Chess, Scruggs, and Rock n’ Roll

11/18/94, East Lansing, MI, MSU Auditorium

There’s not a ton going on in this show*, compared to its surroundings. So let’s take this opportunity to rip off a Thoughts On The Dead format and do a bullet-pointed live viewing of The Bluegrass Sessions, the 80-minute video document of this moment in Phish history. These five shows (11/16 - 11/20) comprise the run that Rev. Jeff Mosier, a multi-instrumentalist formerly of the Aquarium Rescue Unit, joined up for a crash course in bluegrass and several guest appearances as Phish toured the Big Ten Conference. While traveling with the band, Mosier shot a bunch of footage on his camcorder, which surfaced online in the mid-2000s. 

“Come on in, get in there.”

• We open in Grand Rapids on November 14th, with four gentlemen wearing some of the worst jeans imaginable soundchecking The Old Home Place.

• Half of the bluegrass mini-setup is pretty gimmicky: specifically, the Fish-mandolin and Page-bass half, even if Page is adorable playing standup bass. But hearing Mike play banjo is a genuine pleasure...I would not complain if that resurfaced sometime. 

• Well, here’s a partial answer to what was going on during the deepest, darkest part of that night’s Bowie. Both Page and Trey are waving their microphones at their stage fans...as one does? The ominous cartoon bassline Mike plays leading out of this segment really is the best.

• It’s nice to have a from-the-board POV on the stage circa 1994, after the askew angle of the Halloween video. The geometry of the backdrop produces some strange subliminal effects, focusing attention in on Trey and Mike and pushing Page and Fish off to the side. They also seem really spread out in the four-across arrangement, even on a mid-size venue stage. It’s crazy how the lights already look like modern Phish.

• Before The Old Home Place, Trey shushes the crowd! His sympathies lie with the shushers!

• Mosier jokes that part of why he filmed the band was to “show them that their feet weren’t tapping!” And it’s true, they are awfully flat-footed for this last show before Mosier joins them onstage.

• It’s funny that they could’ve just sang “Sweet Adeline” into the bluegrass mic but make a big show of the crew taking it offstage to do it unamplified. Man, those transitions must have been a momentum killer though.

• Now to the rehearsal room before 11/16/94. “Imagine brushes,” Mosier says to get them to slow down to the right tempo for “Blue and Lonesome.”

• Strange that the camera never shows Fishman during this rehearsal. Was he not there? Also, it must be said, their vocals sound pretty great. And I like how Trey does his stare at the back row/head bob moves even in rehearsal.

  

• There’s a different, minor chord on the “haaaad” in Nellie Kane that sounds really cool, and that I’ve never heard them do on stage. Something they dropped or forgot?

• Brad Sands, “any sign of Fishman yet?” So uh yeah, no rehearsal for Fish, haha.

• Dick jokes backstage, same as it ever was.

• The Hill Auditorium looks so small from the stage. It continues to seem impossible that they played in there — that they played *that show* in there. 

• Was Trey cutting his own hair on this tour? At least it’s an upgrade over his Halloween look. He’s also wearing the same shirt on the tour bus 11/17 as he was in the rehearsal room on 11/16...life on the road. “Where are we, in Dayton?,” Mosier asks.

• A lot of practice/teaching time put in on My Sweet One, which they didn’t end up playing that night, or at all that week. It’s cute how Mosier laughs at the lyrics.

• It’s not listed in the chapters, but there’s a brief excerpt of them practicing “Dooley” before 11/17. To show the depth of my bluegrass expertise, I thought it was a song called “Julie” until I Googled the lyrics.

  

• 5:39 a.m. on 11/18/94 and Mike’s up playing bass alone on the tour bus while Page eats a Hot Pocket with a plastic fork and knife. Pure art

• There’s a box on the tour bus that says “Trey be normal? YANK IT” and I probably do not want to know what it’s for.

• Mosier now interviewing the bus driver, who has a glorious mullet and talks about driving around Warren G, “a rap band from Long Beach.” 

• Finally some footage of Mosier onstage with the band, singing “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” using Trey’s vocal mic (they couldn’t spring for an extra mic?). The electric bluegrass sounds so much better than the acoustic, though bless ‘em for trying.

• Might be the camera angle from the wings, but the stage looks much more compact for 11/18. I’m sure the setups were all over the place as they slingshotted between theaters, auditoriums, arenas, and bandshells; I wonder how that influenced the playing on a given night?

• On to 11/19 and Bloomington, with Page’s tech tuning the baby grand, talking shit about how Elton John no longer uses one. What a thing to have to do every day. 

• Bummer that there’s no footage of the Bloomington parking lot jam, but look at all this gaggle of college kids trying to Beatlemania the tour bus at 2 a.m. And oh hey, it’s Mike’s one-string bass thing. And the tour bus chess match —Page has got somebody I don’t recognize in check. Real rock n’ roll animals, these guys.

  

• Trey’s having a conversation with Kuroda at the light board, and seems very concerned about how they look on stage during some kind of effect. “Ever since that first time...I totally changed my entire style of lighting since then,” Kuroda said.

• The banana dress! And of course it has a giant banana in the crotchal region. These guys sure did love their dicks.

• Brad Sands: “I hate bluegrass!” I suppose the acoustic setup and random guests sticking around for an entire week doesn’t make a tour/stage manager’s life any easier

• For 11/20, Mike is wearing his pumpkin vest! So, as I suspected, it wasn’t just special Halloween garb, it’s a regular part of his wardrobe. Trey is also wearing the same black shirt with the hilariously baggy sleeves from Halloween, so maybe everybody’s on the same laundry rotation.

• Mosier joins for If I Could and there are now two (2) men wearing vests on stage at the rock concert.

• Trey doing an off-camera impression of a fan asking a nerd question about why they didn’t do the whistling ending of Reba is a nice way to close things out.

Overall, the footage is interesting for seeing the band’s squeaky-clean, geeky tour routine: bluegrass practice and setlist writing at 3:30, show at 8, chess games and even more practice late at night while the tour bus drives to the next stop. The most scandalous material is some fratty backstage humor and that time when they can’t find Fishman before the Ann Arbor show, so he (gasp!) missed his bluegrass lessons that day. 

Maybe Mosier left out all the debauchery, but that doe-eyed innocence matches up with a band still earnest enough to bring in a bluegrass tutor mid-tour, even as they’re a) still ostensibly promoting Hoist, b) trying to capture what they do best onstage for a live album, and c) playing longer and darker improvisations that have no obvious connection to the traditional practices of bluegrass. This era might be the last one that you could make a PG-rated video about — The Betty Ford Clinic Sessions aren’t surfacing online anytime soon — but it’s still great to see a band that’s hungry to learn new styles, even a decade into their existence and in the midst of a commercial and creative leap. 

* - The Llama is another great example of Noise Phish from yesterday, a rare ‘94 Bathtub Gin goes off the rails in an interesting way, and I like the Tweezer which is basically just a long jam on The Wedge, which is MIA for the entire year for some reason?