Bag of Nerves

10/29/94, Spartanburg, SC, Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium

Here’s some of that insightful commentary you signed up for: this show rules. In my best Bill Hader Stefon impression, it has everything: rarely-played songs, intense and dark jamming, inventive segues and sandwiches, an extremely gnarly Star Wars tease, and a very nice soundboard recording to remember it by. Almost every song has a little something extra going on, My Friend My Friend has a spooky coda, Simple has a great, brief Trey solo that is a leap forward for the still-embryonic song, the Runaway Jim breakdown goes four-on-the-floor for a minute...I could run down the entire setlist, but better that you just listen to it.

It’s remarkable how much of a break this show is from the preceding weeks, which are full of pretty good, if a little bit predictable, nights with 1 or 2 exceptional moments. Back when I tweeted this show in 2017, I speculated that 10/29 was “the point where pre-Halloween jitters turn into pre-Halloween slap-happiness.” The band is two nights away from the most audacious concert of its career, learning the 30 songs of The White Album (okay, 28-1/2) on the road while still playing their regular 2.5 hour performances nearly every night. Yeah, they have an off day tomorrow, but they’re also playing 885 miles away from their Halloween destination and are on their fifth show in five nights. There is a lot of steam to blow off, and that pressure powers this show into some weird, satisfying directions.

The timing made me ponder whether there’s a pattern of exceptional shows before and/or after the extremely high-profile and high-stress Halloween dates. A similar phenomenon is well acknowledged by the community for New Year’s Eve, where the 29th and 30th consistently outperform the holiday show itself. For NYE, the story usually goes that it’s more of a party-first night, and the midnight gag tends to be awkwardly placed for the show’s overall flow. For Halloween, the theory is more complicated; one hypothesis is that the amount of rehearsal and preparation required for the main event could spill over into distracted shows in the run-up and exceptionally loose shows in its wake. 

So I decided to do some (rather basic) data science. I looked at Phish.net ratings for the show immediately before Halloween and the show immediately after, in years where a musical costume was performed. Hope you like boxplots!

What the figure shows is that the show immediately preceding Halloween is way more of a wild card than the show immediately following. You get some good ones, like this 1994 date or the Reading Disease show of 2013, and some real duds — jeez, people really didn’t like the first night of Festival 8. But usually these shows fall somewhere in the high 3s or the low 4s, which I’d guess is roughly average for the overall Phish.net ratings corpus (we’re a generous fanbase). 

However, the show after Halloween is almost a guaranteed blockbuster. For the 8 of 10 years where fall tour continued after 10/31 (1995, which didn’t have another show until 11/9, is the weird one here), the rating is never lower than 4.231 (Festival 8 again). The after-Halloween group can claim some bonafide classics, including Coral Sky 1996, the Dark Side of the Moon show in Salt Lake City, and as we’ll see shortly, the Bangor Tweezer.

So it certainly appears that the demands of preparing for Halloween night can take their toll on the band, while occasionally the training exhaustion pushes them to magical results, as on this night in South Carolina. An inverted run, like they played in 2018, is probably the best possible scenario for future Halloweens — you get the costume set, and then multiple nights of the band celebrating that they are past their self-imposed challenge. And an entire damn fall tour that stretches another month and a half past the Halloween hurdle? That’s going to be a wild ride.