Complaint Hotline
11/15/95, Tampa, FL, Sun Dome, University of South Florida
SET 1: Poor Heart > AC/DC Bag > Fast Enough for You, Rift > Prince Caspian > Sparkle > Split Open and Melt, Sweet Adeline, The Squirming Coil
SET 2: Wilson > Theme From the Bottom > Scent of a Mule > Mike's Song > Life on Mars? > Weekapaug Groove, Fee, While My Guitar Gently Weeps
ENCORE: Suzy Greenberg
What’s this? A relatively routine show in the midst of one of Phish’s great tours? The mid-November campus tour of Florida — the kind of college visit scam you pitch your parents when you’re conspiring for a mini-vacation in high school — moves from Central to South today, inhabiting another white-roofed mini-dome and playing a pretty OK show, with one notable jam. So let’s take this rare moment of quietude to get in a holiday season tradition early: let’s Air Some Grievances.
Mind you, these aren’t necessarily my objections, but rather the few negative takes you hear about Fall 95, which I agree/disagree with to varying degrees. As I’ve said before, this tour was the first I followed from afar, logging into rec.music.phish each morning to get the setlist and the early first-person accounts from those lucky enough to be on the road. As with any Phish tour, there were complaints, even while a legendary tour was being assembled before our eyes. And like most Phish complaints, they stem from a place of privilege, taking aim at annoyances that would likely be perfectly tolerable if, like a normal person, you only saw or listened to one show that year. But they’ve stuck around, perhaps because all those (lovable) jaded vets from 95 are still around today. Most of these quibbles appear in this particular show, so let’s break them down on a night where not much else of note occurs...that’s not often going to be the case going forward.
The Mule Duel
Scent of a Mule was played 15 times in Fall 95 — equal to Hoist-mate Julius and far behind Sample — but it feels like it so much more. That’s owing to the “Mule Duel,” the middle section which finally replaced a Page solo back in September. In case you’re blissfully unaware of it, the Duel starts with a Page solo, which is picked up by Trey and cross-examined, then handed back to Page for the final word before the klezmer bit brings the song back in.
The Duel will eventually go some interesting places, most notably in 3.0 when Fish seizes it as a showcase for his sorely underused Marimba Lumina, but for now it almost always goes just one place: Trey singing the same notes he is playing on his guitar, one of my least favorite Phish tropes. I’m sympathetic to the Mule Duel as another way to bring Page out of his shell, but other tricks of this tour (see below) are doing that much more organically, and particularly in a show like this one that also contains a Coil solo, it can be redundant. However, the biggest problem with the Mule Duel is just plain real estate: at an average of 13 minutes this tour and almost always appearing in the second set (like this one, which also has woo-ing for added insult), it’s taking up valuable time best spent elsewhere.
The Mini-Kit
The very act of Trey putting aside his guitar for another instrument (Fish songs excluded) was pure heresy to many Phish fans in 1995. It’s akin to Michael Jordan playing baseball. But Trey’s motivations were pure; by sitting back and contributing to the rhythmic structure of a jam, he forced Page and Mike to take the wheel and play more aggressively at a time where that was not their first instinct. I think I tolerate the mini-kit more than most — I like how it gives the Free jam a unique flavor, and there are times when its intended purpose pays dividends, such as yesterday’s Mike-led detour into Manteca. Plus, Trey just looks so happy playing it.
For me, it’s not so much the existence of the percussion kit that’s frustrating as it is the frequency with which Trey turns to it. Already this tour, it has become a regular feature in Simple and YEM as well, and nearly every extended jam finds Trey drifting that way for at least a minute or two. Most of the time, the switch saps the momentum of the jam and forces the band to tread water; it could just be an AUD recording effect, but Trey almost always seems to play the same tik-tok pattern every time, confining the music instead of expanding it. Tonight, that happens at the start of the Mike’s second jam, a dull stretch from 8:15 to 10:30 that only takes off into more compelling atmospheric space once Trey puts the drumsticks down.
Strange Design
One that skipped this show is the now-ubiquitous Strange Design landing ballad, though it did appear in that role last night after the monumental Stash. Now, I like Strange Design, and in the early days of Phish Twitter I was surprised to discover that was a minority view. But I also wasn’t hearing shows as frequently in 1995, the song’s apex, and now that I’m going show by show...yeah, it can go on the shelf for a while.
The song itself is still, uh, fine, it’s the predictability of its appearances that is starting to wear thin. Phish, at this point, has a lot of great ballads: If I Could, Fast Enough For You, even Lifeboy are all circulating. But for some reason, when the band needs a breather, Trey relentlessly calls for Strange Design, you can almost set your watch by it. Maybe I should just look at it as a trailing indicator of a must-hear jam — if you worked your way through the Strange Design performance chart and just listened to the song before it, you’d catch the Deer Creek Reba, the Jones Beach Bowie, the Fox YEM, and a whole bunch of other excellent moments. But still, guys, mix it up a little.
The Cover Zone
Admittedly, this one may be entirely my hang-up, it’s not one I’ve noticed on any iteration of Phish online discussion. And doubly admittedly, it is the tiniest of complaints; among many other things, Phish is the World’s Greatest Cover Band, and I would never begrudge them the decision to dip into other band’s greatest hits (I find the occasional petulant 3.0 no-covers run to be kind of pointless handicapping, to be honest). Nevertheless, I can’t help but noticing that these 95 shows almost always end up on the classic rock dial at the end: WMGGW tonight, the prolonged Immigrant Song jam in the middle of last night’s YEM, or the shuffled playlist at the end of Fox night 3.
I think this phenomenon is pretty clearly a case of Phish stealing valor from their heroes’ songs because they don’t trust their own stuff to give a big crowd the big finish it deserves. In the future, a lot of these slots will be filled by Character Zero or Down with Disease (when they remember it exists) or other originals that hit that euphoric climax nerve, but for now they’re more comfortable with Trey almost perfectly mimicking the Clapton solo in WMGGW — an impressive feat, over a year after he learned it, but still a costume nonetheless. It’s not so much a grievance as a constructive note, 25 years too late: Phish, my dudes, don’t sweat it, you got this.
[Ticket stub from Steve Bekkala.]