For a Grand Total of 73,294 Days

Fall Tour 2014, Halloween, and the Future

I. Phish is Dying

Everyone gets older; it’s inevitable. The funny thing is you don’t notice the ceaseless drumbeat of time until it crosses a threshold. One morning, those few isolated gray hairs turn into silver temples, the occasional soreness becomes chronic back pain, a couple extra pounds turns into a beer belly. You’re only slightly closer to death than you were the day before, but somehow it feels like you’ve made a big, rather frightening leap forward.

One way we try to forget we’re on this moving walkway to mortality is music, rock music in particular, which time machines us back to youth for a few hours. That’s the siren song of nostalgia, a tendency to retreat too deeply into these safe spaces rather than enjoy the present and keep growing even as time runs shorter and shorter.

This danger applies in equal measure to people and artists. Just as it’s all too easy for us to stop following new music and keep queueing up the old favorites, the path of least resistance for a band is to fall back on their old material and give the people what they want — in this case, that potent dose of the past. But musicians get old too (if they don’t have the decency to burn out early), and less capable of replicating the things they did when they were younger, adding a growing note of bitterness to everyone’s nostalgia fix.

This fall, the big question of the Phish community was “What happened to Phish/Trey?” The flaws are well documented: ragged song performances, clunky transitions, jams that dwindled away to nothing, choppy set flow, even some light on-stage passive-aggressive bickering. Everyone had a theory, some more irresponsible than others, all based on scant evidence and armchair psychiatric observation of body language and mp3s.

In the cloud of all this speculation, there’s an Occam’s razor solution: Phish is getting old. One of the few undeniable facts this fall is that it’s Trey’s first tour as a 50-year-old, and by the end of next year the entire band will have joined him and Page in their sixth decade of life. They’ve continued to defy the aging curve; it’s not hard to argue that 2013 was one of the finest, most accomplished years in their career, whether you’re into deep improv, new material, or sentimental moments. But in the end, time always wins.

It’s not discussed often enough, but the physical demands of playing Phish songs are immense. It’s not easy for 50-year-old fingers to play what 20-year-old fingers wrote, to play the waterfalls of notes that used to cap a triumphant segment of improvisation, or maintain the sustained endurance needed to kick a jam into another gear towards the end of the night’s second 80-minute set. That we notice it in Trey the most is down to his leadership role in the band — he has the most responsibility, so the cracks are always going to most visible with him first. But it applies equally to the other three (perhaps Fishman most of all), who every year have to work a little harder to keep their physical and mental performance up to our very high standards.

Rather skillfully, Phish has kept us from noticing this aging process by subtly shifting their approach, particularly in regards to improvisation. Songs that rely upon a more-or-less standard build-up to a finger-flying peak — your Bowies, Antelopes, Stashes, Rebas, and Mike’ses — have been marginalized, while songs with more open-ended, lateral jam structures, such as Disease, Ghost, Twist, Light, Sand, or Carini, are used as centerpieces. They’ve even shifted some natives of Group 1, such as Hood or Chalkdust, into Group 2, and in doing so produced many of the highlights of this past year.

Within these songs, the improvisations have moved gradually to a more democratic structure, taking the burden of leadership and triumphant punctuation off Trey and focusing more on the quick exchange of ideas between all four members. When that conversation wasn’t clicking, they dabbled this summer in unexpected segues, or by placing jams in unexpected places or new material.

This fall, those compensations seemed to lose their effectiveness. With Trey focused on rhythm guitar patterns and atmospherics (predominantly of the Echoplex variety), even more burden was placed on the other three members, and no one stepped up. Mike was less aggressive in directing the band than in the last few years, often euthanizing jams by playing with his drill. Fish regressed to turning invisible when things took a spacier turn, unlike 2013 and early 2014 milestones where he often powered the band through hazy interludes into further-out territories. Page…bless him, but he’s never going to be a natural stage leader.

Overall, the band seemed distressingly short on ideas — one of the most frightening things for a Phish fan to process. Suddenly, another hiatus, or worse, seemed inevitable, maybe even advisable. Heading into the tour’s last week, that unpleasant, compulsive thought got louder and louder: was Phish dying? And if Phish was dying, where did that leave us? The first two weeks of fall tour forced us to grapple once again with Phish’s mortality, and reflectively, face our own mortality as well.

II. Phish is Undead

So, of course, for their Halloween gag, they dressed up in corpse paint, climbed on top of a haunted house, and played eleven new songs about people meeting grisly ends — one of their most thrilling sets of the era. Phish was dead, and it was awesome.

