Half Baked
3/18/97, Burlington, VT, Flynn Theatre
SET 1: Cinnamon Girl, NICU > Sample in a Jar > Punch You in the Eye > My Soul, Beauty of My Dreams > Harry Hood > Cars Trucks Buses, Suzy Greenberg > Character Zero
SET 2: Taste > Drowned -> Prince Caspian > David Bowie, Love Me, I Told You So, Love Me Like a Man, Waste > Chalk Dust Torture, Slave to the Traffic Light
ENCORE: Hello My Baby, Funky Bitch
Phish did not take any time off upon returning from Europe. Still jet-lagged, they played The Late Show with David Letterman for the third time on March 5th, dressing up and playing an abridged version of Character Zero. From March 12th to 15th, they holed back up in Bearsville Studios, improvising to tape and further sketching out the parameters of the inspiration that struck abroad. And then, they returned home to play this one-off benefit show in honor of the release of Phish Food, their signature ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s.
I try to resist straightforward reviews in these essays, but Phish Food is a heckin’ good ice cream: four stars, a solid A, 9.1 and Best New Dessert. I dutifully bought it at first to support my favorite band and their charitable goal of preserving a lake I had never heard of before, but have spent 25 years continuing to purchase it for those gooey swirls of marshmallow and sweet chocolate fish (I could take or leave the caramel, which is why it’s only a 9.1). It’s a rare example of quality licensed food — Mr. T cereal it was not. As fellow Vermonters, Ben & Jerry would never do Phish dirty.
It’s also, in retrospect, a strange mainstream breakthrough landmark for Phish. Despite a few Letterman appearances and throwing the largest concert of 1996, Phish was still far from a household name, and grocery shoppers in the freezer section were most likely perplexed by the new flavor. Fish food-flavored ice cream? Sounds gross. And who’s copy-editing the Ben & Jerry’s label? I’m not sure too many consumers rode the pipeline from ice cream buyer to tour rat, but it was an effective, unorthodox way to raise the band’s Q rating nonetheless.
It also means the legendary year of 1997 (U.S. Edition) starts with shilling for ice cream; the Letterman appearance, too, was as much in support of Phish Food as the now 5-month-old Billy Breathes. Commercial and charitable motivations aside, a special hometown theater show feels like the perfect opportunity to echo 5/16/95 and drop a truckload of new material on fans, but…they’re not quite ready for that. The first of Trey and Tom’s watershed 8-track songwriting sessions — the “Pecked By The Dove” session in Stowe — took place the week after this show, and the Bearsville session comprised “funky and experimental jams of the sort that had taken hold by the end of the European tour” according to Kevin Shapiro.
One would hope at least some of the European flavor would creep into this show, but the band keeps those cards close — despite a good Hood and a very good Bowie, the whole affair feels more of a piece with 1996 than 1997. The guest appearances by Dave Grippo, James Harvey, and Tammy Fletcher (of Vermont blues band The Disciples) are fun, but take up a lot of set time that could have been used on foreshadowing with the new, improved Wolfman’s or a funk-laced Disease jam. Curiously, the band seems shy about playing their rotation-switch songs (or Carini) on home soil, restricting the American debuts to a handful of their new covers: My Soul, Beauty of My Dreams, Love Me, and a surprise Cinnamon Girl, which has annoyed me for a quarter-century thanks to the extra note Trey adds to the main riff.
Instead, the clues are scarce and well-hidden. There’s a bit of Mike’s new synth-bass pedals in the intro to PYITE, and Trey whips up a brief loop-storm at the end of Hood. Suzy features, among some very specific shoutouts to Steve Pollak (The Dude of Life) and other pals, Trey and Fish yelling “Siket!” a bunch in reference to the recent session’s engineer whose name would grace their most experimental release of the 90s. If anything, the impromptu blues songs of Fletcher’s sit-in and the jazzed-up horns in Cars Trucks Buses would add fuel to the fake-out that Phish was going “back to basics” rootsy as their next move.
No, the real U.S. debut of the renovated Phish sound would have to wait four more months…unless you got an invite to Bradstock. It’s a time when the gap between public Phish and private Phish was as large as it’s ever been, with the band laying down raw material for exploratory songs such as “What’s The Use?” and “My Left Toe” in the studio while playing straightforward and unrehearsed blues covers on stage. As their ice cream collaboration with Ben & Jerry started shipping nationwide, they kept their own new musical recipe under wraps.
Photos from Kevin Shapiro’s essay on the show at nugs.net.