Bottom at the Pops

9/28/95, San Diego, CA, Summer Pops, Embarcadero Center

Pops orchestras always struck me as kind of condescending: a watered-down olive branch to the plebes who could never comprehend Wagner, so let’s give them the John Williams they’ll recognize instead. I get that it’s a form of outreach to the vast majority of people who find classical music archaic and impenetrable, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the very talented musicians involved are slumming it for a largely inattentive audience. The result can often be musical wallpaper, background sound for a wine-and-cheese picnic or literal accompaniment to a projected film. 

That said, Phish is a natural fit for a Summer Pops series, even several years before Trey started playing regular symphony gigs. They’re a band full of highly-trained musicians who have chosen rock music, and songs such as YEM, Fluffhead, and Divided Sky provide advanced musical composition in easily-digestible packaging. On a given night, they might even give you both Wagner and Williams, by way of Deodato and a Run Like an Antelope tease.

So Phish at their first mid-90s peak playing a Summer Pops Series in San Diego beside the water sounds like a perfect match. But let’s not mince words — this is as forgettable a prime-era Phish show as I’ve ever heard. Sporting a 2.36 phish.net score, it’s easily the lowest-rated show of 1995, and I had to go back to 1992 to find a show held in lower esteem (7/14, when Trey apparently fought an out-of-tune Languedoc at a warehouse venue called The Boathouse in Norfolk, VA). The show is barely 2 hours long, and the tape doesn’t do it in any favors, as it’s an AUD that’s 60% audience noise, 40% band noise. At least the view was nice? 

The setlist only adds to the nothingness of this show. All four of the new Fall 95 originals repeat from the night before, and none of them see improvement in their second go-round. Most memorable is The Fog That Surrounds, where Fishman flubs his new lead vocal so badly he has to restart from the top. Both Armies — Acoustic and Keyboard — show up, obliterating the little momentum each set manages to accumulate. Historically, the only notable moments are the first proper Mule Duel, an innovation that many Phish fans wish had never occurred, and the final Don’t You Wanna Go?, a cover few remember or miss.

It’s such a sharp regression from where the band left off in July, that I’m starting to cast about for conspiracy theories. There’s the perennial California Curse for Phish, who to this day give the West Coast short shrift, playing sub-par performances if they even go west of Denver at all. There’s the weight of new songs, none of which are really set up for exploration, and a shift from the reliable hijinks of the past (Fishman songs, Big Ball Jams) to newer gimmicks like the Duel and the Armies that don’t quite land. Or there’s the theory I’m most sympathetic to: that Trey is just a tired New Dad, barely a month after his first daughter Eliza was born between tours. I know I didn’t get back to normal for months (maybe years?) after my firstborn arrived.

But maybe this is just the Phish version of a Pops performance, a grab-bag of easily accessible material and crowd-pleasing antics that provides an unchallenging good time. I can’t imagine it was that satisfying for either the band or the audience (though one Chomper Chad near the mic yells “JOYGASM!” right before the klezmer section of Mule), and unless you saw a UFO on the way home or you’re doing a full Fall 95 listening project, there’s no reason to take it off the streaming shelf. Every skyscraper has a ground floor, and this is Fall 95’s disappointing lobby.

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]