Beginner’s Guide
12/14/95, Binghamton, NY, Broome County Veterans Memorial Center
SET 1: Suzy Greenberg > Llama, Horn > Foam, Makisupa Policeman > Split Open and Melt, Tela, Taste That Surrounds, My Sweet One, Frankenstein
SET 2: The Curtain > Tweezer -> Timber (Jerry The Mule) -> Tweezer -> Keyboard Army, Halley's Comet -> NICU -> Slave to the Traffic Light
ENCORE: Bold As Love
In 2001, Phish finally opened their archival floodgates with the original Live Phish series. It’s hard to believe now, but up to that point — the entirety of 1.0 — the band had only released unabridged full shows twice: the Hampton Comes Alive box set collecting 11/20 and 11/21/98 and the 10/31/90 show released through forgotten music download platform emusic. But with the band taking a break from the road and bills to be paid, Phish worked with Elektra to kick off what would become a 20-volume series of multi-disc sets in strange slipcases, before digital downloads killed the physical media star.
As someone who has spent an alarming amount of time thinking about improvisational rock bands releasing their archives, I’ve definitely got some thoughts about the Live Phish series. But it’s a different animal from the Dick’s Picks series, which told the Dead’s story through the superfan tape collector lens of its namesake, Dead archivist Dick Latvala (and after Dick’s death in 1999, his successor David Lemieux). The process behind Live Phish selections is murkier — Phish archivist Kevin Shapiro is less of an eccentric character than Dick, and the band members themselves played a role in the selection of shows early on, unlike the delegating Dead. “The members of Phish are very hands-on in just about every sense of the organization, so it’s really their decision what, when and if,” Shapiro told Charlie Dirksen in 2000, and at least four of the original Live Phish series, volumes 17 through 20, were explicitly selected by Mike.
The approaches for releasing Dick’s Picks and Live Phish were also very different. The former was originally only available via mail order and micro-targeted to the headiest of fans, released in a steady, though accelerating, drip of one volume at a time. Live Phish releases went out to record stores everywhere and were released in batches, with the first five volumes dropping simultaneously in September 2001 and all making the Billboard albums chart (between Volume 2 at #93 and Volume 4 at #127) the week after their release. So while you could read a lot into the Dead’s decision to release a little-known 1973 show as their first-ever peek at the archive, Phish fogged up the narrative right away by releasing shows from 1995, 1994, and 2000 (3x!) all at once.
That said, they had to put the #1 on somebody’s spine, and 12/14/95 was the show they chose as the flagship edition of their still-running program (the day this essay runs, they’re announcing another addition to their streaming/download service, I’m guessing 11/28/94). It was a somewhat eccentric choice for the time — by then, December 95 was already considered a peak month for Phish, but Binghamton likely would not have won any fan polls for the best show of the month. Today, thanks to official release bias, it’s one of the highest-rated shows of December (trailing only 12/31 and 12/1), but it still doesn’t have the historical reputation of 12/1, 12/2, 12/9...or New Year’s Eve, which wouldn’t get its own official release until 4 years later.
So what did 12/14 have that made Phish and Phish Inc. consider it the best introduction for a hypothetical customer who, intimidated by the multiple choices, simply chose to start with the lowest number? In 2005, Shapiro gave a little more insight into how archival picks are made, in an interview for Relix:
Obviously if a band member wants to release a show, we release it. Beyond that, there are a few tests. One that Fish made up is the show must achieve "significant, transcendent moments" in each set. I’d take that a step further to say that those high moments should be achieved in each disc. Another is a scale I made up that incorporates Fish’s test and considers a show’s energy, musicality, flow and transcendence. The last is the "goosebumps" test, which is a good overall baseline. A show that doesn’t give us goosebumps probably won’t make it. It’s still subjective to a large degree. One person’s favorite show is another’s overrated and that’s part of the challenge.
12/14 definitely passes that four-point test, but so does pretty much everything else from December 95. What may have separated Binghamton from the pack is that it’s the most accessible version of that month’s magic, without sacrificing any of the manic creativity that it represents. There are no 30-minute-plus jams here; the longest track is a Melt that still finishes up in less than 15 minutes. There’s no acoustic bluegrass or a capella, no Fish doing half an Elvis impression, no Faht or Kung or Catapult. The oddest moment for someone coming in cold is probably the last Keyboard Army until 2015, but even that’s just a few pleasant minutes of minimalism, even without the visual gag to explain it.
Instead, you get a razor-sharp first set that, apart from the Melt, doesn’t go that deep, it just shows how everything was played superbly at the end of this long cross-country trek. Suzy begins the evening with show closer energy, and it just builds from there, as though they’d already been playing for three hours backstage before letting the crowd in on the fun — it’s the less geeky version of opening a show with Tweeprise. There are best-of-tour versions of Foam and Taste, one of their most well-tailored covers in Frankenstein, the first officially-released document of Page pretending to forget the line about a multi-beast, and a Melt that ends in a silent jam.
The second frame bears the improvisational burden, and it does so with aplomb and, importantly for a mass audience, in digestible bites. That’s helped a bit by the interruption of Tweezer with Timber, which halves a 20-minute jam into two 10-minute chunks, but the band is also ruthlessly efficient with its jamming, getting right down to business in the unusual settings of Halley’s and NICU. It’s also the second show in a row with no real let-up, apart from Keyboard Army, and an almost continuous run of segues from start to finish, tape flips be damned.
It’s also good newbie bait that the set’s two improv highlights take very different approaches. This Tweezer punctures another one of my theories — that the 12/2 Tweezer, while exhilarating, was not a direction Phish wanted to pursue — by offering a pocket edition of that jam’s drag race, absolutely roaring out of the Timber interlude as Trey and Fish resume battle. If there’s a saving grace for my hypothesis, it’s that they only speed metal for about 3 minutes before moving out of it into an entirely new direction, a rhythmically vertiginous stretch that is more similar to the first Tweezer released by Phish on a live record than New Haven.
Then there’s the Halley’s, the Nancy song with essentially no jam history before this performance, though by the time it hit record shelves, that novelty was lost. No matter; historical significance aside, this jam slays, based largely around an incredibly confident theme Trey seemingly conjures out of thin air (it’s got a little “Oye Como Va” to it, and has all the trappings of a tease, but if nobody’s identified it by now…). Some of that Tweezer intensity comes back when it hits double-time just before the 8th minute, but the melodic inspiration lifts it into entirely new space. It’s the “goosebumps” moment, for sure.
Taken as a whole, Live Phish Volume 1 might have been the most accurate Phish official live document at the time of its release, and not just because it’s one of the first full shows they put up for sale. Both A Live One and Slip Stitch and Pass were documents of transitional periods, the band calling its shot for their next stage. Hampton Comes Alive is an anomaly, capturing the extremes of Phish show silliness, and the Halloween 1990 show was just too gestational. But December 95 is the platonic ideal of Phish in many ways, and 12/14 is a night that catches them existing fully in that wonderful present without as many of the month’s hints at the future. Even six years later, with the band not actively touring, it was potent enough to convert the heathens.
[Ticket Stub from Golgi Project.]