Bluff in a Band Shell

10/23/94, Gainesville, FL, University of Florida Band Shell

A Live One is a fraud. Oh sure, there’s PA music and a Lights Down cheer at the start of each disc, and tracks are connected via realistic crowd noise. The two discs pretty much match the set length and structure of a typical two-set evening with Phish. There’s even a little scrap of info in the booklet — which has partially made its way over to streaming services — that says “Recorded Live, Clifford Ball, 1994.” But I did some digging, and friends, what if I told you the whole thing was a hoax? That this setlist doesn’t exist anywhere in the Phish.net data? There’s not even a venue called the Clifford Ball, and the festival with that name didn’t happen until 1996!

OK, every Phish fan in 2019 knows that A Live One is a compilation. And back in June 1995, when it came out, anyone who wasn’t first encountering Phish via their double-disc live record probably figured it out pretty quickly as well. But back then, releasing a highlights compilation instead of a full show wasn’t a controversial move, it was just what bands did. Even the Dead had only dabbled in the practice at that point, and then only through archival releases, with One From The Vault in 1991 and the launch of the Dick’s Picks series (which started with an incomplete show) in 1993. 

Instead, for their first live release, Phish recapitulated the method by which the Dead started putting their live reputation into record stores. Just like Live/Dead, they professionally recorded a bunch of shows, then used the raw material to compile an optimized simulacrum of a typical night on tour. And jokey lede aside, A Live One does a pretty good job – everything’s in its right place, more or less. A Bouncin’ opener and first set YEM might feel a bit off, but front-half placement of Stash, Gumbo, and Chalk Dust checks out, Wilson is a reliable second set opener at this point, the big jam comes in the third quarter, and you wrap it up with a Coil encore. It’s an impressive forgery, even for those with the expertise to spot it.

But that artifice has a lingering effect. Combining the evidence of your ears with a skim through the set’s thick booklet, you might imagine a band flying around in a hot dog in giant sports arenas every night, playing to adoring, chanting, singing-along crowds willing to follow every experimental adventure. The truth of Fall Tour 1994 is much more complicated, and far more humble.

Take this night’s ALO representative. Late in the second set, they play the Harry Hood that made the cut for official release — no small honor given what a tremendous year 1994 was for Hoods. The performance, to do it the minimum of justice, is a triumph. I won’t even hazard my own description here, instead giving the mic to Wally Holland’s brilliant 33-⅓ on A Live One, a must-read for anyone obsessed enough to subscribe to these essays.

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Ten minutes into the track, they’re soaring: ringing open-string guitar, piano fistfuls, tummy-rumbling bass moans, at least fifteen limbs bashing away at the drums. For sixty seconds the music is at a climax, big and loud. Rawk. We’re basically done—in five improvised minutes they’ve worked a fresh variation on the song structure and ramped up to the final vocals. Plenty of folks would follow a band around the country if what they did every night was the first eleven minutes of this “Hood,” and—

—but they turn back. Sharing a destination but lacking a map, all four players instinctively pull up and halt the jam short of the finish. Drums and bass drop out, the road ends … and then a deranged blues-guitar thing happens, a goblin-drum thing, a bottom-string bass thing, a how-did-he-get-quite-there piano thing. The music, as the saying goes, is playing the band. From this point until the end of the track, anyone’d be proud to have written music so purely joyful and rich. It comes and goes in minutes, departing from the songform in order to fulfill that form. The term “leap of faith” seems appropriate. Maybe your heart speeds up a little here, to hear; maybe theirs did too on that night. That’s a nice thought, isn’t it? Hearts beating in shared time. Music is a technology for synchronizing the movement of animal bodies.

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Now given that wonderful, ecstatic description, would you have pictured it happening on the stage above, which looks better suited to a family reunion than a rock concert? Could you imagine it would have happened on a Sunday night, near the end of a free show tacked on to the itinerary too late for the band to even announce it in their official newsletter? That it was played to a smattering of diehards who stuck around to complete the full four-show swing through Florida, a group likely outnumbered by curious onlookers idly checking out the commotion on campus? Does it seem possible that such holy music came immediately after Fishman’s vacuum-sucking piss take on Prince’s “Purple Rain,” and the sped-up Argent cover they use to chase him off the stage? That it was followed by a ditty sung through a megaphone about a weasel’s rivalry with a chimpanzee?

There are some hints at these less-than-pristine recording conditions if you listen to A Live One loud enough, most notably the chatty audience rumble and the gaggle of ladies yelling “woo hoo!” periodically during the quiet beginnings and the first, false peak of the Hood jam. It doesn’t appear to distract the band at all — one of the many wonderful things about this particular Hood is how perfectly paced it is, how gorgeously it unfurls, with no deference paid to a distractible college crowd. If anything, noticing all the chompers deep in the mix makes you appreciate how focused the band is at this point, hearing nothing except each other, moving as one.

And that’s really the well-earned cockiness at the heart of the A Live One mirage. Phish in late 1994 was starting to realize that they were something special, that they had broken through to a higher level, even if the venues, crowds, and general amenities of their tours hadn’t caught up yet. In a way, the “Clifford Ball” gag and rock star photo album were a spell of self-actualization, a gamble that selling out Madison Square Garden wasn’t a fluke, that Phish belonged there now, not in an IHOP-looking bandshell sitting in a grass field. The spell worked, they never looked back.