For the second straight year, the band brought a full set of new material to their Halloween party. But this time around felt different. Last year, I wrote about how the Wingsuit set was the shot in the arm they needed to stay fresh in their fourth decade as a band, to avoid the greatest hits act destiny of so many other groups. But now, in retrospect, Wingsuit/Fuego looks more like a capstone to the first phase of 3.0, a bookend with Joy that illustrates the distance traveled for the first five years of the comeback. But, with a few exceptions, it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. Wingsuit was new songs. Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House was new sounds.

The compositions managed to capture the melodic fluidity that the band achieved in the last couple years and combine it with some of the novel sounds discovered in 3.0 — “Storage jamming,” more propulsive playing from Fish, more democratic songwriting (presumably). There were even some completely new or less explored elements thrown in the mix, through the use of samples, vocal effects, and lyric-less song structure.

That last one is kind of a big deal. Surely it was no coincidence that the Halloween show opened with “Buried Alive” and closed with “Frankenstein,” two instrumentals with similar spooky, interpretive intent. It’s said that instrumental music is the most abstract art due to its lack of words and images, and early Phish was pretty good at it, not just with actual instrumentals such as Oh Kee Pa Ceremony or All Things Reconsidered, but in the long vocal-less passages of Reba, Fluffhead, or YEM.

But where those songs didn’t appear to have any particular narrative structure or specific subject (“Fluff’s Travels” comes closest), Buried Alive, Frankenstein and this new set of music are almost tone poems, seeking to illustrate the story or topic suggested by the title — or in Chilling, Thrilling’s case, the titles and narration. In a way, the closest analogue in the Phish catalog are the backdrops they play beneath a Harpua or Forbin’s narration, where Page, Mike, and Fish would do their best to musically express whatever tale Trey was spinning.

That mission produces songs with more lyrical playing than Phish usually trades in, a tighter line of melody meant to evoke more discrete images and feelings that would normally be provided by the words. The atmospheric flourishes are more purposeful as well — the ambient breakdown in the middle of “Shipwreck” isn’t just the logical endpoint of a gradually disintegrating improvisation, its washes of sound and tortured notes are literally meant to evoke waves, storms, the ocean at night. Divining meaning from setlist structure and jam flavors is increasingly a parlor game of the Phish punditry, but for these 11 songs, the messages were explicit.

To pull this off, the band wrote some of its most cohesive, delicately interlocking material to date. The song structures are just as leaderless as much of the jamming from fall (and arguably, summer too), but the preparation and practice removes all the awkwardness and indecision from the tour. It’s impressive how no one band member sticks out more than the others — even when Trey solos, he sounds more like a “featured soloist” than the conductor. The inward-facing-square lineup belied the surface simplicity of these songs; watching the webcast, you could see them concentrating hard on staying in sync with each other.

Yet remarkably, this material sounds both improvised and composed, both new and back-to-basics. This kind of four-way interwoven organization is what they often arrive at through improvisation, and the songs almost feel like a shortcut to the spontaneous magic of recent milestones like the Tahoe Tweezer or Randall’s Chalkdust. More than anything else from their past, it was reminiscent of The Siket Disc, which also played at slicing up what they were exploring on stage into discrete “songs.” Appropriately, weeks later, it remains entirely mysterious who wrote these songs. It’s just “by Phish,” in the purest way possible.

Democratic songwriting, songs derived from jams — these were also the talking points laid out by the Phishbill for Halloween 2013 regarding Wingsuit. I still believe that Wingsuit’s injection of fresh material into the catalog was critical for the band’s continued vitality, but in hindsight, there was very little about that set of songs that they hadn’t done before, and maybe even ill-advisedly included some things that they don’t do as well any more. But Chilling, Thrilling — in its exploration of less-traveled directions, in its digestion of elements of 3.0 improv styles, in its lyrical-instrumental directness, in its brave acknowledgement that they don’t play the way they used to — sounds like a path forward.

Photo by Rene Huemer, from @Phish_FTR

III. Long Live The Phish

So wait, after that super-depressing first section, now you’re telling me to remain optimistic? Yes…with some caveats that might be divisive to the fanbase.

As I’ve written before, Phish is a band that typically thrives under restrictions and adversity, and reduced technical dexterity is just another challenge for them to face. The effects of age are only going to get worse. But Phish has mastered so many styles of music that they can adapt where other bands would wither and depreciate. It’s just about finding the right thread in their musical tapestry to pull, and Chilling, Thrilling offered at least a couple solutions on how they could continue to evolve into their golden years.

