“We did a show in… somewhere down south, about a year before that first Halloween show, and because we have this habit of mixing up the set list, we thought it would be kind of a shock to play our own album, which was Hoist, exactly as [it is]… normally we improvise… so we did the whole album top to bottom, exactly as it lay on plastic. And afterwards we were talking to some fans, and we were jokingly boasting, ‘Oh we’ll play any album ever recorded.’ And that gave us the idea, the next Halloween let’s do that as a musical costume.”
[From the 1998 Sessions at West 54th interview with David Byrne, via Gothamist]
The concept of the GameHoist show begs for heavy interpretation. It’s a meeting of the old and the new, connecting Phish’s most recent work to their sort-of-first album, in the neighborhood of the band’s 10th anniversary. Or maybe it’s an official welcome party for the Hoist material, putting it on equal footing with the band’s most beloved and sought-after song cycle. Or it could be an honorary send-off to the “new album promotion” strategy that has hovered over 1994, one final run-through nearly three months after Hoist’s release and a chance to sort out the heavy-rotation keepers (Down with Disease, Julius, er, Sample) from the songs that have yet to ripen live (Wolfman’s Brother) or never will (Demand). Maybe it was even a test run for recording the band’s first official live album, or the rumored but never realized CD-ROM for The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday.
Allow me to propose an alternative theory. The GameHoist show isn’t so much a celebration of their albums, old and new, but an experiment within the nascent idea that started to bubble up over the preceding year: the idea of long-form set structure.
Some of the most jarring elements of spending a lot of time in 1993 and early 1994 are the very different priorities in the nightly setlist. Over the second half of the 90s, and straight through to today, Phish worked with the confidence of a band whose crowd would follow them basically anywhere, any night. They didn’t need to play the “hits” — in fact, the diehard fans would rather they didn’t — and they didn’t feel obligated to hit certain marks of how a Phish show “should” go. With that freedom, they could innovate on the structure of sets and make them cohesive long-form units, eventually even discarding the pre-written setlist itself and going where the spirit took them, playing as few songs or as many as they needed to express that show’s unique energy.
But in 1993 and 1994, they were still trying to earn that freedom to experiment. And so they acted more like a typical band would: finding a setlist formula that showcased all of the different things they could do and were expected to do. The most obvious byproduct of this approach was the near-nightly Fishman song near the end of the second set in 1993; no matter where the momentum of the set was pointing, it was interrupted so that they could live up to their billing as “that band where the guy in the dress plays the vacuum.” More subtle rules were usually followed from show to show, as well: the a capella song, the acoustic mini-set, something with trampolines, the classic rock cover encore, the jams placed precisely halfway through and at the end of the first set, and near the start of the second.
You can’t really blame Phish for adhering to this relatively safe structure as they were visiting new areas of the country and gradually scaling up their venue size. But only the odd seguefest here or there — 2/20/93, 3/14/93, August ‘93, the Bomb Factory — breached these barriers and reached that special place where it felt like anything can happen, where the direction of the show was driven by the music rather than pre-written instructions. Surely the band noticed this phenomenon themselves, and in a way, the mild commercial performance of Hoist freed them up to try it out more regularly, beginning in June and accelerating through the fall.
But taking that leap into the unknown and quite possibly self-indulgent must be frightening for a band, and so GameHoist offers an opportunity to try out set-length statements with water wings on. Playing two albums in their entirety seems like the absolute inverse of freewheeling setlists, but it’s the structure that’s important. TMWSIY and Hoist were both sequenced, like many albums, to create an emotional journey for the listener with peaks, valleys, and ideally some sense of resolution (whether they do this well is another matter). That’s a big leap away from “let’s show off everything we can do” as a guiding principle for a setlist, and recreating a couple of their established tracklists live is a nice, simple toe-in-the-water test.
As Trey’s quote at the start indicates, the Halloween album tradition is a direct descendent of this night’s experiment, but I think it influenced Phish in less subtle ways as well. If playing an album live and expanding on its original premise works, why not construct a brand-new “album” every night from the many, many available parts of the Phish catalog? Why not improvise at the meta-scale of the set or show, instead of just within songs? And beautifully, pursuing those questions only accelerated their popularity, with the unknown proving an even more addictive experience for fans than the formula meant to safely send everyone home happy.
I’ve mostly minced words about my feelings on Hoist in these Spring 94 essays, but this seems like the right time to let it all out. I think it’s a woefully flawed record, easily the worst in their discography. It’s not that it’s a quote-unquote sell-out record; I’d like to think that I don’t really care about the false dichotomy between authentic and popular at this stage. It’s that it’s such a lame attempt at selling out, completely oblivious to musical trends of the time and ultimately half-hearted. The parade of guest stars feels like an admission that they didn’t trust their own abilities to make it in the mainstream. The tempos are irritatingly slow — a recurring annoyance in all their studio work. And the performances are stiff, over-anxious about staying at radio-single length, until all that restraint explodes in the 4/21/93 Melt jam like a fat man taking his belt off.
Admittedly, it’s somewhat endearing that Phish is such a fundamentally weird band that they would screw up their attempt at mass appeal so badly. But that doesn’t mean I want to listen to it when I’m not researching posts like this one. And the complete 180 of the next year’s A Live One — and that album’s complete omission of Hoist material —is all the proof I need that Phish wasn’t too pleased with how Hoist turned out themselves.
But it’s also fascinating how Hoist lives on. It wasn’t just tossed aside as a failed experiment, the majority of its songs have stayed in regular rotation these last 20 years. So Spring 1994 is fascinating from the perspective of how they reclaimed this material from the circumstances of its recording, converting them incrementally into important live staples.
In that regard, beneath the setlist gimmick is a kind of progress report of how these songs have grown over roughly three months of live performance. Predictably and obnoxiously, I would argue that basically every song has already improved from its album version, with the possible exceptions of Dog-Faced Boy, which is slight enough to not really have much room for improvement, and Demand, which could never recreate its complex knottiness live.
Without all the restrictions mentioned three paragraphs ago, the other songs are able to breathe and expand. But it’s (mostly) not just that they’re longer. Julius and Wolfman’s Brother have a geekier swing to them that is more true to Phish’s Vermont-filtered take on black music. Disease has taken a few small steps on its way to becoming one of the major improvisational platforms, and offers a glimpse of that future for about 30 seconds around the 6:30 mark in this rendition. If I Could now has the glorious end solo that makes it one of the finest Phish ballads, and Axilla, in just the last couple versions, has used the creepy coda of the studio version as a unique, dark passage. Lifeboy’s dynamics are much more effective live and electric, Sample’s arena rock is played at a proper arena rock tempo, and Mule is getting weirder and weirder, as it should.
Those are all pretty boring observations — of course Phish songs are better live than they were on the record, they almost always are. But the atypically mainstream intentions of Hoist and the fact that only 3.5 of these songs were played on stage before the album’s release offer a cleaner demonstration of the alchemical power of live Phish, how it transforms “new songs” into just being “Phish songs.” No matter how far out of their comfort zone they stretch, there’s a natural gravity that brings new material back closer to the parameters of the catalog while simultaneously expanding those boundaries in an organic way. It’s damn fun to watch happen in slow motion.