Facing a Waterloo

6/23/95, Stanhope, NJ, Waterloo Village Music Center

Four years before Big Cypress, nine years before Coventry, there was Waterloo. Pretty much every attendee’s account of the day spends as much time on the shitshow getting in as the music itself...what little of it they got to see. The venue, “an extremely dusty fenced-in outdoor field” according to Kevin Shapiro, was on the grounds of a restored 19th-century village with no on-site parking, necessitating a complicated shuttle bus situation that completely collapsed under the crush of Phish fans with and without tickets. The results were grim.

From the phish.net comments:

My first show, and sadly I missed the opener. The venue and lot were about a mile apart, and the shuttle buses they were operating stopped running at some point when the boarding process got out of hand. I'll never forget seeing a state trooper standing on top of one of the buses with a megaphone trying to quell the masses. Most of us just decided to walk, breaking into a sprint as we got closer to the venue and realized the show had already started.

And from friend of the project Jesse Jarnow:

Traffic was a CLUSTERFUCK. Like multiple hours. We ended up parking in a parking lot of some business office plaza just off the highway & following a crowd (over a mile, I think) down an unlit path through the woods. We came into audio range of the venue during the You Enjoy Myself bass solo and finally got through the doors just as the vocal jam and first set was ending.

And from my well-thumbed copy of The Pharmer’s Almanac (Vol. 5):

After you see a guy on a body board with a big blood spot, it’s hard to have a good time. The scene was chaotic. No one had a clue, not the cops or the staff. I walked three miles and missed almost the whole first set...The bus ride on the way back to the auxiliary lots was also an experience, driving on two wheels going around hairpin turns. The bus driver was a heavy metal maiden from hell!

Indeed, a fan named Daniel Malone died outside of this show, likely the first official fatality in the vicinity of a Phish concert. In the same Pharmer’s Almanac, editor Andy Bernstein recounts the tragic circumstances:

With local police refusing to provide instructions or assistance, Malone and many of us were faced with the difficult choice of walking an unknown distance and missing at least half the show (as thousands did — I arrived at the end of the first set despite hitting the off-ramp to the venue a full hour before the scheduled start of the show), or jumping on the back of a car. While Daniel’s decision to do just that was a tragic mistake, it was one made by many that night, and the police made no attempt to stop people or offer an alternative even after the show when they knew of the accident.

The tragedy and chaos in Waterloo were a bummer sign that Phish was back on their home turf, where both demand and expectations were higher. The last time Phish was playing non-holiday-run shows on the east coast, fans were forming “human ladders” to try to get into venues, and 3 hours north of Stanhope in Glens Falls there was a “riot” of ticketless fans outside the doors of Halloween. In the seven months since those events, they had only gotten bigger, further magnified this night by crossing streams with the Dead’s tour (6/23 was a GD off day between Albany and DC). After some serene, half-sold nights in the Rockies, the South, and the Midwest, Phish had returned to the region where they were as huge as any other touring act in 1995. 

I’m not sure how insulated the band would have been from the logistical nightmare offstage, but the show is permeated with anxiety, starting with a nervous squiggle before launching into the opener Simple. The first set’s new songs — Caspian, Free, and Taste — all sound pretty wobbly, particularly in comparison to the thunderous Themes of recent shows. The show doesn’t really find its legs until You Enjoy Myself, maybe because that’s the point where most of the crowd finally arrived. 

The second set starts strong too, and by opening with Jim, teases a return to the dark explorations of last week’s show in Raleigh. But the Jim jam, while long by any pre-Walnut-Creek standards, never manages to escape the song’s gravity, and despite an intriguing interlude after the song’s closing lyrics, Trey pulls the plug and starts up Lizards. From there, it’s a pretty standard second set, the first since Riverport 10 nights ago to not contain an extended stretch of improvisation. 

Instead, the set is anchored by a now-rare Phish event: narration. You could count on a Forbin’s or Harpua every 3 or 4 shows before this year, but the Harpua here is the first and only storytelling opportunity for all of Summer 95, and it’s an unsatisfying representative at that. Trey flips through some of the usual references: the Rhombus (which is nearby), Gamehendge, and a tame take on the Harpua story, which gets up to Jimmy’s record choice: ABBA’s “Waterloo”...get it?

Pitchy vocals aside, I love the idea of Phish covering ABBA, sarcastically or otherwise. But Jimmy/Trey ruins the moment with some rude ABBA slander (“this is really shitty music, ABBA. I hate ABBA!”) and then doubles down by bringing out John Popper. Whatever your opinion on Popper and Blues Traveler, it’s a regressive move for 1995, and it means they never work their way back to the end of Harpua, instead charging through versions of Llama and Good Times Bad Times with a frankly criminal amount of harmonica soloing. It also brings the set to an early close after a paltry 63 minutes, perhaps due to curfew after delaying the start for traffic reasons.

Combined with the bad vibes outside the venue, it’s a pretty off-putting show, the first major stumble on a tour that had been on a steady upward climb up to this point. You may have noticed in the show rating graph from the other day that the back half of this tour was much more up-and-down than the first half — an oddity, given that this part of the itinerary is closer to home base. Perhaps now that they’ve reached the highest tier of venues, the familiar regional relationship between popularity and musical safety has flipped; maybe at this point, they’re more likely to get adventurous in half-filled sheds between the coasts than in front of the juiced expectations of overflowing Northeastern amphitheaters. Just as Waterloo Village and its infrastructure failed to deal with the massive wave of Phish fandom, was the band also ill-prepared?