All We Need
SET 1: Ya Mar, Sample in a Jar > Divided Sky, The Wedge, Scent of a Mule, Free, Strange Design, My Long Journey Home, I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome, Chalk Dust Torture
SET 2: Reba, Life on Mars?, Cars Trucks Buses, Mike's Song -> Breathe Jam -> Sparkle > Weekapaug Groove, Suzy Greenberg > Crossroads
ENCORE: Fire
I worry a lot about repeating myself in these essays, or at least repeated certain themes and terms. For instance, “intensity” is a word that comes to mind often in describing what makes Fall 95 FALL 95, and as the band finally begins to sound like the world-beaters of December, it’s going to crop up more and more in my analyses. That’s because one of my preconceived endpoints of this tour’s evolution is a specific jam: the 12/2/95 Tweezer, the high water mark of Trey/Fish manic Rock God insanity, a moment that never fails to give me a nosebleed.
But another buzzword for the year is one of my top criteria for assessing Phish improvisation of all eras: patience. In their first decade, Phish’s natural tempo was 100mph; they burned through even their most complicated material at a sprint, segued between songs like a highway asshole changing lanes, and were quick to pull the plug on jams that weren’t working. One way to sum up their entire 90s is Phish learning to slow down, concluding in late 99 with a style of long, slow(er), groove-based jams that developed tidally.
Intensity and patience would appear at first to be incompatible opposites, and the speedball energy of a show like 10/21/95 is not attributable at all to qualities of composure and restraint. Yet a layer below that explosive surface, 1995 also finds Phish developing their deliberacy. Whereas Summer 1995 jams were long, patience didn’t feel like the engine driving the duration of those big Bowies and Tweezers...more like, in many cases, sadism. Fall shows continue to rein in the track times — a month in, we haven’t even had a 20-minute jam, unless you count the 10/17 MMW free-for-all or the 10/21 Dog Log soundcheck — but have offered plenty examples of shorter jams that nevertheless pace themselves.
Tonight, that measured approach is best heard in the Reba that opens set 2 (it’s on Live Bait 12, if you have it handy). At 17 minutes, with no whistling, it’s a longer than average version, and the band makes the most of the 11 minutes available to them after the somewhat flubby composed section. For the first stretch, Trey is playfully gentle, feinting like he’s about to take off and then fluttering back to a murmur several times. Rhythmically, the band falls into the same pattern, and it establishes a meditative pulse that carries through the full jam even as it builds. The unusual topography makes the machine-gun summit(s) of that climb all the more heart-wrenching — patience feeding intensity, not undercutting it.
Later in the show, Patient Phish shows up again for the latest round of Halloween jousting. This time, instead of the obvious wink-winks of the Michael Jackson and Led Zeppelin teases in Lincoln, it’s a full-on instrumental jam on Pink Floyd’s “Breathe,” oozing out of Mike’s Song and ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted either as a DSOTM hint or as harmless happenstance. But independent of the hijinks, it’s a tremendous, slow-developing segment of music that doesn’t just recreate the original — it’s much creepier, almost like “Breathe” and “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” had a demon child. It even has some Friday the 13th “chh chh chh” whispers deep in the mix (very seasonal) before it resolves into the Breathe chords and Trey’s dead-on Gilmour impression.
For a third example, allow me to hop back a night to a performance that didn’t fit into my Tasty Fog exegesis: the 10/24 Antelope. The game plan for Antelope is simple, and laid out right there in the song: shift gears, runrunrunrunrun, out of control. In Madison, Phish found a way to follow those instructions without just gradually shredding faster and louder; Trey getting stuck in a deranged locked-groove riff for several minutes while the other three conjure a storm around him. It’s very King Crimson and very Summer 95 in its sustained tension, but it never totally breaks open the song, it just provides a fresh angle alchemized from a novel mixture of patience and intensity.
Phish patience is not a 1995 invention; you can hear it in many of the standout 1994 jams chosen for A Live One. But my hunch is that the disciplined, unrushed pace of jams like the ALO Stash, Hood, or Slave are a big part of why they were picked by the band in the first few months of 1995, that live album being more of an aspirational vision of where Phish would like to be than an accurate portrayal of the late 1994 sound. But “intensity” or “patience” doesn’t do those aspirations justice — the ultimate goal for Phish in 1995 (and every subsequent year) was nothing less than to become absolute wizards of live music energy, creating it, capturing it, and sculpting it. Intensity, patience...these are just some of the tools.