SET 1: Cars Trucks Buses, Down with Disease, Wilson > Buried Alive > Poor Heart, Billy Breathes, Mound > Sample in a Jar, It's Ice, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Character Zero
SET 2: Wolfman's Brother, Taste, Train Song, Simple > Swept Away > Steep > Prince Caspian, Run Like an Antelope, The Squirming Coil, Johnny B. Goode
ENCORE: Waste
Was it all just a dream? The coronation at Madison Square Garden, the studio experiments in Bearsville, the awkward month in Europe, the pop-up civilization on a decommissioned Air Force base? The ten months between Phish closing their Fall 95 tour in Lake Placid and opening their Fall 96 tour in the exact same room were, suffice to say, full of career-defining moments. It’s the kind of year you’d expect to change a band, and it did. But you might not have expected it to change them for the worse.
Hold up, I’m not going to spend the next two months piling on a tour that — apart from a couple historic shows, including possibly the most important decision of their entire career — is generally ignored by all the most completist Phish listeners. But fair or no, the circumstances of this show demand a direct 1995-to-1996 comparison, and that head-to-head is a bloodbath. Consider it an opportunity to get it all out of my system right at the starting line, so we can spend the remainder of the tour looking for fresher angles. 1996 defenders, we’ll see you back here tomorrow.
Part of the unfairness of this 95 vs. 96 matchup is because 10/16/96 is that particular rarity in Phish’s live history: a record release show. It wasn’t billed as such, to my knowledge, but Billy Breathes came out the day before, which the band acknowledges by playing a whopping 9 of 13 tracks from their new album. The only songs left out of this wrap party are the already-familiar warhorses of Free and Theme, the acoustic-only Talk, and the brief interstitial Bliss, which wouldn’t get a live debut for another 22 years. Otherwise, the band is eager to break the seal (or that sparkly CD anti-theft sticker that required a blowtorch to remove cleanly) on their latest release, to the overall detriment of the show’s flow.
Now Billy Breathes is a pretty good album, and I say that as a well-publicized hater of Phish’s studio catalog. For the first time since The White Tape, Phish toyed around with the studio as an instrument, while also featuring their most collaborative songwriting to date. As such, it’s probably the most cohesive mood piece Phish ever put down on wax, despite shifting gears midway through recording from a self-produced effort to the more commercial hand of Steve Lillywhite. Where Hoist felt like the band trying on a series of genre costumes, and earlier albums were “here are some clean versions of songs we play live,” Billy Breathes felt like a stew mixed up from the lessons learned in the great leaps forward of 1994 and 1995.
But while Billy Breathes was informed by the band’s live evolution, it curiously did not translate that well back to the stage. Free and Theme had already been battle-tested before audiences, but they grew tamer in 1996, their edges sanded off in the studio. Zero was purpose-built to be a big Hendrix-y flamethrower, but it would take a while to get there; tonight’s version decays quickly into its studio vocal jam outro. Waste and Billy Breathes are lush Beatles/Floyd homages on the LP, but sound too slight in the live setting. The new Caspian intro and outro are just a weaker dry run for Piper’s repetitive trance. And the band is completely stumped on how to translate the experimental Swept Away > Steep — the most exciting segment of the album, and the sole surviving chunk of The Blob — to the stage, resorting to the cheap dramatics of a bloodcurdling MFMF-like scream in Lake Placid.
These struggles will last the entire fall tour, and the density of Billy Breathes material in the opener compounds the problem. It also contributes to 10/16/96 being “song-y” in all the wrong ways, a shuffled playlist with no real flow or momentum. Even the older songs thrown between the Billy Breathers are head-scratchers: Wilson and Buried Alive appearing mid-set like they’re trying to jolt it awake, Horse > Silent in a show that already has slow jams to spare, nothing with any improvisational teeth between the second song Disease and Simple, halfway through the second set.
That Simple is by far the most interesting song of the night, foreshadowing that it will be one of the top-tier jam vehicles for the rest of the year. But a large span of its 16 minutes are spent with Trey on his percussion kit, with Page switching between organ and piano to try to keep it afloat, unconvincingly. It’s an example of the mini-kit as momentum-killer, and more broadly, of Trey’s well-meaning but wrong-footed attempt at forcing band democracy. That it occurs just two weeks before the Halloween that would finally set that mission on the right track is all the more frustrating.
Overall, the most jarring change when jumping straight from Lake Placid ‘95 to ‘96 is the lost sense of confidence. The triumph of December 1995 is a unique Phish peak, in that it’s not really fueled by a new experimental direction or creative breakthrough. Instead, it’s Phish at its most fully realized, playing with absolute belief in themselves and a swagger that pours out of the speakers, even 25 years later. Those ‘95 Lake Placid shows might be a step back from the highs of the month, but the energy of the room still crackles, while ‘96 just sounds…sleepy.
The previous year’s bravado is distinctly absent in their return to the site of the Miracle on Ice. Maybe it’s just that it’s a tour opener rather than closer, maybe it’s the flood of new-ish material, maybe it’s the understandable indecisiveness of where to go next after the achievement of so many career goals. But from my prior experience listening to Fall ‘96, I know it’s a cloud that will hang over the entire next two months. And yet, the evidence suggests that the water-treading of 1996 had to happen for the band to find new peaks for the rest of the decade. So now that we’ve described that cloud, let’s try to focus on the rays of sunlight peeking through.
excellent analysis as always...