Flop Sweat
11/22/95, Landover, MD, USAir Arena
SET 1: Cars Trucks Buses, Wilson > Run Like an Antelope, Fluffhead, Uncle Pen, Cavern > Taste That Surrounds, The Lizards, Sample in a Jar, Sweet Adeline
SET 2: Rift, Free -> Llama, Bouncing Around the Room, You Enjoy Myself, Strange Design
ENCORE: Poor Heart, Frankenstein
Layered beneath the musical narrative of each tour is a venue narrative, the progression of stages Phish performed on as they criss-crossed the country. The period from 1993 to 1995 provides the most twisty-turny plotlines as the regional differences in Phish’s popularity swung them crazily from clubs to theaters to arenas to sheds, sometimes in the space of the same month. Before 1993, Phish would play anywhere that would have them. From 1996 on, they generally played the largest room available in each market. But in between, there was plenty of venue whiplash.
Fall 94 was a Benjamin Button tour, the band’s status evolving in reverse as they traveled from East Coast college basketball arenas through Midwest theaters to high school gyms on the West Coast. Fall 1995 provided a more satisfying easterly build from modest venues in September to the iconic rock arenas of the Northeast by December. This week feels like they’ve finally entered this final phase, with Phish making their debuts at Maryland’s Capital Centre (sporting its late-era product placement name) and Hampton Coliseum, before a slight jog back inland to less-historic venues until December’s victory lap.
Today, the demolished-in-2002 Capital Centre might not have the rep of Hampton, but it was a storied stop in the heyday of classic rock: it was opened by the Allman Brothers Band, The Who played Quadrophenia there in 1973, Springsteen, AC/DC, the Stones, Zeppelin, Van Halen; you name it, they played it. The Dead performed there 26 times, and perhaps most importantly, Heavy Metal Parking Lot was filmed there before a 1986 Judas Priest/Dokken double bill.
So Phish made their debut at the Cap on Thanksgiving Eve, an ideal night for a concert in non-pandemic years, and they...kinda bombed. It’s as sloppy a show as I’ve heard on this project, with big screw-ups in Taste That Surrounds and Cavern in the first set and a Rift that gets the plug pulled after only a minute. Trey blames it on Fish — it doesn’t sound like he’s joking — and then launches into an out-of-nowhere half-hour expansion of Free that provides mixed results at best. It reminds me of the 7/24/99 Fluffhead, another show where the band isn’t clicking for one reason or another so they try to jam through it on an unlikely song.
But from another angle, the Cap show is also a triumph, because for all the stumbles Phish sounds at home in a massive sports arena. It might just be a trick of the tape, but they don’t feel overmatched in the same way that they did last time they played an NBA homecourt, the Palace show on 10/28. The anthemic setlist choices of the first set work great when the band isn’t goofing up; I especially enjoyed the way Trey’s delayed notes ping around the rafters before the Clod section of Fluffhead, or how the Lizards coda inflates to fill the saddle-shaped room. The crowd, not a sellout but seemingly quite robust, is absolutely onboard too, lustily participating in the Wilson chant, cheering even Trey’s “we’ll be back in 15 minutes” announcement (?), and doing a supportive clap-along when the Free jam is at its most aimless.
Even that Free, in its flawed way, fits the storied environment. If Trey’s punishment for Fish was sentencing him to play the relatively elementary Free drumbeat for 10 minutes, it still sounds great in those arena acoustics, even when the mini-kit layers in. The jam is invaded by the ghost of Zeppelin (lots of “No Quarter” teases) and like a lot of post-Halloween improvisations, feels vaguely Who-ish in several places, both nods to the Cap’s place in rock history. And while it takes forever to get there, the passage from around 24:45 to 30:10 is some prime Fall 95-ing, finding a gentle TMWSIY-ish motif (initially over the Bouncin’ drum pattern) and escalating it to a windmilling finale.
So like the Palace show, it’s another mismatch as Phish levels up. In this case, the ingredients are all there: Paul Languedoc has figured out the arena soundscape, the band is picking the proper songs for a charged-up crowd, there’s room for both tightly-scripted epics and completely open improvisation. But for reasons lost to history, Phish found themselves on shaky footing, producing an uncharacteristically off-kilter performance, particularly for pre-Betty Ford Clinic times. The concurrent venue and musical narratives of Fall 95 haven’t yet aligned, but it won’t be long now.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]