Devil Horns Pt. 2: The Hornening

12/1/96, Los Angeles, CA, Pauley Pavilion

SET 1: Peaches en Regalia > Poor Heart > Cavern > Cars Trucks Buses, Character Zero, The Curtain > Down with Disease, Train Song, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Sample in a Jar > Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Tweezer > Sparkle > Simple -> A Day in the Life, Reba, Swept Away > Steep > Tweezer Reprise > Johnny B. Goode > Slave to the Traffic Light

ENCORE: Highway to Hell

For some reason, I keep coming across the phrase “history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes” lately. It’s usually attributed to Mark Twain, and though it probably wasn’t him, it fits his brand of folksy wisdom that newspaper columnists and graduation speechmakers can’t resist. Like most stock quotes, it’s overused because it’s true: almost everything moves in inexact cycles, from the stock market and politics to sports results and viral outbreaks. Think about it too hard, and you’ll drown in deja vu.

The same phenomenon applies to Phish tours. In 1995, Phish dug into their final stretch of shows by playing an incendiary Tweezer in New Haven on December 2nd. 365 days later (1996 was a leap year), Phish gave Tweezer the hard rock treatment once again, this time on the other side of the country (it rhymes, not repeats). Both Tweezers are better suited for head-banging than wiggly dances and twirls, both feature bags of Trey riffage, Fish extemporizations, and a unique take on the classic slow-down ending.

But it’s the year-over-year differences that are most interesting. The 1995 version felt like the pinnacle of a drag-race Trey and Fish had been waging all that tour, as well as Phish’s aspirations to shrug off their inherent dorkiness and rock as hard as their idols in The Who and Zeppelin. If I may quote myself:

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.

While it gets nearly as heavy, 1996’s early December Tweezer doesn’t feel like a climax, it feels like a deconstruction. The previous year was something of a two-man show, though it’s two musicians completely in sync, even while they are engaged in a dick-measuring contest. Tonight’s Tweezer is more of a full-band operation, but at times it feels as chaotic as a four-way street. It’s slinky at first, but some time around where Trey starts scatting along with his guitar (8:15ish), it takes a turn. Instead of 1995’s speed run, the rhythm kind of lurches along, as Trey unwinds from funk licks to fearsome tones, Page starts hitting dissonant chords, Mike forces minor keys, and Fishman hoots and hollers. It’s a couple minutes of Phish-style free jazz, snuffed when Trey moves to percussion kit. 

It’s after this segment where the family resemblance is strongest. Trey finds a true Riki Rachtman of a riff at 15:05, and all four of them sync up and spend the next five minutes on it, eventually giving it a verrrry slow classic Tweezer wind-down (where 12/2/95 unwound “Take Me To The River” for a mere two minutes). Instead of speed-metal, it’s on the sludge side of the very branchy heavy metal genetic lineage. It ends, appropriately, in devilish laughter, and then Sparkle, the inverse tempo exercise.

What can be learned from this head-to-head Tweezer comparison? Well, the obvious takeaway is that these are two bands at very different phases of a cycle much longer than one year. I’ve said it a hundred times, but Fall ‘95 was Phish realizing its fullest version of itself thus far, while ‘96 is them deciding what to do next. Some clues to that future have emerged over the course of this year, but they can’t really move on until they blow up what they’ve already built. The 12/1/96 Tweezer is a funeral pyre for the Tweezer of the year before — an anarchic refutation, followed by a slow-motion battle-axing. It’s yet another cycle, one of destruction and rebirth.