Clutching Forks and Knives
10/7/94, Bethlehem, PA, Stabler Arena
The first show of Phish’s 1994 was full of debuts — five total, including Fish’s take on “I Wanna Be Like You.” That flurry of first-timers was largely a matter of housekeeping, as the band added several songs to the repertoire that were recorded for Hoist before their first live performance. But it had also been three months since their last show; seven if you don’t count the NYE run as a proper tour. As prolific as Phish were at this stage, the Flynn Theatre show let loose the backlog and clued fans in on their headspace during their months off the road.
Fall tour picks up just shy of three months since summer tour’s finish at Sugarbush, leaving the band with far less time to generate fresh material. The break was a fairly quiet one, with Trey’s wedding, a few Bad Hat dates, and a couple Burlington sit-ins as the only documented events. And with recording plans focused on the long-awaited live album, there wasn’t much of a push for songwriting. Thus, 10/7/94 at Lehigh University, despite Trey’s early-show promise of new songs, only unboxes two: an original they had been tinkering with in soundchecks since at least Summer ’93, and a fairly unusual cover.
That said, the debuts of Guyute and the bluegrassed Foreplay/Long Time are an excellent appetizer for the tour to come. If April 4th’s introduction of Mule, Disease, If I Could, and Wolfman’s Brother signaled a shift towards more traditional songwriting, Guyute was reassurance that they could still write radio-unfriendly proggy epics. If Fish’s new Jungle Book song was the usual novelty vacuum showcase, the rearrangement of Boston’s FM radio staple was…well, still a novelty, but a new, more promising style of live gimmickry.
Guyute has always been one of my very favorite Phish songs. It has something of a strange trajectory, getting heavy play in Fall ’94, spotty appearances in ’95 and ’96, an ill-fitting place in the middle of Story of a Ghost, regular rotation from then until the hiatus, then becoming a semi-rarity for 2.0 and 3.0. The pig doesn’t seem to have found his place in the modern era — it hasn’t been played very often or particularly well, and nobody seems to notice or start hanging banners from the upper deck when it disappears for a few dozen shows (it’s currently at a 31-show gap, dating back to last Halloween). Perhaps the scarcity of 3.0 fall tours has hurt it the most, as the song is far more at home in a dark arena than on a sunny lawn.
You also usually know what to expect when the band strikes up Guyute. There’s no space for improvisation, and aside from some extra pauses, some hesitant playing, the lack of whistling, and a less-scary second verse, the debut is pretty similar to every version played after. That replicability is a crime for some Phish fans, particularly in 3.0 — don’t forget how Time Turns Elastic was bathroom-breaked into quick banishment.
I can be that kind of fan at times, but Guyute hardly ever tests my patience because its precise composition is so satisfying. Earlier lengthy Phish songs such as Fluffhead, YEM, Reba, Divided Sky — god bless ’em — still can sound like a bunch of unrelated parts sutured together, easy targets for the anti-prog argument of treating complexity as an end goal in itself. Guyute, for all its swollen runtime, is comparatively simple, and thematically far more consistent. It’s basically three sections: the verse progression, a dreamy TMWSIY-ish instrumental, the jig and its progressive dementia, and a return to the verse progression, this time with a big finish.
The lyrical storyline of Guyute is the usual Phishy nonsense, right down to introducing a new character that feels custom-made for a Pollack drawing. But its emotional arc is unusually direct, uncomplicated like the musical structure, but effective, evocative, and darker than most anything else in their catalog. Last essay, I talked about Phish’s increasingly sadistic pranksterism, defying expectations of wiggly hippie grooves and creating a more dangerous atmosphere for their shows. Guyute might as well be that approach in song form.
It starts out with a gallivanting chord progression and some screwy lyrics about a pig who does tricks (but wait a minute, what was that about weapons?) and a distractingly pretty theme, before moving into a hilariously corny Riverdance of a melody. Then the band turns the screws, peeling back the skin of the riff until it’s a blood-soaked psycho in a pig mask stabbing you in the chest. The tension builds for an uncomfortably long time, setting up an eruptive release, before the second verse (especially in later versions) drags you right back into the cemetery. Then we’re back where we started, because these are your crowd-pleasing pals in Phish, and they play a happy melody and tell us they hope this happens once again (“this” being murder-by-demonic-pig, but hey, it makes good sing-along).
We’ve talked a lot about the transitions of 93–94 Phish, making the leap from theaters to sheds and arenas, and it’s inescapable that many of their classic standbys are a weird fit for a bigger stage. Ornate sagas like Fluffhead and You Enjoy Myself are not supposed to work for five-figure crowds, and they were written by a band who probably never dreamed of playing their quirky musicological experiments in such an environment. It’s to Phish’s credit that they kept at it and eventually made those songs work just fine, against all odds, in the country’s biggest venues. But it also didn’t hurt to stitch together a more cohesive new epic, one that scripts out and weaponizes some of the light/dark, tension/release extremes that the band was just beginning to explore in its improv. It’s Guyute, and it’s the theme of Fall 94.
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But wait, there’s another debut on 10/7/94, one that didn’t stick around as long, and would appear on paper to be a less significant addition. Phish already played a lot of classic rock covers, and over the past year they had worked on various acoustic bluegrass setups and standards. Combining the two was a genius move, made moreso by the choice of Foreplay/Long Time, a prime cut of 70s rock excess. If Guyute was a Phish song written for the arena, Foreplay/Long Time was quintessential arena rock rewritten as a Phish song.
Most explicitly, the Foreplay/Long Time encore of this show foreshadows the prominent role of bluegrass on the Fall 94 tour, peaking with the week-long “tutorship” of Reverend Jeff Mosier in November. The rearrangement is even a loose callback to Mosier’s last appearance with Phish at Atlanta’s Roxy on 2/21/93, where they played a one-off, uptempo bluegrass version of encore staple Good Times Bad Times. Foreplay/Long Time is an altogether more ambitious reinvention, particularly the first half, which in the original is a baroque organ fantasia. Other than perhaps Uncle Pen, with its extended instrumental passage, none of their prior bluegrass material was anywhere near as technically challenging for their acoustic lineup.
One of the two new roles in that lineup — Mike’s banjo — ably transposes the busy organ of Foreplay, with essential structural backup by Trey as the only member playing his primary instrument. The vocal arrangement is the other clever move, replacing Brad Delp’s irreproducibly high tenor with bluegrass harmonies. There’s no way it should work, but it does, much to the crowd’s delight.
It’s tempting to just lump Foreplay/Long Time in with the a capella Freebird as a goofy lark, but perhaps it also signifies something deeper. Coming up as a college band, playing dorms and frat houses, Phish earned their chops as a cover band, able to play a variety of classic rock favorites. But at this point, their covers have mostly stuck to that protocol, trying to recreate the original instead of reimagine it. Whereas today songs such as Drowned, Rock and Roll, and Golden Age are often improv centerpieces, the band hardly ever jammed out covers in the first decade of their career, opting instead for faithful renditions. The bluegrass Foreplay/Long Time (and, I suppose, Freebird as well) suggest a growing willingness to interpret instead of mimic the classic rock canon — fortuitous timing, as they rehearse their inaugural Halloween costume, basically the ultimate cover band challenge.
More than anything else, the dual debuts of this show reassert the band’s unpredictability and continued growth. While many song debuts are sort of awkward in their unfamiliarity, experiencing both Guyute and Foreplay/Long Time with no warning must have been a total blast. After a tour where the Hoist material nudged them ever so slightly towards behaving like a normal band, this was a refreshing double shot of true Phishy weirdness to kick-start yet another cross-country adventure.