Keep It In The Freezer

11/28/94, Bozeman, MT, Brick Beeden Fieldhouse

What was Phish doing in Montana on a Monday night in late November? Well, if you’re trying to get from Minneapolis to the Pacific Northwest in 4 days, there aren’t too many other places to stop. But even in this remote setting, there was another sign that their popularity is accelerating faster than their tour booking practices. Before they arrived, demand forced them to upgrade to a larger venue, shifting from the 1800-capacity Montana State University gym to their 8500-capacity field house — in a town with a population of only 26,811 in 1994. There’s no indication that it sold out, but if it had, that would be on third of the town of Bozeman in “the largest wood dome structure in the world” that night.

Phish “rewarded” these diehards with their longest jam to date, obliterating the record established two nights earlier by eight whole minutes. The Bangor Tweezer and the Bozeman Tweezer are the Two Towers of Phish jams bookending November 1994, and the Bozeman Tweezer is Barad-dûr, the more imposing of the pair. It’s not particularly dark or intense, but in its uncompromising length and approach, it exceeds even the challenging listen of the Bangor version. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t particularly like it.

I don’t think this is a particularly controversial opinion among Phish fans. Every more-than-casual Phish fan knows about the Bozeman Tweezer, but I can’t think of any that put it on regularly. It’s more of a proof of principle, similar to the nearly hour-long Runaway Jim of 11/29/97, which isn’t even the most famous jam of its run, never mind the broader tour. For a fanbase that fetishizes the stopwatch on jams, even we have our limits, it appears.

The main issue is that the Bozeman Tweezer gives a listener very few holds to grasp on to in its rough terrain. The “Montana” excerpt that made it onto A Live One might be a tantalizing suggestion of atmosphere and patience, but in full context, it’s a rare island of coherence, setting up a brief fling with “I’m a Man” instead of a You Enjoy Myself from one week in the future. Before that segment, there are ten minutes of standard galloping Tweezer jam; if it had gone into the slowdown ending at 15 minutes, it’d be a perfectly fine 93/94 Tweeze. After the “I’m a Man” tease fades out, there’s still 22 minutes left to go, and I would challenge any Phish fan to hum a single melody from that long stretch.

Don’t get me wrong, I love spacey, minimal Phish. I particularly adore a digital delay loop jam, which plays the same recalibrating role in this jam that the vacuum segment played in 11/26’s Bowie. But here the rest of the band can’t quite find their position in and around the Trey loops — a challenge that would take them a few more years to master — and it knocks the rest of the jam off course. In the back half of the jam, there are times when only one or two band members are audible, like the stretches of Big Cypress when half the band took a Porta-Potty break. In the 30s, it becomes almost like a soundcheck jam, in the most procedural sense: a Page solo, a Mike solo, Trey strumming some chords, check 1, 2.

For all its faults, the Bozeman Tweezer was inevitable. If the improvisational style of the month was “choose the less obvious path, and cross your fingers it works out,” there was eventually going to be an attempt when they kept hitting dead ends. You can’t blame them for trying: If the 36-minute voyage last time out was a success — and it was, to ears both then and now — why not push it even farther until you find the breaking point? But the Bozeman Tweezer never reaches a satisfying resolution like the euphoric final stretch of the 11/26 Bowie, which arrived at truly original Phish jamming after its weird phase. Instead, after a long cycle chasing a eureka moment, tonight’s jam reaches for the predictable lifeline of the Tweezer riff, does the Tweeprise build in a different key, and ends in the traditional fashion (albeit with one more cool Trey loop).

It sure seems like the band themselves felt they took it too far in Bozeman; once they hit the West Coast, the long jams of November are reined back in to a more reasonable twentysomething minutes, at most. Phish, wisely, will table the extended improv until Summer 1995, when they have some new tricks to sustain those long passages. The Bozeman Tweezer sets the template for those tape-side-filling excursions, and sketches out the spacier (in both cosmic and density senses) style of the late 90s. But judged in Montana-style isolation, it’s an experiment that doesn’t pay off.

[Stub from Golgi Project]