Honest Representative
8/13/96, Noblesville, IN, Deer Creek Music Center
SET 1: Divided Sky, Tube, Tela > Maze, Fast Enough for You > The Old Home Place, Punch You in the Eye, Llama, Glide, Slave to the Traffic Light
SET 2: AC/DC Bag > The Lizards, Mike's Song > Lifeboy > Weekapaug Groove -> Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Waste, Train Song, Strange Design, Sweet Adeline, David Bowie
ENCORE: Sleeping Monkey > Rocky Top
Gather round, one and all, it’s time to play one of this project’s favorite games: Why was this show chosen for official release? When the Live Phish CD series launched in the dark hiatus days of 2001, there was the immediate excitement of filling out one’s collection with a bunch of previously unreleased SBD recordings from the archives. But there was a secondary fascination with how Phish, at that transitional moment, chose to curate its past. The band members (wisely, in my opinion) don’t often talk about which shows they consider to be successes or failures, and while the majority of the series was selected by archivist Kevin Shapiro, it still provides an “official” version of the historical timeline that’s fun to dissect.
8/13/96 was enshrined as Volume 12 of the series, part of the second six-pack of releases that hit stores in April 2002. It was the first show Phish released from 1996, coming out six months prior to the Halloween show and several years before Vegas ‘96 and The Clifford Ball DVD. So outside of the anomalous Remain in Light show, this night at Deer Creek had a long run as the only example of This Year in Phish History. It’s not the most baffling choice in the early days of Live Phish (that still goes to 7/8/00, a thoroughly boring show), but it’s also not an obvious standout from its surroundings.
That said, I’m not sure there is a consensus winner from the non-Ball shows of August 1996, and this is a strong representative of its class. In a year with a lot of repeats (which reader basementbrain reports was starting to get on fans’ nerves), 8/13/96 is a bit of a bustout show, with six songs reappearing after gaps of 28 shows or more. If you were a Phish fan desperate for an official version of Sleeping Monkey or Strange Design to keep in your car CD changer, Live Phish Volume 12 came to the rescue, while also adding new performances of infrequent fan favorites such as Tube and Glide, and several Gamehendge tracks to the collection.
Like many bustout shows, the band is also in a relaxed mood. The hot mics pick up random chatter before Divided Sky and during the acoustic set, Trey moans Keith Jarrett-style over a glorious FEFY solo, AC/DC Bag is preceded by a strange mini-jam, and Page’s favorite friendzone allegory gets played in its traditional “encore to a wacky show” spot. It’s also an opportunity to preserve for posterity the summer that Page learned to play the Theremin, which once again disguises the changeover to the acoustic stage.
It’s that hushed segment of the show that is the likeliest reason for this show’s selection, as the acoustic mini-set is what makes 8/13/96 truly distinct in the Live Phish collection. As mentioned on its debut, there are only three instances of this format in Summer 96, and if Phish wasn’t going to release the Clifford Ball shows, tonight probably beats 8/5/96 as an overall package. Here, the band drops Talk from the unplugged setlist, but the rest is the same: Waste, Train Song, and Strange Design. The performances are fine (it’s no Harpur College), and the crowd is a little restless, but capturing Phish’s brief dalliance with an acoustic/electric format is important for the archival record.
By picking a show with this stripped-back interlude, Shapiro and Phish also, perhaps inadvertently, highlight some of the extreme polarity of Phish in 1996. There’s the divergent musical dynamics on display in Set 2, with these quiet tunes sandwiched between a thunderous, riffy Mike’s Song and a fluid Bowie that is unjustly snubbed from the jam chart. There’s also the lyrical whiplash of going from songs about a robotic executioner, a race of lizards, and a magical book to the moody introspection of Waste and Strange Design.
The half-full take on this bifurcation is that Phish was deepening their versatility in 1996, the half-empty take is that they couldn’t decide which direction to lean into. So Live Phish Volume 12 is ultimately an accurate document of 1996’s indecisiveness, a consistent band that sounds great, but with a looser grip on what they want that sound to be. There’s nothing to really complain about, but there’s nothing really staggering either. So while there might be many superior volumes in the Live Phish catalog, few represent their era better.