
SET 1: My Friend, My Friend, Paul and Silas, Taste That Surrounds, Fee -> Llama, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Demand > Maze, Wolfman's Brother, Acoustic Army, Prince Caspian, Split Open and Melt
SET 2: Julius, Theme From the Bottom, Bouncing Around the Room, You Enjoy Myself -> Sleeping Monkey > Run Like an Antelope, Contact > Cavern
ENCORE: A Day in the Life
Three songs into tonight’s show, a new Phish song debuts...for the third time. What phish.net now calls “Taste That Surrounds” and what tapes back then usually called “Tasty Fog” makes its premiere, a week after the final appearance of The Fog That Surrounds and about four months after the last Taste spotting. By the time Billy Breathes was recorded, the song would come back full circle to that original name, and the arrangement would finally stick for a tune that Phish doesn’t play nearly enough. But the song’s twisty path through 1995 gives us a rare glimpse at a Phish work-in-progress, at a time when their entire songwriting approach was itself under renovation.
Taste was held back from the fleet of debuts at the Voters for Choice benefit in May, making its bow on June 7th in Boise. That first draft of the song isn’t too far off from where it would eventually end up, and the most complicated part — the bafflingly intricate instrumental where all four members are each playing in their own time signature — is already nailed down. Parke Puterbaugh, in his May 1995 visit with the band, described the hard work they were putting in.
“As they worked on ‘Taste,’ it fell to Fishman to juggle four rhythms — the three other musicians’, plus one of his own in 6/8 time. Afterward, Anastasio wandered over to the drums, excited because he thought he heard another implied counter-rhythm. He picked up a drumstick and tapped out the elusive fifth rhythm on a snare for Fishman, who attempted to incorporate it. They knew what they were aiming at but couldn’t quite nail it.”
Publicly, that uncertainty came out in the vocals, which weren’t yet finalized at the time of the song’s Idaho debut; Trey just repeats the first verse when the backing music breaks free from its initial circular pattern after the second chorus. In the first show of fall, Trey introduces v2.0 as “you think you know this song, but you don’t,” and turns the microphone over to Fish, who sings an entire new set of lyrics for the verses over the same musical accompaniment. Or maybe the better verb is “shouts,” as Fishman, who in his first serious vocal never quite sounds natural in the eight total performances of “The Fog That Surrounds.” It’s a big ask for the drummer, who as Puterbaugh noted, already bears a lot of responsibility in the complex song.
There’s one other variant before the name changes again: 10/11/95, where Trey and Fish share the newer set of lyrics, alternating lines. But on 10/24, another hybrid appears in Madison, sounding at first like Phish had reverted to the summer beta test, but handing the second verse and the bridge to Fishman’s Fog. This pattern stuck until next summer in Europe and the studio version, which found its final form with two Trey verses, a Fishman bridge, a Page solo, and a Trey finish, squeezing it all into 4:07. Maybe that all sounds tedious, but...
“Taste ended up being a breakthrough for us,” Page says in the Phish book, adding in another section, “Taste represented an exciting new style of playing for us because, while it’s based on a traditional Latin groove, it’s by no means traditional Latin music.”
Phish transmuting Latin music through their own filter is fine, but I’m more fascinated by the credit line, listed as Anastasio/Fishman/Gordon/McConnell/Marshall for all three versions, and the unusual peek behind the songwriting curtain. Up through Hoist, the Phish catalog was assembled largely through Trey bringing mostly-finished Anastasio/Marshall compositions to the band to elaborate upon, which they usually finished doing before bringing them to the stage. Live performances breathed new vitality into Phish songs, but didn’t typically change their arrangement dramatically. The very public revisions to Taste suggest growing pains in adapting to a new collaborative process.
It’s worth comparing Taste to Theme, another five-way composition (though intriguingly listed in the different order of Anastasio/Marshall/Gordon/McConnell/Fishman) that pretty much sounded fully baked right from its debut in Lowell. It’s majestic again tonight, and one could make a strong argument that Theme’s rookie year is its best year, when the song had a caustic edge that the studio recording sanded away for good. Perhaps Theme had a faster start because it’s also a collaborative song vocally, sung organically as a group instead of being yet another Trey lead or force-fed to Fish; Taste will only find stability when the verse vocals turned into a relay.

Or maybe the better comparison is Wolfman’s Brother, a song from the previous cycle but another group credit, Hoist’s only complete set (Anastasio/Marshall/Gordon/McConnell/Fishman again, if you’re keeping score). The Wolfman also shows up tonight in Madison, its last appearance for a month before being largely memory-holed again until it finally ripens in early 1997. Like all of its 94/95 performances, this one is pretty clunky, aspiring to a groove they can’t yet maintain; it’s a song that would only mature when the band’s collective improvisation caught up with their newfound collective composition.
Taste is somewhere in between; its shared ownership is baked right into the song’s instrumental, but how it is presented live and sung takes a long time to reflect that collaboration. On a tour where Phish is clearly trying to share the mic and the spotlight more frequently, Taste and its alternate iterations is the song that most clearly reflects the difficulties of that adjustment. The taste of full collaboration isn’t free.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]