The first is turning Trey’s increasingly minimal playing into an asset, not a handicap. I think they’ve been telegraphing that switch for a while, through most of 2014, if not even earlier. You can hear it in the (yes, fewer than normal) moments where they really clicked this fall: the atmospheric layers of the 10/17 Crosseyed, the sinewy slither of the 10/28 Twist (and the 11/1 version, for that matter), the clockwork dreaminess of the 10/29 Light. But I think it goes back even earlier: the cowbell/Echoplex combo attack of the 8/31 Mike’s, the back-to-back rhythm guitar euphoria and repetitive fury of the 7/20 Wedge and Ghost, or as far back as the propulsive 12/29/13 Carini.

The challenge is not unlike how the band re-shaped around Trey’s drum kit in 95 and 96 or his little synthesizer in 99 — remove the pack leader from the equation, and see what the other three can do. The results of those experiments were decidedly mixed, but Trey stepping back on guitar is far less dramatic than switching instruments entirely. It’s worth remembering that Trey is a tremendous rhythm guitarist, and has an ever-growing arsenal of effects to convert even the simplest patterns into fresh, complex sounds. The latter point can backfire, as we saw many a 2014 jam stall out when Trey grew too enamored with his Echoplex and the rest of the band failed to fill in the blanks. But new effects take time to blend in — consider how his use of the digital delay loop evolved from 1994 to 1997–98.

Where this shift potentially gets chancy is that it may necessitate the dropping of certain Phish standards, those that rely more upon virtuoso ability than patient texture. The songs mentioned above — Antelope, Bowie, Stash, Reba — that are typically powered by gradually increasing intensity, speed, and ornate playing just aren’t going to explode in the same old, beloved way. If not completely dropped, they may need to be re-invented in the fashion of Chalkdust, Hood, and the occasional Mike’s, finding new, age-appropriate ways to maneuver them to a satisfying conclusion. In fact, that they could recalibrate songs as old as Hood and Chalkdust into entirely new forms should be heartening to any worried fans.

Certain Chilling, Thrilling songs offer glimpses of what these new dynamics might look like. Instead of Machine Gun Trey, there’s the machine gun snares and stop-start precision of “The Birds” providing the tension. The Very Long Fuse morphs from chipper Allmans-y melodies to a dissonant tangle, The Dogs derives its energy from a grinding, unsettling riff and urgent tempo, the sampledelica/vocal manipulation in Martian Monster gradually builds into a weird, abstract mania. There are solos in these songs, sure, but they’re more restrained, tightly coiled, enmeshed with the other three instruments. Again, not all of these approaches are exactly new to Phish’s arsenal, but they’re very flattering in light of their current weaknesses and strengths.

As far as the generation of ideas that was so lacking in early Fall, here too the Chilling, Thrilling material may offer assistance. Nobody knows how they’ll be used, or even if they’ll be used, going forward, but a likely option is that they’ll serve as agreed-upon waystations within jams, just as The Dogs was used right away in the 11/1 Light. Even before Halloween, it turns out there were some hints of this usage, as when the San Francisco Hood passed through The Dogs on its way to Funk #49 and Have Mercy, or when the 10/21 Tweezer explored a slowed-down Your Pet Cat progression.

The idea of “pre-conceived” jam themes might rub some fans the wrong way, since spontaneity is one of Phish’s most-prized assets. But these songs could serve the same purpose as Dave’s Energy Guide throughout their career, or The Siket Disc in 1999: triumphant landing places for jams a la What’s the Use?, or loosely-defined connective tissue like My Left Toe and (that one special time) Quadrophonic Topplings. In this role, I don’t see Chilling, Thrilling songs being reprised note for note from their Halloween debuts, but as jumping-off points for deeper exploration, providing a known pattern for the band to sync upon and then elaborate. In a way, these songs are even more ripe to serve in this role than The Siket Disc material — they’re closer to actual “songs,” and they also present a wider array of Phish flavors to fall into and explore.

If 3.0 has had a flaw, it’s the band’s desire to please everybody, to give every fan a hit of what they treasure the most from across their history. Perhaps the new limitations conspicuous this fall are an opportunity to escape those expectations, to leave some eras in the past where they belong and carve out new territory to explore over their future, however long that might be. But for all this change to succeed, we need to evolve as well. Aging gracefully is a two-way street, and fans need to be patient and look forward instead of back, just as much as the band. We might as well accept that we’re all dying…some are just better at it than others.