It’s Educational

11/3/94, Amherst, MA, Mullins Center, University of Massachusetts

Tonight’s show affords the same opportunity as 10/22 in Orlando: the chance to compare two non-consecutive shows in the same calendar year at the same venue. In this case, it’s the Mullins Center, the home court for UMass basketball and hockey, a roughly 9,500-capacity arena squarely within the New England homebase of Phish. In fact, Amherst had been a frequent stop ever since the late 80s, when they would frequently play either The Zoo, the Student Union Ballroom, or the glamorously named Campus Pond.

Making the leap from a literal pond (as recently as 1992!) to the biggest room on campus must have been quite the head trip in early 1994. As a result, the April show is played pretty safe, notable primarily for the live debut of the updated lyrics to Axilla, a cheerier-than-usual Stash, and the first appearance in almost a year of The Vibration of Life, nestled in its primary home within the You Enjoy Myself ambient section. 

Six-and-a-half months and 85 (!) shows later, there’s another YEM > Vibration of Life > YEM in Amherst, a pretty rare repeat alongside the less notable UMass back-to-backs of Fee, Julius, and Nellie Kane (which gets played electric in April, and acoustic in November). Honestly, given the last three shows, November’s Amherst stop is pretty much a return to safe shores. The setlist is a little more challenging, with Peaches, Glide and Melt providing some first-set prog and BBFCFM bringing the Phishy weirdness to the second. There’s also a couple nifty segues, including an unfinished Wilson where Trey scats the drum intro to Peaches instead of his usual “blap-boom” business, a tidy little song suite of 2001 > Simple > Poor Heart > Julius, and a rare YEM vocal jam segue — a particularly unhinged one — into the aforementioned hirsute martians. 

Thus, YEM > VoL > YEM is the best one-to-one comp for these two shows. YEM is a particularly hard song for taste testing different versions, especially when neither version even makes the jam chart. For all its length, YEM is very structured, both in its 10-11 composed minutes and the way the jam navigates from the Page’s post-tramps organ solo into the closing chapters of the bass-and-drums and vocal jams.

The April version gets the Vibration of Life explanation over with fairly quickly, and includes a little bonus chatter before the trampolines — Trey’s still on the DL with his ankle injury suffered the week before, and Brad “the guy who throws the balls out” Sands subs for him, with a bit of jesting about how badly he did the last time out. The jam is straightforward and very Trey-centric; it starts quiet and builds predictably, before yielding the floor for a pretty long Mike and Fish duet and a vocal jam that flirts with the “oh-we-oh” chant of the Wicked Witch’s castle guards. 

November’s version clocks in at only twenty seconds longer and isn’t dramatically different, but a lot of subtle touches reveal a more assured band. Either that, or it’s the tapers that have gotten more confident — the sound is much better, which no doubt contributes to the performance feeling far crisper. The Vibration of Life explanation is longer and more riddled with in-jokes: “No relation, of course, to the Dude of Life” and “You got to be careful with this stuff though, it’s powerful stuff, you don’t want too much. You end up looking like that,” which I’m going to assume means Fishman. 

The structure of the jam might be the same as April, but it’s played with much more swagger. The quiet beginning is broken down all the way to silence, inspiring a spirited clap-along from a Mullins Center crowd that was a bit restless during the first YEM. Trey’s licks are considerably funkier and simpler, which Page and Mike seize upon — Page using his clavinet, which was a rarity earlier in the year. Trey retreats momentarily and returns as a rhythm guitarist, establishing a variation on the usual YEM jam chord progression that carries the band to the finish line. Trey even tosses one more post-peak idea out to set the tone askew for the bass-and-drums segment, and he doesn’t fully sit it out (or dance along; did he do that back then?), adding scratchy chords and wah pedal deep in the background. Overall, it’s a small step on the long arc towards the Albany YEM in a year and change, but less of a cookie-cutter YEM than April’s version.

If you need another data point, we can even reach into the future and cue up 12/4/95, the third consecutive Mullins Center show with a YEM. It’s the shortest of the three, but that’s likely down to the composed section getting dosed with the December 1995 energy; it is absolutely blazing, with no time to spare for The Vibration of Life. It’s the last version before Albany, and you can hear some foreshadowing — Trey spends a little time on his drum kit, there’s a solo guitar breakdown, Page has some new synth tones, everything’s basically dripping with funk. All it lacks is the patience of its more famous December peers.

These differences are not night-and-day, or spring-and-fall. But you couldn’t pick them up just by reading a setlist or looking at song length either. Part of the improvement is spending an insane amount of time playing shows together in 1994. Part of it is an expanded sonic palette. And part of it is increased comfort playing in college basketball arenas, in campus towns where they once played house parties. Like leaves changing color, there are subtle changes happening all over the place that will soon and suddenly be stark.

[Stub from Golgi Project.]