Fake It, Make It

12/30/94, New York, NY, Madison Square Garden

Here are some of the other musical acts that headlined Madison Square Garden in 1994: Barbara Streisand, Phil Collins, Aerosmith, Robert Plant & Jimmy Page, Nine Inch Nails, Eric Clapton, ZZ Top, Rush, Melissa Etheridge...and the Grateful Dead. 

Here are some of the musical acts that played the Late Show with David Letterman in December 1994: Toad the Wet Sprocket, Prince, Stone Temple Pilots, Tony Bennett, Aaron Neville, Mary J. Blige, Bad Religion, Willie Nelson, Big Head Todd & The Monsters...and Darlene Love, naturally.

That Phish would put themselves among this company is ambitious, to say the least. These are artists that had already been successful for decades or had recently topped the charts. Phish was neither. Hoist had peaked at #34 two weeks after its release, and disappeared from the charts by mid-summer. Down With Disease got one spot higher, to #33 on the “Mainstream Rock” chart, but was gone in a month. And yet they booked, and sold out, the “World’s Most Famous Arena” the night before New Year’s Eve, a feat that no doubt attracted the attention of Late Show bookers.

The resulting double shift on December 30th would introduce Phish to more people than ever before. Not just that night, to the few million watching Letterman on a Friday and the 20,000 fans and curious onlookers crammed into MSG. But for decades to come; Jesse Jarnow reminded me that the A Live One Wilson, played on this night, has become the stadium theme music of multiple Wilsons in sports, meaning it is routinely heard by tens of thousands of people, if only subliminally. 

But before that moment, Phish had to haul their gear one mile uptown to the Ed Sullivan Theater after soundcheck for the first of eight appearances the band would make on Letterman. The other guests that night were Jerry Seinfeld at the peak of his TV show’s popularity, and comedian Dave Atell. Letterman offers to drive them back to Vermont after the show, and holds up Hoist backwards. The band celebrates its broadcast television debut in their traditional fashion: by committing sartorial crimes. Trey wears gold pants and the gigantic-sleeved black t-shirt from Halloween. Page wears a silver blouse, Mike wears a vest, and Fish adds a red long-sleeve beneath his dress for national TV modesty, which only makes him look pervier. Phish, ever unpredictable and commercially self-destructive, play a song from two albums back instead of the one they’re there theoretically to promote. 

The Chalkdust itself is pretty hot, though disorientingly compressed — there’s no space before each line of lyric, so it feels even more nail-bitingly anxious than usual. There’s an accidental compliment to Phish’s democracy when the camera zooms in on Page instead of Trey during the guitar solo; apparently, they’re all playing so hard, the director didn’t know who to focus on. Paul Shaffer adds organ, and his contributions aren’t much more than what Page can do with his left hand under normal circumstances, but it’s at least a more natural blend than when he and the “World’s Most Dangerous Band” accompanied Sonic Youth.

The most interesting thing about this appearance might just be that they didn’t play the obvious choices of Sample or Disease. Reaching back to pull out Chalkdust might not have been Elektra’s preference, and it may have been played at Letterman’s personal request, but either way it was kinda savvy. They have nearly four years experience playing the song at this point, and it’s a solid rocker that won’t scare off the folks at home, provided they don’t listen too hard to the flagons and vasoconstrictors of the lyrics. But it’s also a nice subtle statement of defiance to those in the know — Phish didn’t make it to Letterman on the back of a sudden radio hit, but on the foundation of a slowly-assembled catalog that’s all deep cuts to the uninitiated. So why not just play what feels right.

Later that night, they bring the same cheerful refusal to compromise to Madison Square Garden. Their first of many, many performances on top of Penn Station isn’t highly-regarded, either now or then — most of the reviews on rec.music.phish that week were bummed that it didn’t build upon the promise of the previous night in Providence. The band is clearly a bit tight, in the nervous sense of the word, and they show it by playing a first set almost entirely made up of openers and closers like they’re afraid to settle in. 

But you can’t say they don’t dance with the one that brung ‘em. The second set features a Tweezer that’s right in line with its Fall 94 versions, adventurous and inconsistent, without the highlights or storytelling of the previous night’s Bowie...but that’s an unfair standard. There’s a song in the bluegrass setup, and a stately YEM that unspools patiently. But I think it’s most crucial that they let Fish do his thing, with an appropriately epic Purple Rain. I almost wish they had played the dang Big Ball Jam, just to underline the absurdity of headlining such a storied room without sacrificing any of their essential quirkiness. 

So it’s apropos that this long day begat the ALO Wilson, a performance that, more than anything else, celebrates that Phish had reached this lofty level without compromise. Here is a band with no hits that can sell out one of the world’s legendary concert venues and, just by playing the same note four times, can make 20,000 people yell a fictional evil dictator’s name. Here is a song from a nonsensical fantasy world rock opera that includes a lyric just outright listing off Trey and Tom Marshall’s college buddies, and it sounds like the most transcendent arena rock, recorded on the same stage as The Song Remains The Same. Now, improbably, it gets played and chanted along to in baseball and football stadiums whenever a player named Wilson does something good. It’s an apt symbol of how Phish got to Madison Square Garden by their own path, and they’d continue to do so, 62 times and counting.