Devil Horns

12/2/95, New Haven, CT, New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum

SET 1: Prince Caspian, Runaway Jim, Mound > Guelah Papyrus, Reba, My Sweet One, Free, Taste That Surrounds, Bouncing Around the Room, Possum

SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Maze > Simple -> Faht, Tweezer > A Day in the Life > Golgi Apparatus, The Squirming Coil, Tweezer Reprise

ENCORE: Bold As Love

Listen on phish.in

If you knew nothing of Phish and saw the above photo of the band, or this one, or this one, would you call them hippies? I think you’d be far more likely to peg them as a different kind of burnout, metal-lovin’ longhairs hanging out with their token clean-cut friend down by the ol’ milk factory, up to no good. By all accounts, Trey was still more of a Zeppelin guy than a Dead guy until it all clicked (with some pharmaceutical assistance) watching the Hartford show that would become Dick’s Picks 6. Fish drew from similar early-age inspiration — ”Led Zeppelin is the reason I play music today, and Bonham was the fire under my seven-year-old ass,” he told Richard Gehr in The Phish Book.

Zeppelin is more proto-metal than metal-metal, of course, and I can’t find any references to Phish repping Iron Maiden or Dokken or the NWOBHM. But I have a hunch that Trey and Fish and maybe Mike did dabble a little in the devil horns. For one, by the early 80s, their beloved prog-rock had mostly retreated to the metal scene, the only genre that could handle, without irony, rock operas and albums with overtures and songs with multiple movements and time signatures. For two, Phish liked to play fast, and you could imagine Trey at least admiring the lightning riffage of Motörhead or Judas Priest.

If a metal influence exists, it doesn’t seep into too many Phish songs, Big Black Furry Creatures From Mars and Fuck Your Face — both Gordo compositions  — being the exceptions. But as 1995 progressed, the room got heavier and heavier, no doubt a symptom of studying another primary ancestor of hard rock and metal, The Who. The band’s Zeppelin obsession also crept back in to feed the flames further, as barely a show has gone by in the last month without a tease of “The Rover” or “No Quarter” somewhere in the setlist notes. 

The fuse of that trend hits powder in tonight’s Tweezer, which in my opinion is the heaviest, metal-est jam Phish ever played. There’s a certain kind of Phish fan that just wants to watch the band shred at high speed, and I wouldn’t normally count myself among their numbers, but this Tweezer never fails to get my heart racing to an alarming degree. It’s the exact opposite of the exploratory Tweezers that usually top the fanbase list of favorites, never really deviating from the parameters of a Type I Tweezer jam but cranking those ingredients, appropriately enough, to 11. 

The great Phish jams are typically four-way conversations, but this one is all The Trey & Fish Show, with Mike and Page hanging on to the fender for dear life. It feels like possibly the final phase of Fish’s sentence for the Landover Rift fiasco, the drummer finally fighting back after Trey has intermittently needled him with insane tempos over the last two weeks. It turns from playful jousting to something far more diabolical somewhere around 7:15 (of the video with SBD sound, which I highly recommend for maximum wattage).

There, the extra kick drum pattern added by Fishman nudges Trey into an evil trance, you can see his robotic side-to-side rock transform quickly into head-banging. Fish lets out a little “woo” at 7:59, and from there the staring contest is on: whose white knuckles will lose their grip first. Trey starts playing some dark, mystical snake-charmer scales, Kuroda’s color palette starts going nuts like a vomiting rainbow, the crowd starts speaking in tongues. Fishman’s fills begin to resemble cries for help, but he doesn’t give in until Trey switches to chords at 11:45. Nevertheless, they’re both playing possum, as it snaps right back down the roller coaster hill 20 seconds later, the moment that never fails to make me laugh in amazement. 

Finally, at 12:35 it lets up by almost teasing “The Rover,” then, in a weird trance state, takes another swing at “Take Me To The River,” a premonition that beyond the limits of Phish’s current peak, the Talking Heads offer a new path forward. It’s an absolutely absurd 15 minutes of Phish, teed up by, of all things, the final performance of Faht, Fishman’s solo acoustic guitar and sound effects rumination, and landing in The Beatles’ exploration of crescendo, A Day In The Life. 

To be frank, this show does not have the overall consistency of the last two nights, probably why it breaks our two-show LivePhish SBD streak. But the Tweezer alone is enough to keep this show from being a letdown in the December 95 lineup, occupying as it does one of the primary destinations of the band’s evolution over the course of this year, if not career, so far. There will never be a time, to my admittedly incomplete knowledge, when they will rock harder, or will sound more like a band that wears leather, puts backwards messages on their records, and brings a giant demon puppet on tour. That might not be the main point of Phish, but it’s a Satanic streak that, in 1995 especially, should be ignored at your peril.

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]