Here Come The Regulars

12/3/94, San Jose, CA, San Jose State University Event Center

I ranted yesterday about the musical let-down of the December shows with horns, but there’s also a logistical consequence of spending roughly half the show catering to guests. Tonight in San Jose, the entire second set is played with the Giant/Cosmic Country Horns, and the rare use of an opening act shortens the time left for unadulterated Phish even further. Silicon Valley fans only got an hour and change with the core four, and in that hour Phish gave them just about the most generic 1994 set imaginable. 

Aside from the only slightly less common Guelah Papyrus and Wilson, the first set is packed with songs that appeared at least once every three shows in Fall 94. Three of these songs — Scent of a Mule, Guyute, and Sample in a Jar — are in the top 6 for most-played songs on the tour, with Sample the king of the entire damn year, tallying 71 (!) performances in 125 shows. If they had somehow squeezed Simple and Disease in there too (Julius shows up with the horns, natch), 12/3 Set I would perfectly capture the heaviest-rotating new songs of 1994. 

Since we’re almost to the end of the year — and since this show’s horns set isn’t too different from 12/2’s, aside from an interesting take on Slave and the one-off revival of Touch Me — it’s worth thinking about what the persistently high frequency of these songs says about Phish in 1994. I’ve already tried to put Simple and Disease and Julius in context, but what about the other three, which haven’t evolved much over the course of 1994, and wouldn’t really grow too far afield in the future either? Despite their stasis, this trio does a pretty good job of symbolizing the conflicting directions pulling at Phish in this pivotal year, occasionally producing sparks of genius, and sometimes producing...well, sets like this one.

Sample in a Jar

Sample hails from the same neighborhood as Julius and Disease, songs that reflect the band’s growing awareness that if they were going to play big venues, they needed big songs to match. But Sample takes that idea to the farthest extreme, handcuffing the muso complexities of Phish to four easy chords, a progression Page compares to Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men” in The Phish Book. On that same page, nobody minces words about the song’s intent either; Tom Marshall calls it “a blatant crowd pleaser,” Page says they recorded it early in the Hoist sessions “because it’s nice to start with something easy, as in basic,” and Trey says it’s “basically about sitting in a car with the seat belt on, drunk” — nothing deep to see here. 

The simplicity of Sample lends it versatility, and the band has deployed it this year as a set opener and closer, an encore, and a handy single to push on the rare radiosessions they did back in Spring (oddly, when they get to Letterman later this month, they’ll toss it aside for Chalkdust). Playing it at more than half of the shows this year is a bit much, but credit Sample for teaching Phish that it’s okay to hold back — any song this straightforward in previous eras would have been either a cover or a joke. In that sense, Sample kicks off a new era of Phish songwriting that would pretty much last the rest of the decade, producing far more interesting experiments using mostly direct song structures. For now, sometimes you just need an easy one to get everyone in the room, band and audience, on the same page, and screaming “WROOOOOONG!” with your arms in the air while the lights get real bright directly accomplishes that modest goal.

Scent of a Mule

By contrast, Mule could not be fussier or more alienating to a crowd. On Hoist, it’s a quintessentially Phishy composition, hybridizing amphetamine bluegrass and klezmer and injecting plenty of humor, courtesy of Mike Gordon’s bottomless oddity. Even in its original form, Mule would be a tough song to smoothly integrate into any set of music, but Phish being Phish, they made it even more obtuse live, adding a mostly unaccompanied Page solo in the middle, expanding eventually (though still not yet) into the dreaded Mule Duel. 

In questing my way across 1994, I’ve learned to embrace the frequent Samples for what they are, and anyhow, it usually only takes up four minutes of my day. Instead, my mortal enemy has become the annoyingly recurrent Mules, which don’t have the good manners to be brief or stay out of the way at the start or end of sets. It’s a shame, because the main Mule melody is actually one of the catchiest from Hoist, but that clanky piano solo and the tempo shifts just bring the show to a dead halt, every single time. 

For 1994, Mule is most interesting in how uneasily it sits next to the actual bluegrass studied and performed by the band throughout the year and particularly in the Fal. It’s strange that they never attempted Mule in the acoustic lineup; it would have been difficult to play, probably, but how much more so than Foreplay/Long Time? Instead, it floats around the structure of 1994 shows, never quite finding an unobtrusive place to land, a throwback to Phish genre experiments of the past at a time when they’re growing out of such dalliances.

Guyute

Now Guyute I can get into. The only original to debut in Fall 94 (unless you count Chalk Dust Torture Reprise next week), Guyute is also the end of a Phish songwriting era. Trey would essentially not write another song so thoroughly composed for the rest of Phish 1.0, and he went out with ambition. Per The Phish Book:

“I wrote Guyute, my most recent extended multipart composition, as an experiment in breaking harmonic boundaries. In it each band member plays one step apart, which creates some heinous harmonies during the doubled-up sixteenth note climbing section. The slow melody at the end is harmonized in a different wrong way. It suggests an obvious chord progression I had changed completely.”

I only barely understand what he’s talking about there, but I love it. Trey’s early compositions can sometimes sound a bit sterile and overwrought, the work of a kid in a music theory candy shop. But Guyute is a composed piece that codifies some of the best Phish jam tricks, in particular the sustained tension/release effects they’ve perfected in Stash and Antelope. It’s dreamy and pretty at the start, cuts a mean Irish jig for a while, gets fierce as hell, then finishes triumphantly. That multimodal journey might all be written down on sheet music, but it parallels the scattershot approach of November’s prolonged improvisations. Even the still-incomplete second verse and Trey’s occasional attempt to rewrite it — or skip it entirely, as on 11/26 — is in line with the experimental mood of the season. 

But like Mule, Guyute is a throwback to Phish past instead of a harbinger of the band’s future. It doesn’t sound too out of place in 1994, but by the time it landed on The Story of the Ghost four years later, it was conspicuously ornate compared to its minimal surroundings. In the Fall 94 competition for what the next Phish direction would be, Sample takes the crown from among these three songs, joining Simple, Disease and Julius in the winner’s circle. The next phase won’t be easy or basic, but the songs will definitely be streamlined.

[Stub from Golgi Project]