Help Me Find One
10/25/94, Atlanta, GA, Atlanta Civic Center
Like many of you, probably, I’ve been working my way through Dean Budnick’s new Long May They Run podcast. Budnick’s 1996 book The Phishing Manual, alongside Andy Gadiel and rec.music.phish, is one of the primary sparks for my compulsion to write about Phish, and is certainly the reason why I spell it “jamband,” all one word. Long May They Run is very well produced, full of great interviews with the band and the people around them, and absolutely bonkers in its specificity. I cannot believe that there exists a legit podcast, with advertisers and New York Times write-ups and everything, that spent basically an entire episode on the tour booking practices of Phish in the late 80s and early 90s.
While it’s interesting, the music biz insider stuff is not the behind-the-scenes info I’m after. I want to hear how the sausage gets made; the sausage, in this case, being the improvisations that have kept me obsessed with Phish since the mid-90s. However, I ingest these details with a mix of fascination and revulsion. A major obstacle for me with a lot of post-Phish jambands is that they are too transparent in their improv process, which ruins the magic for me, like an illusionist who keeps telling you how they do their tricks. Phish has always been good at not revealing too much about their secret formula, typically falling back on some well-worn, vague chestnuts about their rehearsal process and the telepathic intimacy that comes with nearly four decades of playing together.
That said, two nuggets about the band’s onstage communication in Long May They Run have jumped out at me so far. Neither of them are some secret master key to understanding how they do what they do, exposing the dull scaffolding behind the spectacle. But both are interesting filters for examining any particular Phish show, such as this Tuesday night in Atlanta.
Much is made about Kuroda’s quasi-official role as the “fifth member” of the band, though I didn’t know that they had literally advertised the lighting director position as such way back in a 1989 Doniac Schvice. But Kuroda’s comment in Episode 3 about how he sometimes explicitly interacts with the band on a musical basis was new to me:
“Sometimes I’m just flowing and following and trying to keep one in the right place, musical one. And then sometimes I can tell they’ve just gotten so far off — it doesn’t happen very often — but I’ll really accent one to help them find one again. We actually used to refer to it as ‘Help me find one.’ And I’ve been told by those guys, on occasion, ‘I didn’t know where I was so I followed you and found my way back.’”
In my very amateur musicology, I’m pretty sure the three-note refrain that anchors the Split Open and Melt jam isn’t technically “one.” But one of the thrilling things about a good Melt is how the foursome all trade off the responsibility for playing that return, keeping the meter of the jam intact while the other three shoot off in different directions. Occasionally, as on this night’s extremely awesome version around the 11-minute-mark, they’ll float thrillingly free of that tether, and that’s when you can very easily picture Kuroda playing his lifeguard role. It has always been a fun game to try and hear the implicit “bum bum bum” in a really out-there Melt jam, but now you can imagine Kuroda doing the lights equivalent of the three-note return to help the guys regain their footing.
A much broader insight is provided by Episode 4, “Yes, And…” which talks extensively about the similarities between Phish’s approach to improvised music and the techniques of improv comedy. To my shock, Trey states that he didn’t learn about the “Yes And...” concept until meeting members of Chicago’s Second City improv troupe in 2013, though he realized pretty quickly that it put a name to a process Phish had already been using since...well, pretty much the beginning.
The episode goes on to talk a lot about how that conversation with Second City has influenced the last six years of Phish performances, which really got me stroking my beard, as their jams have definitely grown far more fluid and multi-faceted in recent tours. But it’s also amusing that the specific examples they cite of this “new” approach — such as debuting the Ghosts of the Forest track “Wider” on 7/9/19 before Mike had even practiced the song — sound like pretty standard old Phish tricks.
For instance, this show, like any Phish show really, has a plethora of delightful moments I’d point to as clear “Yes, And…” applications, where the band builds on each other’s ideas. There’s the riff Trey plays at the outset of the Mike’s song jam (4:02), that is picked up and echoed by Mike within 4 seconds. There’s the icy smooth segue out of the Axilla II slow coda into Jesus Just Left Chicago, a cover they hadn’t played in 33 shows, and one which appears to have been audibled by Trey at that very moment. And there’s the way Led Zeppelin teases keep rattling around Possum; listen to Page take the baton from Trey’s pre-song tease of “The Rover” and sprinkle it into the background of the verses, and how quickly Fish picks up on the “Kashmir” tease at 3:28. There’s even a sidebar into Magilla, which is about as strange a leap as whatever Trey was going for with his piss/maple syrup/Jedi knight train of thought on Long May You Run (stick to your day job, Trey).
These are just the easy ones to spot; I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of far more musically complex “Yes, And..”-ing taking place in the really good, far-reaching Weekapaug Groove or, for all I know, Fish’s second-to-last performance of If I Only Had A Brain. Peering into the near future, trying to track its usage in the Bangor Tweezer next week might break my brain. But again, neither “Help Me Find One” or “Yes And…” are one-size-fits-all explanations for Phish improvisation, they’re just pieces of the puzzle — a puzzle I would rather not compete, and one that the band, no matter how many podcasts they appear in, will be smart enough never to reveal.