Be Here Now

11/9/96, Auburn Hills, MI, The Palace of Auburn Hills

SET 1: Buried Alive > Poor Heart, The Sloth, Divided Sky, Horn, Tube, Talk, Split Open and Melt, The Lizards, Character Zero

SET 2: David Bowie, A Day in the Life, You Enjoy Myself, Taste, Swept Away > Steep > Harry Hood

ENCORE: Julius

I may have finally pushed my ambivalence towards 1996 too hard, as I actually got a couple light pieces of criticism over my 11/7/96 essay. That’s fine, I can take it; y’all are way nicer than any, er, constructive feedback I got at Pitchfork. But that makes the rare backlash stand out against the usual tides of positivity. One reader suggested I need a nap (absolutely and always true) and that I need to “use a non-97 measuring stick from time to time.” Fair enough! 

The overarching narrative of this whole project is charting Phish’s constant evolution in real time, and I’m drawn to sniffing out the earliest signs of the future in whatever era I’m currently covering. When the band is spinning its wheels a bit, as I think even the band members themselves would admit about 1996, I tend to check out and focus on the future even more. But I’ll confess that, by only looking through that lens, I can sometimes lose sight of the strengths that are right in front of me.

So without further ado, on the occasion of Phish’s second visit to the mighty Palace (RIP), here are some things I currently appreciate about 1996.

New Songs Settling In

In the first post of this tour, I talked about how some of the Billy Breathes material didn’t translate well to the stage, thanks to its studio-as-instrument origins. But as almost always happens, the new songs improve with repetition. Free and Theme may still be diminished from their pre-studio heights (though the Champaign Theme encore was very pleasant to revisit), but the songs without significant pre-96 history are growing up nicely. 

I’ll have my issues with Zero in the future, when Trey uses it for sometimes gratuitous guitar wanking, but in its current 5-6 minute form it’s a nice shot of adrenaline wherever it turns up. The Billy Breathes rearrangement of Taste still has that new car smell, and the outro jam is starting to stretch its legs. Swept Away/Steep isn’t going to deliver on its textural improv promise for another 20+ years, but it works great as a transitional piece, whether between the slices of a Mike’s Groove or in more inventive positioning such as tonight, where it overlaps with the Hood intro. 

The biggest surprise for me is Talk, the song I would always forget if you asked me to name the Billy Breathes tracklist from memory. I remembered it as a slight throwaway that didn’t work outside of the brief experiment with the acoustic mini-stage, but I’ve been enjoying its occasional appearance as maybe the most direct echo of the White Album Halloween cover — it sounds like “Blackbird” mixed with “Julia,” and it’s a fresh breeze of cool air when it appears.

New Sounds Emerging

In my podcast conversation with Ryan Storm posted yesterday, we picked at one thread that stretched all the way from 1996 to 2021: Page’s synthesizers. In a vivid illustration of just how far our beloved Chairman has come in 25 years with his Moog-ing, the 11/8/96 Simple features a couple minutes of tentative noodling on Page’s monophonic synthesizer during Trey’s mini-kit vacation, while the 8/6/21 Simple rides on the back of Page’s monstrous polyphonic synthesizer tones. 

But the four-show run we’re finishing up here has had a number of cheeky Page synth moments. As mentioned, 11/7/96 had two surprisingly long synth solos, while tonight finds Page using his Moog Source for his first Lizards solo and once again to further funkify the YEM jam. Ryan, the master historian of Page’s rigs through time, informed me that the debut of the Yamaha CS60 (most famous for Meatstick and What’s The Use?) is just around the corner in 1997, but since Remain in Light, his interest in synthesized sounds has grown. 

Less well documented is another digital sound that keeps cropping up in recent shows: you can hear it woosh at the start of the YEM jam here, and it turned up in multiple places in Champaign. After a little bit of digging, I’ve come to the conclusion that Fishman had a sample pad, 25 years before the looped moans in the Arkansas Slave divided the Phish community. My guess is that he brought in some samples for Remain in Light — those fake handclaps in “Seen and Not Seen,” perhaps? — and they stuck around for a while. A blurb on 10/26/96 in my worn copy of The Pharmer’s Almanac also talks about Fishman testing “his new electric drums” in soundcheck. They may not have lasted long, but it’s cool to hear yet another idea that would pay off a quarter-century later.

Ticket stub from @ambropel

Confidence & Consistency

Last year when Phish made their debut at The Palace, I wrote about how they sounded out of their depth in the pretty massive NBA arena that held over 24,000 for concerts. This year, while the show isn’t much better overall, they at least feel more comfortable in the environment. And it’s true for the majority of this first tour that’s almost entirely in arenas; there’s none of the “are we sure we should be here?” nerves that cropped up occasionally in Fall 95 before the red-hot month of December. 

That raises the floor on the quality of shows in Fall 96 — if nothing else, they’re a far more consistent band. They’re assured enough to play what they want and damn the setlist rotation; tonight features an unusual 8 songs that had already been played in this four-night stretch, including the second YEM in three shows and two years in a row at The Palace. There’s an emphasis on playing what they want to play, not just giving the fans what they might want (no Tweezers in these four nights) or what they think they need to play to suit a big venue. While it’s not the manic episode they eventually reached in December ‘95, it’s progress.

And…I’m thinking about 1997 again. I can’t help it; the next time they play The Palace, it will be my single most beloved Phish/anybody concert of all time. Getting comfortable in big venues is great, and a necessary step forward, but the nickname for Fall 97 isn’t Phish Gets Comfortable With America, there’s an emphasis on Destroys for a reason. Developing new sounds and songs, growing into big cavernous basketball arenas — these make for interesting chapters, but they’re still the first act setup of a story that’s about to pick up the pace. There’s plenty to love in 1996, but it’s hard not to flip ahead.