Invasion of the Snowbirds
11/16/95, West Palm Beach, FL, West Palm Beach Auditorium
SET 1: Cars Trucks Buses, Runaway Jim, Jam, Horn > Mound, Ya Mar, Simple -> Timber (Jerry The Mule) > Guyute, Funky Bitch
SET 2: A Day in the Life > David Bowie, Lifeboy, Uncle Pen, Ha Ha Ha > Harry Hood, Hold Your Head Up > If I Only Had a Brain > Hold Your Head Up, Amazing Grace, Possum
ENCORE: Brown Eyed Girl
By the time Phish arrived in southeast Florida, they were in high demand. On the Under the Scales podcast, Brad Sands told Tom Marshall about the band’s dueling invitations to hang out with Florida musical royalty before the show, forced to choose between an afternoon at the estates of Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks or Parrothead Pope Jimmy Buffett. According to Sands, Mike and Fish went to Trucks’ place, Trey and Page hung out on Buffett’s boat. But being respectful young diplomats, they invited both elder gentlemen to sit in at the West Palm Beach Auditorium, creating a rare guest-spot double feature.
Both sit-ins are awkward, at best. I’m not sure what the band members were doing at their famous friends’ homes, but rehearsal was not on the agenda. The Buffett appearance feels particularly impromptu; when they return for the encore, Trey says “this one we just found out about backstage,” and they are clearly learning “Brown Eyed Girl” as they go. Trucks, meanwhile, bigfoots Fishman off his drum set and simply plays the “One Way Out” beat instead of anything resembling the usual Possum shuffle — kind of a baller move, I have to admit.
Neither performance is “good,” but they’re both interesting, and not just because I can use the Buffett video to explain to my Parrothead in-laws that we aren’t so different, you and I. Each offers a different vision of a path that Phish could have taken in 1995, suddenly thrust as they were into the spotlight as the Dead’s unofficial heirs. There are times this year when Phish may take a few steps down those paths, but ultimately they reject them, despite the lower resistance they may have encountered in those directions. The clunkiness of tonight’s sit-ins, the inability of Phish to sink into either the role of the Allman Brothers Band or the Coral Reefer Band, reflects the harder option they’ve chosen.
The Allman Brothers, respectfully, were frozen somewhere around 1974 and ceased evolving creatively from that point on, aside from cycling in new band members every so often due to death and disagreement. That probably sounds harsher than intended; they nailed/defined a classic blues-rock sound and wrote a bunch of great tunes in that idiom in five years despite a couple of tragedies that would shatter almost any band. If they wanted to cruise on that accomplishment for four decades, they earned it.
But Phish is like the myth about sharks, they have to keep moving or they die. If they had never progressed beyond their first five years or records, they would have broken up long before 2004, and the inevitable reunion would never have been as creatively satisfying as the 3.0 era became. On a smaller scale, they could never play a song like Possum the same way for decades; its recent hot streak is the result of earnestly embracing its blues-rock swagger while also taking it to absurd extremes and threading in esoteric band lore. No wonder that this version with Trucks clocks in about five minutes shorter than the norm for Fall 95; just playing it straight out of deference to their guest saps the song of its current magic.
The Jimmy Buffett model is actually closer to what Phish built in the 90s. You’ve got the in-jokes, the audience rituals (the “fins to the left, fins to the right” dance is basically Contact or Meatstick), and the tailgate scene, which is just Phish lot with a different pie chart of intoxicants. The musical vibe at a Buffett show is pretty much what people who don’t listen to Phish imagine Phish to be like, it’s a much better fit for the “Raffi for adults” slam that Phish occasionally draws.
So it’s pretty perfect that Buffett’s appearance (wearing the same stage outfit as Page, awkwarrrrrd), is the normiest wedding-band cover song this side of “Sweet Caroline.” Buffett released the Van Morrison chestnut as a single in 1983 (adding copious steel drums, natch), plays it frequently live, and I assume often adds some of the same corny ad-libs that he does here: “going down the Intracoastal Waterway” and “watch out for the manatees!” for his home county. The Palm Beach crowd eats it up and the band seems to have fun, even if it sounds like your boss doing karaoke at a cringey work party. Free jazz with MMW it is not.
All right, all right, it’s kinda charming, but it’s also a glimpse at the dangers of leaning too heavy on the crowd-pleasing covers, the tightrope I was talking about yesterday. The occasional tribute is fine, and covers are going to be natural meeting places for sit-ins on short notice. But otherwise, a cover should be a song that reveals something new in the band playing it and/or tips off the audience to something they may not have heard before. “Brown Eyed Girl” is just comfort food, empty calories, the kind of “oh I know this song!” low-hanging fruit that too many jambands feast upon.
Phish declines both of these options — rejecting static traditionalism and the everyday bar-band pleasures of the easily recognizable. It’s why they were never a good fit for something like HORDE tour, where both approaches thrived, and why guest appearances at Phish shows over the back half of the 90s and into the 2000s dwindled to rare exceptions for top-shelf artists. A night like 11/16/95 is an indulgence, a forced smile for their musical forebears, but Phish has their own field to plough.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]