All Hat, Some Cattle

7/17/00, Austin, TX, KLRU Studios

SET 1: First Tube, My Soul*, Limb By Limb*, Horn, Heavy Things, Back on the Train*, Beauty of My Dreams*, Gotta Jibboo, Piper, Down with Disease, The Inlaw Josie Wales*, Driver, When the Circus Comes*, Twist*, Sleep*, Chalk Dust Torture, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Possum*, Character Zero, First Tube*

* - included on Austin City Limits broadcast

Listen

Compounding the awkward ending to summer tour in Columbus, Phish had one more obligation before they clocked out – a taping for the venerable PBS institution Austin City Limits. Since Willie Nelson performed for the pilot episode in 1974, ACL has beamed hundreds of just-outside-the-mainstream artists to American televisions, remaining one of the last beacons of independent, regional music. It’s an institution that helped shape the vague genre of Americana, a useful, if sorta problematic, shorthand for artists who are connected to our country’s musical traditions.

It’s a stretch to call Phish an Americana band, but they can certainly fake it on occasion. Listening to the circulating tape of this show, which only includes the songs chosen for the episode, I thought Phish had actually done an excellent of job of targeting the ACL audience, drawing from the songbooks of Del McCoury, Clifton Chenier, Los Lobos, and Lynyrd Skynyrd* and leaning into the quieter side of their own catalog. It was the effective elevator pitch they couldn’t quite nail back in May, offering a side of the band that would surprise anyone who only knew them as hippie dorks.

Then I looked at the full setlist and thought “they should send the ACL editors a nice gift basket.” That’s a real shotgun blast of Phish material – old and new, quiet and loud, simple and…okay, no, they didn’t play any of the really complicated stuff, no trampolines for public broadcasting (yet). It’s at least twice as much music as they needed to fill up an hour-long episode, even under the safe assumption that the stuff on the cutting room floor was barely jammed.

The band is definitely familiar with ACL – Trey tells a story about them watching Bela Fleck tape an episode in 1993 before playing Liberty Lunch – so you can’t say they didn’t understand the assignment. There’s just a resistance to meeting an outside audience halfway that is sort of surprising in a year where they were consciously looking to shift some Farmhouse units. The May radio and TV appearances at least dialed in on that crass purpose, with sets almost entirely composed of album tracks; any lack of stylistic focus was inherited from Farmhouse itself. ACL, two months later and after the initial media cycle for Farmhouse had passed, was a chance to carve out a case for Phish’s rootsier side that the new album only half-heartedly made.

And in abridged form, the episode makes a pretty good case! Foregrounding the band’s deft but not cornily traditional take on bluegrass is a great attention-grabber for the people who just tune in to ACL every week, no matter the artist. It’s very funny that they picked My Soul – and I think it was played for its usual sync-up purpose after a reportedly botched First Tube opened the taping – but in an episode where Trey namedrops Stevie Ray Vaughan twice, it’s good to show that Phish can handle a 12-bar blues too. Inlaw Josie Wales is definitely well-suited for the intimacy of both a 300-person studio audience and zoomed-in TV cameras, an atmospheric cosmic country that is possibly the most Austin-appropriate song in Phish’s whole catalog.

That’s a banger opening trio for ACL’s following, stitched together by some smart editor from the 7th, 2nd, and 11th songs of the set. And the editor keeps it mostly mellow thereafter too, with a tight Limb By Limb and Twist providing digestible micro-jams, BOTT and Possum showcasing Phish-choogle, and Sleep calling back to the Bridge School acoustic sets, the last time Phish played to this demographic. Only First Tube seems a little bit miscalibrated for the occasion, like playing techno in a library, but I suppose it provides a more accurate taste of the wiggly live Phish experience for anyone intrigued by the episode’s tasteful first 45 minutes.

Because in the end, the ACL episode is as dishonest an introduction to Phish as the Drum Logos show was, just for an entirely different potential audience. Anyone convinced by gentle acoustic instrumentals and Los Lobos covers to attend a Phish show in the fall was probably in for a rude awakening upon encountering their first YEM vocal jam or 2000-style loud, dense improv. But maybe most entry points into Phish are paved with lies – I know folks who were initiated through Halloween shows, a Gamehendge set, or hearing Bouncin’ on the radio, and someone somewhere must have gotten into them through downloading a misattributed cover of “Gin and Juice.” For a band with so many dimensions to wrap your mind around, it’s sometimes most effective to carve out an incomplete, biased introduction to ease someone new into the fold. And on Austin City Limits, someone on the show’s production team understood that strategy better than Phish themselves.

* - This is a joke about Possum