Illusion of Control
11/22/94, Columbia, MO, Jesse Auditorium, University of Missouri
One of the most exciting things about Phish, I’d argue, is not knowing when and where the next big jam is coming from. Sure, there’s always going to be the big reliable jam vehicles, but the most intoxicating and addiction-feeding jams are those that arrive out of nowhere, when you least expect it. The Alpine Valley Ruby Waves is only the latest example, over a half-hour of deep improv sprouting from a new song that had only hinted at this potential previously. It was fascinating to hear Trey admit on the Long May They Run podcast that the band was just as surprised as we were when Ruby Waves broke out — they had actually planned to take Mercury for a long walk, he said, but the jam found them one song later.
I don’t use “addiction” lightly, as the Phish experience can overlap pretty heavily with the allures of gambling. In my day job, I once wrote a blog post about why slot machines are so addictive, including these bullet points, which could double with very little modification as a “why people can’t stop seeing Phish” list:
Operating on a random payout schedule, but appearing to be a variable payout; i.e. fooling the player into thinking that the more money they play, the more likely they are to win.
“The illusion of control” in pressing buttons or pulling a lever to produce the outcome.
The “near-miss” factor
Increased arousal (where the sounds and flashing lights come in)
Able to be played with very little money; the allure of “penny” slots.
And perhaps most importantly, immediate gratification.
With the exception of the penny slots (Phish is an expensive habit), the rest are all uncomfortably on the nose: the compulsion to see every show you can, the superstition that if I wear my lucky shirt it means the band will play an all-timer, the unpredictability masquerading as a system that can be cracked (“Never miss a Sunday show!”), the FOMO, the, er, flashing lights. But it’s mostly the neurobiological stimulus of the unpredictable reward, and its scary ability to inspire compulsive behavior, that Phish shows and games of chance share in common.
That’s where surprise jams come in. We take this anything-can-happen rule for granted today, but in the early 90s, it hadn’t yet been added to the Phish quiver. Even for most of 1994, the setlists follow a pretty regular structure, with many songs earmarked exclusively for the first or second set and jams appearing reliably in designated positions and following familiar paths. As those jams started to get weirder and longer, they still were largely contained within the usual suspects: Tweezer and Bowie, most often, with the occasional expanded Stash or Mike’s or YEM or Antelope.
In November of 1994, that’s finally starting to change. Since the second-leg began 10 days ago, there have been extended jams sparked by Down With Disease and Simple — both songs known to regularly go deep today, but that had resolutely stayed in the box thus far in their debut year. Tonight brings us another significant and very long jam, this time in a song that would be shocking to audiences both then and now: Son Seals’ Funky Bitch.
Just last week, I spent a whole post bashing Funky Bitch as an overly safe and unexciting request choice*. This version, as I admitted then, is the exception that proves the rule, launching a nearly half-hour of improvisation so far removed the source material that it was initially released (as filler on Live Phish Vol. 18) as two tracks: Funky Bitch > Columbia Jam. In another recent post, I speculated that the simplest songs were the most likely to lead to big jams, but there’s still a big difference between the minimalist single-riff mantras of Tweezer or Simple and the 12-bar blues of Funky Bitch, a framework that’s meant to contain extended solos, not inspire free exploration.
With that in mind, I’m comfortable going out on a limb and declaring this performance a pre-planned jam. That might be controversial in some Phish circles; it’s nice to imagine that every time the band goes way out there, it’s purely because they were possessed by the spirit of the music, The Hose and so forth. But recent events, most especially the “Jam-Filled” night of the Baker’s Dozen, have proven that theory to be fantasy — turns out they pretty much can switch it on whenever they feel like it, though that doesn’t guarantee that it will be good.
And it’s always been so. I was flipping through The Phish Book the other night looking for quotes about the Rev. Jeff Mosier residency (really wish The Phish Book had an index!), and stumbled upon this quote from Page, talking about Tweezers of the time (97-98) versus 1994.
We don’t play Tweezer as much as we did a few years ago, when we were consciously trying to stretch our jams out. Tweezer lent itself to that very well. We didn’t intend to make the Bangor Tweezer [11/2/94] half an hour long. On the other hand, there have been David Bowies where we said, “Let’s see how far we can stretch it out.” It takes a conscious effort sometimes, since we were inclined to play ten- or fifteen-minute Bowies and not take that extra ten or fifteen minutes. Once in Dallas [5/7/94] we decided to play Tweezer for the whole set, which was probably the beginning of our whole extended-song thing. But a lot of those jams weren’t very good in the end. When we were choosing material for A Live One, I’d hear these Bowies, Tweezers, and Antelopes and think, “That’s a good moment there, but man, the next five minutes kind of drags.”
Pre-planned or otherwise, I should stress that the 11/22/94 Funky Bitch is not just long and unexpected, it’s good. Like really, really good. The transition to the jam (at 6:50 on the full-show SBD release of 11/22/94, which regathers Funky Bitch and Columbia Jam into one long track) is laughably deliberate; there’s a pretty abrupt key change, some rare-for-94 Page clavinet, and a Trey riff that sounds, perhaps not coincidentally, a little bit like Tweezer. But from there, unlike the academic, ADD path of the Bangor Tweezer or the Ann Arbor Simple, the jam feels organic and cohesive. It might not have the patience and rhythmic continuity of later Phish improv, but ideas are given the time they need to bloom and evolve, instead of changing course every couple minutes like a shot clock is going off. Particularly modern are the prolonged, ambient-tinged recoveries from near-silence at roughly 13:50 and 22:00, two moments where the band could’ve easily off-ramped into a new song and safer ground, but they chose the scenic route instead.
One of the joys of this chronological listening project has been hearing Phish gradually building their mature sound piece-by-piece. The expectations of the late 90s and beyond about the frequency of Type II improv, unpredictable song choices, and thoughtful set construction didn’t arrive overnight, and certainly weren’t in place for the first ten years of the band. That started to change in 1993 with the arrival of seguefests and more sophisticated, if still infrequent, off-rails jamming, but there was still a lot of work left to do in 1994 to reach what we commonly understand Phish to be today. This night in Missouri adds a wild card to that deck, one that makes the game simultaneously more fun and harder to quit.
* - Worth mentioning that Trey actually takes a crowd member request again in this show and the fan chooses Hood...not the most obscure of choices, but still a much better pick!
[Stub from Golgi Project]