I’d Like To Go There
10/20/94, St. Petersburg, FL, Mahaffey Theatre
Let’s talk about my favorite Phish October tradition. No, not the Halloween musical costume, at least, not exactly. I’m talking about the misdirection *around* the Halloween musical costume, in the weeks leading up to the show itself. Ever the pranksters, Phish quickly realized the opportunity for messing with fans’ heads, dropping teases and clues as speculation over which album they would cover built up. The band was so into this joke, they faked out their audience up to the very last possible second in 1994 and 1995, with Dark Side of the Moon and Thriller walk-on intros before dropping into the actual costume.
10/20/94 kicks off the inaugural season of this game with a completely unexpected cover debut: Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady.” The track from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 Innervisions was neither a single nor a deep cut, sitting in the second or third tier of Wonder songs on the radio today. But in the scheme of Phish covers, it was a conspicuously odd choice, played early in the first set without preamble or explanation beyond Trey’s “That’s a song we’ve wanted to play for a long time.” Indeed, according to the Phish.net history, Innervisions was potentially the band’s own choice for the first Halloween album costume, were they not beholden to the fans’ vote.
In this case, the wisdom of the crowd likely made the right choice. “Golden Lady” is a bit outside of Phish’s strengths in any era, but especially so for 1994, when the band was just beginning to molt its prog-nerd skin and start getting at least a little more straightforward and serious. “Golden Lady” isn’t just soul music, it’s a soul ballad, and it’s smooth, a whole bunch of descriptions that don’t quite fit a band whose freshest original was a 10-minute suite about a murderous pig. It’s much closer to “My Cherie Amour” than “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” the other Wonder song in the Phish repertoire, and one much better suited to the band’s goofier, funkier predilections.
Because let’s state the obvious: four white dudes from Vermont are always going to struggle to channel one of Motown’s finest. The vocals present the highest degree of difficulty, and while Trey makes a game attempt at hitting notes that sit comfortably in Wonder’s lower register, the multiple modulations in the song’s finale quickly find the limits of his 1994 range. But “Golden Lady” is a mismatch instrumentally as well — the original has hardly any audible guitar, and Page’s simpler rig of the time can’t replicate its ARP synthesizer theatrics. Only Mike and Fishman are well served by the challenge, getting a, for the time, rare opportunity to create an elastic pocket and pulling it off capably.
Even more awkward, “Golden Lady” is a profoundly earnest song, at a time when the young men of Phish still kept their emotions hidden behind humor and technique. It’s telling that the cover is immediately chased with “Poor Heart,” a goofball bluegrass pastiche that conflates love with recording gear, and is near neighbors to a version of “Kung,” one of the silliest songs in a catalog where that’s really saying something. It’s hard to imagine this same band credibly tackling the fiery racial injustice of “Livin’ for the City” and the political commentary of “He’s Misstra Know It All” in (checks calendar) 11 days.
But 25 years later...maybe it’s not such a stretch? If there’s a word that describes recent Phish material (Kasvot Vaxt aside), it’s earnest, and Trey’s songwriting in the last few years has taken the idea of “soul music” extremely literally. “Soul Planet,” “Set Your Soul Free,” “Everything’s Right,” and “Rise/Come Together” all sound like Trey’s attempt at writing a psychedelic Motown record of the early 70s, around the time when The Temptations and The Isley Brothers got deep into tie-dye and wah pedals. TAB, through its multiple configurations, has covered The Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child” since their very first show, and the backing singers/horn section lineups can tackle soul, reggae and even Gorillaz more convincingly than Phish.
Tellingly, Phish borrowed some of those TAB members for their most soulful Halloween, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars in 2016 — not a soul album, exactly, but one with a song called “Soul Love” at least. Meanwhile, “Strawberry Letter 23” and “You Sexy Thing” are two of the Baker’s Dozen specials that have survived for subsequent tryouts, and if their delivery is still slightly tongue-in-cheek, they don’t stick out quite as much from their surroundings.
Which is all to say that the 10/20/94 debut of “Golden Lady” was just a decade or two ahead of its time; even its surprise reappearance in 2003 (followed up once again by “Poor Heart”) feels a bit premature. For Halloween ‘94, they were far better off doing the album with silly songs about raccoons and monkeys and piggies instead of the one with a dramatic interlude that includes the n-word. But “Golden Lady” also creates a wormhole into the far future of Phish, an extremely long-distance tease of a time when emotions, sincerity, and soul — in the broadly-defined sense — would be a more integral part of the experience.
[Stub from Golgi Project]