Forced Retirement
2/20/97, Milan, ITA, Teatro Smeraldo
SET 1: The Curtain > Tweezer > Soul Shakedown Party > Chalk Dust Torture, Love Me, Taste, Gumbo, When the Circus Comes > David Bowie > Tweezer Reprise
SET 2: Sample in a Jar > Cars Trucks Buses, Character Zero > Uncle Pen, Stash, Bouncing Around the Room, Free > Swept Away > Steep > A Day in the Life, Runaway Jim, Sweet Adeline
ENCORE: Julius
There’s another big change in early 1997 that hasn’t come up yet, one that can also take a share of the credit for the transformations about to unfold. Sometime between the two Europe tours, Phish decides to do a housecleaning of their song list, tossing out tunes that weren’t currently sparking joy. According to The Phish Book, any song that three band members didn’t want to play any more got the ax, and the cuts were merciless: staples Golgi Apparatus, Suzy Greenberg, Wilson, Weigh, and Contact among them, all semi-retired for at least the summer.
But the most surprising demotion to the bench was one of Phish’s most iconic songs: Tweezer. It’s an easy guess that Tweezer remains the most hoped-for song at every Phish concert to this day, as no other song in the catalog comes close to delivering such a high percentage of improvisation and historic moments. And you would think Phish themselves felt similarly fond of the track, having made Tweezer the centerpiece (and a quarter of the runtime) of A Live One and using the song to navigate and reflect the stylistic changes of 1994 and 1995.
Back in February, they still hadn’t started the official purge, but the idea may have already occurred to them. Tonight’s Tweezer is the last of the winter Europe tour, which still has eight shows to go. In fact, it’s the last Tweezer until The Gorge in August, a gap of 36 shows, by far the longest absence in the song’s history. For comparison, the 2nd-longest Tweezer gap (17 shows) only happened because of the no-repeat mechanics of the Baker’s Dozen; by appearing on the first night, it was guaranteed to be on the shelf for at least the next 12 shows.
In light of those statistics, you’d expect this final pre-hiatus Tweezer to be a total disaster, but it’s really not. It’s quite…normal, the kind of Type I version you’d often hear in 93 or 94 before it became Phish’s favorite canvas for deep, multifaceted excursions. That regularity is a slight letdown after being teed up right at the start of the show by The Curtain, one of its most reliable lead-outs, but there’s nothing wrong with the jam, which linearly builds to a snarling peak before eschewing the classic slow-down ending for an abrupt drop into the second Soul Shakedown Party. If anything, it’s handicapped by being played so early in the show, before the band could properly warm up after a day off somewhere between Paris and Milan.
If there’s an indication that Tweezer is falling out of favor, it’s in how relatively inspired other parts of the show sound in comparison. A few songs later, there’s a spectacular Taste, where Trey’s solo is allowed to flourish without the drop back into Disease of a few nights before. For the first of two times in this show, Trey briefly interpolates Dave’s Energy Guide, always a sign that they’re feeling frisky and musically entwined. Another special moment happens in the bridge between Free and Swept Away, a patient two-minute ambient reminder that Phish would record one of the sessions that fed into The Siket Disc only three weeks after this show.
That these two highlights come in Billy Breathes songs rather than the old guard of Tweezer, Bowie, Jim, and Stash, is a clear indicator that the fresher material is what kindles their creativity these days. When they return to Europe, they’ll have a boatload of even newer songs to elbow the veterans out of the setlist. So while Tweezer did nothing to earn its temporary ban, it’s a harsh but useful self-constraint for Phish — let’s redirect the improvisational energies we would normally reserve for the inside of the freezer towards the freshmen instead. Or maybe it was a coded message to the fans that no cow was too sacred to be sacrificed in this year of change. Either way, goodbye to Tweezer for now; when you come back from vacation, it’s going to look a little different around here.