Hors D'oeuvres

7/17-7/19/96, Assorted Locations and Venues, FRA

7/17/96: Divided Sky, Sample in a Jar, David Bowie, Ya Mar, Funky Bitch

7/18/96: Julius, Cars Trucks Buses > Bouncing Around the Room > Stash, Hello My Baby, It's Ice, You Enjoy Myself

7/19/96: Runaway Jim, Foam, Sweet Adeline, Waste, Chalk Dust Torture, The Squirming Coil

The streak is over. Since I rebooted in October 94, I’ve somehow successfully posted an essay on the 25th anniversary of the 100-plus shows since. But readers, the Europe opening sets finally broke me. Taken together, these three French appearances total up to 132 minutes, not even as long as one typical show, and the memorable moments are scarce. So apologies to anyone who waited by their computer all day Saturday to read what I thought of the Vienne Sample, but a three-course menu of (as we Americans call them) horderves just made more sense.

As mentioned last time in Sesto Calende, just as Phish was finally starting to loosen up, they reconnected with Santana for a final week of opening sets broken up by two German headline shows. Despite the progress made over their week of solo gigs, Phish quickly fell back into the same dynamics as their first week in Europe: short sets, safe songs, gorgeous scenery, and mostly hostile crowds. Where the first round felt like a necessary warm-up, this week has a touch of homesickness, with Phish perhaps distracted by dreams of The Clifford Ball, precisely one month away.

7/17: Vienne, FRA, Theatre Antique

I’m fairly confident this is the oldest venue Phish has ever played or ever will play — a stone terrace chiseled into the side of a hill by the Romans in 40-50 AD. Unfortunately, they bombed harder than Quintilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest (yeah, I had to look that up). Divided Sky was an appropriately pagan ritual to open the set, and Sample seemed to go over fine. But by the time they descend into the hushed beginning of the Bowie jam section, the whistle-birds come out in force, so much so that I wish I hadn’t fired the Dylan 66 bullet a week earlier. Chastened, the band rushes the ending, skips the customary (and, this tour, surprisingly controversial) a capella number and finishes up with two obscure but inoffensive covers. 

In an amusing side plot, an act preceded Phish at this gig: the Israeli singer-songwriter Noa. According to Stephanie Finz’s Europe ‘96 tour diary in the Clifford Ball newspaper, Phish was impressed with her set and invited her to sit in, but after observing their icy crowd reaction, she took a pass. There you have it: a band one month away from luring 70,000 fans to upstate New York for a festival where they were the only act, tonight too toxic for a lesser known artist to risk a guest appearance.

7/18: Nice, FRA, Theatre De Verdure

Stage 2 was a stop at Phish’s third European festival of the month, and very likely the one that was the best fit. The Nice Jazz Festival claims to be the oldest of its kind in the world, with a pedigree that stretches back to Louis Armstrong headlining the inaugural edition. In the 90s, like many “jazz” festivals, they expanded their genre definitions to allow for more commercial artists, and this year featured Buddy Guy, Ben Harper, Ray Barretto, and Archie Shepp alongside the Santana/Phish package.

Photo from Nice via Brad Lowry. Guess Brad wasn’t cutting off the heads yet.

Phish did not choose the obvious pandering path of reviving “Take The A Train” or “Caravan” or bringing out a brass ringer like Michael Ray in New Orleans. But they do indulge the jazzier side of their original songbook, with the gospel-swing of Julius, the Booker T homage of Cars Trucks Buses and the dark cocktail groove of Stash. Trey also attempts to frame Hello My Baby as “the roots of jazz” from “the gay 90s,” which seems musicologically suspect, but hell, most of the crowd probably couldn’t understand him anyway. The patience of a jazz audience allowed Phish to play a fully-realized YEM, though the vocal jam was probably more scatting than even they could tolerate.

7/19: Arles, FRA, Les Arènes D’Arles

Another first-century Roman venue, this one built in 90 AD for gladiator battles and chariot races. Phish keeps the violence to a minimum by playing a fun-size version of a typical first set, with a Jim > Foam opener and Coil closer where, impressively, Page’s solo is not whistled into oblivion and we’re rewarded with a sign-off in French. The one unusual moment comes mid-set, when a momentary power outage causes Trey to communicate with the audience via his Fee megaphone and they prepare to do an un-miced Sweet Adeline before the juice returns anyway. Finz reports that “The French people here actually dug them a lot, and they got a standing applause,” which sounds a little milder than an ovation, but after the last few French shows, they’ll take it. Au revoir.