Dropped Ball

6/6/96, Woodstock, NY, Joyous Lake

SET 1: Split Open and Melt, Poor Heart, Runaway Jim, Funky Bitch, Theme From the Bottom, Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, Scent of a Mule, Highway to Hell

SET 2: AC/DC Bag, You Enjoy Myself, Chalk Dust Torture, Sparkle, Stash, Waste, Character Zero, David Bowie, Fee > Sample in a Jar

ENCORE: Ya Mar, Fire

Unlike the Jazz Fest set, the “Third Ball” show was a more typical way to kick off a Phish calendar year, even taking the usual practice to an extreme. Played at the diminutive Joyous Lake — essentially a house with a bar and stage inside — the surprise show celebrating the completion of Billy Breathes was the smallest Phish show in several years, possibly since they played their final shows at The Front in 1991. With a capacity of about 250 people, it was about 1% of the crowd they had played for at Madison Square Garden five months prior and probably a similarly low percentage of their audience in New Orleans.

For a secret show, it wasn’t very well-kept. My memory is foggy and unconfirmed by the rec.music.phish archive, but I recall the details of this night — Phish playing in a small bar in Woodstock, NY — leaking some time in the afternoon on AOL’s Phish Bowl message board. Anyone with faith in anonymous internet posts and the means of getting upstate on short notice could have made it in, or at least listened from outside; the leaker himself estimated about 300 latecomers stuck around and heard what they could through open windows. 

The lucky few that made it past the doors got the old-school Nectar’s vibe they may have only dreamed of experiencing. It was hot, sticky, and cramped, Paul Languedoc let the tapers patch into the board, Chris Kuroda did what he could with the house lights, and there was a local opening act dubbed, thematically, Juan Hung Low. The vibe was rowdy — you can hear some bro having a meltdown over the quiet intro to Theme From The Bottom — and Phish played to the bar-band ambience with plenty of devil-horns rock, including AC/DC and Hendrix covers and a BBFCFM with Trey on beer bottle slide.

It’s probably folly to interpret the music in this show as anything beyond having a laugh and adapting to the unusual environment, but it does speak to larger themes that would play out over 1996: reversion and indecision. As discussed in the Jazz Fest essay, Phish ended 1995 having fulfilled all of the goals they might have imagined a dozen years ago in Vermont dorm cafeterias, headlining the most famous American venue on the biggest party night of the year while playing arguably the most thrilling and confident music of their career. And when you’ve reached a peak and don’t know where to turn next, one of the cliche rock moves is to go “back to basics.” 

So 1996, Jazz Fest aside, started with a bar gig and then proceeded into a month of opening slots for Santana and tiny clubs in Europe. The Billy Breathes session started out adventurous by tinkering with the song-less, form-less recording of “The Blob,” but moved in its second phase to a more traditional process with the addition of producer Steve Lillywhite, the ringer who had shepherded Phish’s pals Dave Matthews Band to chart success. The end product would be pretty okay, but also trapped unsatisfyingly between two conflicting goals: the mainstream hunger of Hoist and the more communal and experimental songwriting of the future Story of The Ghost. Phish wasn’t sure what to do next, so they ended up deja vuing the past.

The two world debuts of the Third Ball show reflect the safer side of Billy Breathes, previewing two of the new album’s more straightforward songs instead of, say, the abstract soundscapes of Swept Away > Steep or the acoustic delicacies of Talk or Train Song. Waste and Character Zero will go on to get plenty of performances, but neither, I’d argue, are particularly important songs in the Phish catalog. Waste signals a further move to earnest balladry after If I Could and Strange Design, with an added layer of Beatles influence inherited from Halloween ‘94. Zero will act most simply as an excuse for Trey to go Full Hendrix in shows, an impulse that will only grow more stronger for the rest of the 90s.

As for the old songs, the performances are...fine, about what you’d expect for a band that hadn’t played most of them in nearly half a year. Again fitting the throwback mood, the setlist skews towards the early years, with an average song debut in the 80s and Theme the only non-debut representative from the forthcoming LP. The band is playing on stripped-down, partially-borrowed gear; the most interesting sonic element of the show is that Page only plays piano (maybe even a pre-93 electronic keyboard version?), which makes for a unique YEM, if nothing else. The raw power and textural sonics of 1995 don’t get squeezed into an intimate venue, and compared to the small-venue incubations that will take place in Europe and Japan in coming years, it’s a nostalgia trip, not a low-stakes opportunity to innovate.

So while the Third Ball echoes the format of Voters for Choice in 1995 and the Flynn Theatre benefit in 1994, it makes a much limper statement than those special kickoff shows. It will always be fondly remembered — at the time, the Phish fanbase was desperate for new material to trade, and getting a SBD as well was an unexpected blessing. The story of the band playing a rare truly “secret show,” versus a friends and family hangout like next year’s Fourth Ball/Bradstock or TV tapings, also became instant Phish lore, and major bragging rights for those who believed an internet rumor and made it in. But divorced from that context, it’s a pretty generic Phish show with unusually intimate crowd noise, unmoored in time and indecisive in execution. 

[Photos from future nugs.net impresario Brad Serling’s on-scene report, rescued via the Wayback Machine]