the double-barrel darkness of Maze and Guyute through a well-paced 2001 > Mike’s Groove Classique > Fish Song run. Only the late-set Poor Heart is a wrong-foot stumble, when Slave > Cavern would have provided plenty of punctuation. Still, compared to the zig-zag of 10/7’s second set (including the dreaded mid-set Mule) and many other 1994 and earlier shows, it’s a well-crafted storyline.

Extended Improv

Welp, very little of that in evidence here. But a little taste of the avant-garde on display in the catacombs of the 11/26 Bowie and other deep fall jams creeps in at the end of Weekapaug, an unfinished version that detours from its typical frantic funk into a drummer switch and 90 seconds of clavinet-vacuum duet — a rarely-heard combination, for good reason. Which brings us to...

Self Indulgence

On paper, the difference that jumps out most between 10/7 and 12/10 is the Chalk Dust Torture Reprise, a totally delightful little ditty that they are clearly just making up on the spot; I love how Trey laughs at and encourages the very-soft suggestion of backing vocals at 1:15, and the spontaneous first build-up in the intro for Paul. It’s also pretty hilarious that they force an LA audience, thousands of miles from their homebase, to listen to an exhaustive listing of the entire crew, including the truck drivers, security chief “Rap Man 2000,” Amy Skelton, and, of course, GREENPEACE MIKE. And amazingly, people were still clamoring for them to play the impromptu creation again 25 years later.

For most of 1994, Phish remained all too eager to please, especially the farther they got from their New England comfort zone. But that tightness started to slip in the Fall, which found them peppering Vibration of Life lectures and secret language cues from coast to coast. Allowing their in-jokes and inherent quirkiness to spill out more regularly, even in front of unfamiliar audiences, goes a long way toward saving shows like these from anonymity and making every night feel special.

Simplified Songwriting

If it wasn’t for that CDTprise, this show would only be known for its contribution to A Live One: a very straightforward Simple. Even in the moment, Simple is given a position of honor, opening the final non-NYE run set of the year. Meanwhile, only one song appears from Hoist, the album they started the year ostensibly promoting: Sample, of course, tucked away in the middle of the first set. This isn’t the most interesting Simple of the year, but it does celebrate the maturation of a song that was just unhinged chanting over the Mike’s Song jam less than six months ago.

More importantly, it’s a changing of the guard for the kind of Phish songwriting that would dominate the rest of the decade. Simple is much closer to Tweezer than Divided Sky (or Guyute), a sketch of an idea fleshed out into a song and jam propellent. Some of the Hoist songs aimed at this kind of simplicity (sorry) as well, but their attachment to genre experiments and the band’s desire to craft a radio crossover put a leash on the translation of those songs to a live format. Simple, rejected from Hoist, turned out to be much more fruitful ground, and each subsequent batch of new Phish material would move closer to its streamlined logic: still Phishy at heart, but without the ornate packaging. 

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[Chalk Dust Torture Reprise music fades in]

And with that anti-climax, Phish’s 1994 Fall Tour is over. I have a bonus post planned for between now and the NYE Run, but I’ll give your inboxes a rest for a while. If you fell behind or decided to listen to the 2019 Fall Tour instead (something I will finally do now), you can catch up at the Archive. If you know anyone who would be interested in reading these posts, please send them my way. If you’re going to be in New York City for MSG shows or indie-jam post-shows or other conveniently-timed holiday runs, say hey! Thanks for reading...I’m Rob, I write essays!

Torture…

Torture?

TORTURE?

TORTURE?!?

Chalk Dust Torturrrrrrrrrrr-errrrrrr