Face in the Crowd
8/10/96, East Troy, WI, Alpine Valley Music Theatre
SET 1: My Friend, My Friend, Poor Heart > AC/DC Bag > Fee > Reba, I Didn't Know, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Rift > Bathtub Gin, Cavern
SET 2: Wilson > Down with Disease > Scent of a Mule, Free, Fluffhead, Hold Your Head Up > Whipping Post > Hold Your Head Up, Harry Hood > A Day in the Life
ENCORE: Contact > Fire
Thus far, this entire project has been based on secondhand knowledge. I do my best to imagine the experience of being there from the tapes, the photos, the reviews in my beaten-up old Pharmer’s Almanac or or on phish.net, the memories graciously shared by readers, and anything else I can find. But 8/10/96 marks a shift. Because ladies and gentlemen and non-binary readers, for the first time, [electro beat fades in] I was there.
Turns out a lot of people were. I’ve met a bunch of midwestern Phish fans who saw their first show on 8/10/96, which makes sense from a pure numbers and historical standpoint. The mammoth Alpine Valley, capacity 37,000, was the largest venue that Phish had ever headlined, and it would hold the record for largest Phish audience for precisely six days. Its location was also significant, given that the Midwest had lagged behind their homebase of New England in accumulating fans, with the band still playing theatres in the middle states while they moved to sheds on the East Coast. If you were a fan in the great expanse between Colorado and Indiana who discovered Phish via A Live One and you weren’t quick enough to catch a Fall 95 show, this was your big (and only summer) chance to make your debut.
Even though it was my first show, I was far from a babe in the Wisconsin woods. I only got into Phish in the early fall of 1995, but I fell for them hard, and I amassed tapes as quickly as my AOL connection to r.m.p. and the U.S. Postal Service would allow. So by the time I actually saw them in the flesh, I was already past the “what the hell are these dorks doing!?!” stage of Phish-watching. In fact, I may have already been approaching “jaded vet” status right from the start, having been educated via a steady diet of scorching Fall 95 tapes in addition to the most treasured, and thus most easily accessible, shows of prior years.
With that background going in, I had the perspective to know that my first show was not an instant classic, though neither was it a dud. I’ve listened to the tapes plenty of times, but that’s more for nostalgic reasons than musical. It has elegant versions of Reba and Hood (with the chant already enshrined), a very rare Fishman song (plus two vacuum solos), and a setlist full of crowd favorites that comprehensively covers their entire history. It’s far from the best show I’ve seen, but also just about a perfect first show for someone desperate to digest the totality of the Phish experience.
My specific memories of the show are actually pretty foggy; since I’ve been to a number of Phish Alpine dates, they tend to blur together. I know I was in awe of the absolute size of the venue and crowd. I had been to big amphitheater concerts before (though mostly in the gravel lots and boomy acoustics of Tinley Park’s World Music Theatre), but Alpine Valley was another level up. I was in the pavilion, but had to walk down that infamously steep lawn to get to my seats, then back up past countless sore-legged, passed-out fans at the end. I sat in the lot for seemingly hours afterwards, cursing Alpine Valley’s inadequate traffic flow for the first time of many. Phish already felt to me like the biggest band in the world, and this encounter just confirmed it.
Listening back and coming to 8/10/96 in its proper chronological order, it feels like Phish had a similar reaction to Alpine, in a summer where they were grappling every night of the US tour with their newfound scale. After a week at Red Rocks where their enlarged fame and size meant ill-fitting discomfort, it must have been a relief to play a venue that they could still grow into. It’s a bit of a Phish primer show, but it’s also one that’s now comfortable with a paying audience the size of a suburban town.
Faced with that steep wall of people extending high above the wooden pavilion roof, they haul out all the tricks that will sound or look amazing with a huge crowd: the Wilson chant, the Contact arm-wave, anthems such as Disease and Free, weird songs with big finishes such as Fluffhead and Cavern, and — lest things get too serious — a piss-take of an Allman Brothers cover with a few extra rounds of HYHU torture. After facing up to being too big for Red Rocks, Alpine was an opportunity to revert back to their earlier aw-shucks energy: You mean, we can really get away with all our usual hijinks in this enormous, storied rock destination?
I didn’t need convincing. I wasn’t quite bold enough yet to go to multiple shows, never mind that weird festival they were throwing the following weekend. but I was already aligning the fall dates in my mind with potential college visits. It was the last piece of the puzzle for my nearly-complete obsession, less a conversion moment than a confirmation that yeah, this was probably my new favorite band. Maybe not for the next 25 years or anything, don’t be silly...
[Bonus content: Read my rec.music.phish review from the day after the show. Pardon the lack of capitalization, it was a 90s thing, man.]