Antici………pation
10/29/95, Louisville, KY, Louisville Gardens
SET 1: Buried Alive > Poor Heart > Julius, Punch You in the Eye > Cars Trucks Buses > The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Split Open and Melt, NICU > Gumbo, Slave to the Traffic Light, Sweet Adeline
SET 2: Makisupa Policeman -> David Bowie, The Mango Song > It's Ice -> Kung -> It's Ice > Shaggy Dog -> Possum, Lifeboy, Amazing Grace
ENCORE: Funky Bitch
An unexpected effect of this project is that I feel just a sliver of what it’s like to be a touring band. Both Phish and I started out this tour slow and stiff, but got back on solid footing a couple weeks in. A few good shows in a row and I start to feel the momentum as well — the writing gets just a little bit easier. I’m really looking forward to the 8-day break the band took in early November, a chance to recharge my batteries for the final six weeks. And I’m half-excited, half-nervous to tackle Halloween, and have been impatient to get past these final few shows before we arrive in Rosemont.
On the last show before the tricks-and-treats of the 31st, it’s tempting to phone one in, or get super self-indulgent and ramble about something else distracting me from the hellscape of election season: Blaseball, or 70s Horror, or quinoa salad recipes. But just like Phish knows there are many people in the crowd each night for whom it’s the only show of the tour, or year, or ever, I know this might be the only essay somebody reads, or it might be somebody’s favorite show of all time.
In Louisville, Phish splits the difference and plays one set for us, one set for them. The first half is a solid one-set primer for new arrivals, the kind of sampler they could play as an opening act if they were given a generous 66-minute slot. It’s a healthy mix of old and new, silly and serious, heavy-rotation and semi-rare, and it forms a simple but effective arc: Buried Alive > Poor Heart to burst out of the blocks, Melt providing something meaty for the middle, Slave coming through with the happy ending. One can have no complaints.
The second set is Me Time: a band, slap-happy from rehearsing a pretty-complicated double album and with a few thousand miles on their odometer in the last month, entertaining themselves and hoping it might entertain a few Kentuckyians as well. The first thing you hear on the tape is an inexplicable inside joke, someone announcing “taking it way back to 1968” over Makisupa’s opening riff, and Trey giggles as he puts more crew members (“Root Doc” and “Toph Kud”) into bed in the song’s verse.
There’s a Bowie that’s all business, but then it’s a descent into lunacy. There’s Mango Song, now entering special reserve status, then an It’s Ice -> Kung -> It’s Ice — in fact, it’s the fourth Kung in 15 days and 12 shows, twice the frequency of Tweezers in that span. Then, after a double head-fake to Sparkle or My Sweet One, the biggest/strangest bustout of the entire tour: Shaggy Dog, a slightly-rewritten Lightnin’ Hopkins cover that Phish hadn’t played since 1992, and hadn’t played with instrumental backing since a Boston venue called Molly’s Cafe that held “a few hundred” in 1988.
Why Shaggy Dog, and why now? Well, based on some crowdsourced sleuthing about the little ditty Trey sang over the ambient drone in yesterday’s YEM, I’ve got a theory that Trey’s beloved dog Marley joined the tour over this weekend, a comfort animal for the high-stakes Halloween. From there, it’s another round of misdirection “Beat It” teases in Possum, the strangely-timed earnestness of Lifeboy, the night’s second a capella set closer, and an encore of Funky Bitch — still a fan-favorite semi-rarity before it became routine filler.
There’s no narrative to be sniffed out here, just a grab bag of songs that popped into Trey’s mind on this particular evening, perhaps selected because they offered no risk of accidentally teasing a Quadrophenia lick or straining a vocal cord 48 hours before they all have to do their Roger Daltrey impressions. It’s the second half to a show that’s filling the time before the big mid-tour milestone, but doing so without making anyone who made the out-of-the-way trip to Louisville feel slighted. It makes the best of a show that could have been an inconvenient distraction...I hope I’ve done the same.
[Ticket stub from Steve Bekkala. Thanks Steve!]