At The Barbecue
6/6/97, Charlotte, VT, Brad Sands’ and Pete Carini’s House
SET 1 (unrecorded/uncirculated): Limb By Limb, Dogs Stole Things, Ghost, Water in the Sky, Vultures, Dirt, Twist, Piper, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Olivia's Pool, I Don't Care, Samson Variation, Bye Bye Foot
SET 2: Samson Variation, Saw It Again, Waking Up, Limb By Limb, Dogs Stole Things, Ghost, Dirt, Vultures, Water in the Sky, Twist -> Piper, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Ain't Love Funny, Stand! -> Izabella
As Phish got bigger, the “sneak preview” show grew more exclusive. 1994’s Flynn Theatre fundraiser begat 1995’s Voters for Choice benefit, which yielded the Third Ball bar band surprise of 1996. And while 1997 officially started abroad and (in the U.S.) back at The Flynn, the real 1997 kicks off in the backyard of stage manager Brad Sands and drum tech Pete Carini. By 1999, you’d have to be working on a Jim Carrey film to pull an invite to Trey’s barn; in 2000, you’d have to infiltrate a radio studio.
The rising privacy of these shows paralleled their importance in fans’ minds, as the semi-secret shows became decoding keys for the years they prologued. There were, of course, the song debuts: the first chance to hear most of Hoist live, the bumper crop of new oddities in Lowell, the brief glimpses of The Bearsville Blob at Joyous Lake. But there was also plenty of foreshadowing in these special nights: the slick, horn-supplemented sound of early 1994, the confrontational attitude of 1995, the streamlined rock-and-roll of 1996.
“Bradstock” is the paragon of this show type, not a mere teaser trailer but a warning shot across the bow of the Phish fanbase. Likely because of the casual, invite-only environment, the band offers no olive branches in the form of old songs. The setlist consists of 15 new originals and 3 new covers, with many of the first group performed twice. Such an overwhelming new song dump had never happened before, and wouldn’t again until the rejiggered Halloween tradition in 3.0 — and even those debut-a-thons would be sandwiched between two traditional sets.
When the Bradstock tapes mysteriously circulated in early summer as the band criss-crossed Europe yet again, it was like a secret new album spread from mailbox to mailbox. And the contents of that shadow release weren’t easy to process, representing the biggest Phish songwriting shift since the shorter compositions of Rift. Billy Breathes might have contained a few surprises in the form of in-studio, improvised songwriting, but the crop of songs hatched by Trey and Tom in the spring of 1997 would complete the transformation Phish had chased for the last two years, a new set of building blocks for a renovated and rejuvenated band.
It’s tough to hear with today’s ears, since this set contains several songs that would rapidly join the Phish canon. But these songs, at the time, were not your mother’s Phish. Besides Samson Variation — a throwback/tribute to Trey’s tutor Ernie Stiles — and the paint-by-numbers blues-rock of Dog Stole Things, it’s hard to imagine the Phish of 1993 or 1995 or even six months ago performing this material. Half the songs are dark, severe, and simple (if deceptively so), built around a single repeated chord progression or culminating in angry repetition instead of release. In contrast to the musical directness, almost every track contains ornate vocal arrangements, with all four members singing interlocking parts.
The combination, even if all of these songs were written by one band member and their auxiliary lyricist, finally unlocks the egalitarianism the band has pursued since Trey added his percussion kit two years earlier. If, as Trey will say on camera later in the year, nobody comes to see Phish hit the changes, then you might as well strip back those changes to the bare minimum, shifting the focus from complicated melodic figures to groove and cohesion. There’s no lead instrument, and even the lead vocalist is doubled or chased by responders or an ever-present backing chorus.
In another prophetic note, the crowd of insiders gets a little feisty the second time through the material. In the spirit of Phish’s European hecklers, there’s an irritating whistler, plenty of chompers, and a guy who keeps requesting Led Zeppelin (they play the original slow honky-tonk arrangement of “Water in the Sky” in response). Phish fans in Europe and the US were about to get real familiar with these songs, and some would start to wonder where the Phish of 1995, who seemed perpetually on the verge of channeling, if not covering, Zeppelin, had gone.
The backyard setup contributes to that disorientation. Their stage gear was already on its way to Europe, so the stripped-down sound mixes with the raw material to make it all sound very demo-ish. Even in full-band arrangements, the new songs haven’t progressed much from the actual demos heard on Trampled by Lambs and Pecked By The Dove, Trey and Tom’s Guided By Voices cosplay “get in and get out” home recordings. Many of the songs sound unfinished at first blush, with Saw It Again, Vultures, Twist, and Piper all ending in a locked-groove repetition.
It wouldn’t become apparent until later that the work-in-progressness was the point. Previous song drops only happened after the debuted material had been well fussed over, if not in the studio then in the rehearsal room or soundcheck. This batch of songs had only been written a month or two earlier, and while they’re not sloppy at Bradstock, the band is definitely kicking them out of the nest earlier than usual. As a result, some aren’t long for this world: Samson Variation, I Don’t Care, and Waking Up, RIP, we hardly knew ye.
However, that half-baked quality is precisely the medicine the band needed at this time. The winter European tour was a success, but a frustrating one, as the band repeatedly banged its head against older songs that wouldn’t yet yield to new style experiments. For the next time out, they imported a bunch of songs with a blank slate and room to grow, and boy, did they.
But in Brad and Pete’s backyard, they haven’t touched those jumper cables together yet. There’s not much cowfunk in these originals; the most predictive segment for ‘97 jamming is the closing Stand! > Izabella couplet, with its heavy groove chased by a Hendrix seance. Page doesn’t have his clavinet, instead using a heavily-treated Rhodes in Ghost that makes it more of a woozy hard-rocker than a funkfest. Just like the final show of the Europe tour feinted in the direction of a back-to-roots future for Phish, Bradstock doesn’t tip the band’s hand for where they were about to take their jamming; if anything, it sounds like they’re filling out the heavy (Saw It Again, Vultures) and light (Dirt, Velvet Sea) extremes of the catalog, instead of reinventing the core.
If the band was uncomfortable with the public nature of this process, they at least arranged its early stages to happen out of the spotlight. After the friends and family exclusive of Bradstock, they’d head back to the club circuit of Europe, where they’d work the new material hard and let the rumors percolate back home based on fevered reports from hostel computers. At last, all the ingredients for Phish’s triumphant late 90s are on the table, but there’s still six weeks until a paying US audience could taste the dish. 6/6/97 was an appetizer snuck out of the kitchen, raising more questions than answers, as a good sneak preview should.
>>>the brief glimpses of The Bearsville Blob at Joyous Lake
I always wondered about this mysterious music. In what way did it appear?