Confidence Art
11/30/94, Olympia WA, Campus Recreation Center, Evergreen State College
The Fall 94 tour can be fairly neatly sliced into three parts. It almost perfectly lines up with the calendar and the map: Part 1 consisting of October’s run through the South and up the East Coast, actually ending November 4th in Syracuse; Part 2 tracing a Family Circus dotted line around the Midwest for the bulk of November; and Part 3, starting right here in the Pacific Northwest. For the final 11 nights and 10 shows of the tour, Phish will zip down the West Coast, and a new stylistic chapter will unfold.
If October was about Phish outgrowing its past and November was about the band probing aggressively for its future, December 1994 is the Ghost of Phish Present. It’s meaningful that 5 of 12 A Live One tracks were drawn from shows this month. They’re not the most exploratory tracks on the record, but when the band wanted to show the world what the could do best at the end of 1994, they pulled from December more than any other page on the calendar.
Small wonder, since this is the final stretch of an insane touring year that found Phish playing 124 shows in 111 different venues; the most, in both categories, than any other year for which we have full access. By the end of this packed touring schedule, they were as well-oiled and razor-sharp as they’d ever be, a mutant lifeform of four brains and sixteen limbs capable of operating in astonishing synchrony. In November, they perversely tried to undercut this peak condition by intensively studying a new genre and pushing their improvisational boundaries. But for the year’s final month, they eased off the homework and just let it fly.
The Phish that shows up in Olympia after a couple thousand miles of travel in the last four days is oozing confidence. Composed parts are played at high speed and flub-free, and while there’s no one centerpiece jam to stack up against their Midwestern excursions, inventive pieces of improv crop up in unexpected places. It’s not a complete break from the two months of shows that preceded it — there’s a bluegrass mini-set and a Vibration of Life, natch — but there are a few different signs that the band is entering their West Coast jaunt with swagger to spare.
Quiet: Over the course of this tour, Phish has been growing into their new arena-rock form, even as they remain restricted, in most cities, to theaters. Part of that transition is, of course, the sound getting bigger and louder. Which makes the true confidence move the exact opposite: possessing the bravery to play quiet, or even not at all. The Campus Recreation Center of Evergreen State College isn’t exactly Madison Square Garden, but it’s still ballsy how often they force the crowd to listen closely, from the eerie ending to My Friend My Friend (three songs into the show) to the elongated, snoring pause in My Sweet One to the lengthy near-silent jams in Ya Mar and McGrupp.
Segues: Oh my, the segues in this second set. A few shows backed we marveled at The Mango Song -> Weekapaug transition at UIC Pavilion, and here we have a handful of transitions of equivalent difficulty and skill. The way Antelope navigates in and out of My Sweet One and Fixin’ To Die is the best demonstration yet of how Phish has incorporated their bluegrass studies into their overall sound; no acoustic instruments necessary. The jazzy transition into Ya Mar is only outdone by the magic trick of Trey transforming the song’s final lick into the Mike’s Song riff — it’s close-up street magic, Phish style. Only a band that has played together, almost continuously, for six of the last eight months could make this level of telepathy look so effortless.
Rule-Breaking: This show has almost as many “unfinished’ show notes as that 1996 Amsterdam gig where they got too high to remember what they were playing multiple times. And that doesn’t even account for a dangling Mike’s Song, conspicuously missing its Weekapaug. At a time when Phish was still falling back on proven formulas more often than not, it’s an encouraging sign that they’re having so much fun they leave multiple T’s uncrossed. Why force in a “rye rye Rocco” when the set’s momentum calls for Ya Mar instead? Cavern instead of Weekapaug might not be my preference, but I’m all for keeping the crowd guessing and the setlists fresh.
All these flourishes, subtle as they may be in the wake of monumental 30 or 40-minute jams, are symptoms of a band that is exceptionally comfortable and confident. As the list of remaining 1994 shows grows shorter, 1995 is becoming visible on the horizon, and confidence is definitely one of the keywords for why that year is generally considered a (though apparently not the) career peak. It’s a shorter thematic leap between the hefty jams of November 1994 and Summer 1995, but 11/30 and the December run it prologues might just be a preview of what made the following year’s final month so legendary.