Enter The Trampolines
10/3/95, Seattle, WA, Seattle Center Arena
SET 1: Maze, Guelah Papyrus, Foam, Fast Enough for You, I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome, Free, The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu > The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, Sample in a Jar > You Enjoy Myself
SET 2: Timber (Jerry The Mule) > It's Ice > Sparkle > Harry Hood, Billy Breathes, Faht, Sweet Adeline, Split Open and Melt, The Squirming Coil
ENCORE: Rocky Top
At the end of the first set on the second night in Seattle, one of the tour’s main characters arrives. Supporting the argument that 1995 is the pinnacle of everything Phish had constructed so far, the band’s most iconic and most played song had arguably its best year. You Enjoy Myself technically had its tour debut in California, but like a lot of songs on that Golden State swing, its first time out felt like a dress rehearsal. In Seattle, YEM shows the first glimmers of why it will be a major storyline of the next three months.
This tour contains the longest YEM (on Halloween) and probably the consensus greatest YEM (in Albany). The Seattle version is neither; it clumsily stumbles in from a forced segue out of Sample, and just inches past the 20-minute mark, a gimme duration for YEM by this point. But squint your ears (or your eyes, if you’re watching the full-show video that circulates), and you can hear the early gestational stages of the Albany YEM two months down the road, never mind countless other fan-favorite jams.
The composed section is business as usual, but post-trampoline-routine it steers in a different direction. Rather than leading the charge into the usual YEM funk-rock, Trey swings his guitar to his back and steps up to his new percussion kit for the first time in the show (surprisingly, he doesn’t play it on Free earlier in the set). That puts the spotlight on Page, who moves one hand vertically from his piano to the synthesizer mounted on top, a new toy we heard only sparingly in the summer. Then — Stop The Presses! — Page stands up to concentrate entirely on the synth, and as the meme goes, we get down.
It only lasts about three minutes, before Trey picks his guitar back up and resets the jam into more typical YEM territory, but it’s a sneak peek of where YEM — and eventually other songs — would find new room to expand. Trey’s mini-kit was a strategic decision to get the other band members more involved, and here’s an early payoff, giving Page the freedom to shift the tone rather than just waiting for Trey to steer. Tonight, that exchange of leadership opens up a P-Funk-ish space that feels thrillingly outside of the band’s comfort zone, or at least a brief deviation from the norm. Trey even goes back to his mini-kit a second time in the song during the Bass & Drums segment, and though nothing much comes of it this time around, it signals that he feels the experiment is worth repeating.
Overall, the night is loaded, like its predecessor, with Promising Signs. The ambient space that kicks off the show before winding into Maze and a pleasingly dubby Hood intro (before a stuttering but ultimately satisfying Hood jam) provide flashes of textural progress. There are concise doses of dissonant tangles in Timber and a late Melt, and some good old deep Phishy weirdness in the penultimate performance of Faht — Fishman sitting on a folding chair, plunking out notes on an acoustic while Paul Languedoc fills the Seattle Center Arena with bird noises. As a full show, it’s merely early-tour solid, but you can hear the momentum building.
These are all seeds for future developments, but they’re mostly relearning and condensing tricks they’ve explored over the last couple years. It’s those three minutes in the middle of YEM that feel most prescient. In an infamous breakup quote, Trey said he couldn’t bear the idea of playing You Enjoy Myself every night for the rest of his life, but back in Fall 1995, one of their oldest songs was just starting to find new pockets of life, patient zero for the creativity that will spread to their whole catalog in the coming years.
[Stub from John Stimberis. Still looking for 10/6, if you made it across the border.]