Keep Phish Weird
SET 1: Buried Alive > Poor Heart > Slave to the Traffic Light, I Didn't Know, Demand > Llama, Foam, Strange Design, I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome, David Bowie
SET 2: Julius, Simple > Tweezer -> The Lizards, Sample in a Jar, Suspicious Minds > Hold Your Head Up, Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise
ENCORE: Funky Bitch
After press time on the Spokane Opera House essay last week, reader Chris Harriott alerted me to the controversy surrounding that night’s version of Harry Hood. Back in 1995, all the fan punditry about ongoing tours was centered around rec.music.phish, the Usenet newsgroup where fans went to see last night’s setlist, read some attendee reviews, and try to imagine what it actually sounded like until the tapes arrived. The Spokane Hood provoked considerable online panic, not for Trey’s unamplified guitar trick but for the ending, or rather the lack thereof.
“Not finishing Harry Hood is worse than any blue balls I could think of. I just don't understand why they are teasing us,” wrote Mugsy528.
“I heard that the reason phish has not been finishing Harry was because they are not allowed to say "you can feel good about hood" anymore because the hood company was getting mad at them,” speculated Lizards420.
“it is VERY disturbing to think that i might see a harry hood this tour that will be unfinished...seriously, i'm convinced that this could prove damaging to the soul of phish lovers... maybe we should start a help group…” worried pHiL.
“It is a tremendous ending to Harry, that sounds like an amazing 'Theme' ending would,” reassured the wise Charlie Dirksen.
I’m not sure if Phish ever checked r.m.p. from internet cafe modems along their tour routes in the mid-90s, but tonight’s Harry Hood in Austin — the first performance of the song since Spokane — feels an awful lot like a reply to the controversy. And they don’t wait until the end to tweak sensitive fans’ noses; after a fairly typical intro, the band sings the opening lines at a hush, almost seductively. It’s business as usual from there, though the jam is not the stargazing voyage enshrined on A Live One, with a more rhythmic and aggressive approach from Trey. Just when it’s about to crest, perhaps into the “wall of sound” ending from Spokane, it falls off a cliff...not into the thrilling breath-catching valley of the ALO version, but into an anticlimactic finish. Listen closely, and you’ll hear Trey, sotto voce, singing “you can feel good, good about Hood” before crashing into Tweezer Reprise.
It’s a thumb in the eye to all the fans who (I can almost guarantee) ran up to the band in the last week and screamed “WHY DID YOU RUIN HOOOOOOOOD?!” But it’s also the kind of cheeky move they always reveled in, and the kind of inside prank that only increases in frequency as long tours progress. There are other flashes of mischief peppered throughout the show; most notably, a Slave that appears as the third song of the first set without losing any of its late-show emotional intensity, ramping up to the usual cathartic explosion less than 20 minutes after lights down.
More generally, the second night in Austin finds Phish in a mood to subvert the expectations of any audience members who showed up expecting something similar to A Live One, or even continuity with the summer shows of just four months prior. Expecting a long, nasty Bowie? Well, it’s back in its canonical role as a first set closer, and the most interesting part isn’t the dissonant middle jam but the haunted house ambience of the intro, moaning its way out of acoustic bluegrass and not even turning on its hi-hat strobe for nearly three eerily weightless minutes.
When they strike up Tweezer in the sweet spot of the second set, some audience members might have anticipated the experimental half-hour of A Live One, the hour-long travelogues of the summer, or even the manic medley of the Bomb Factory from the last time they visited Texas. But tonight’s Tweezer is mercilessly efficient, whittling down the idea smorgasbord of those earlier versions in favor of a concise thesis statement about the two sounds they’re most invested in developing right now. For the first half of the jam, it’s Trey working on his swagger, a cocksure lead over a steady rhythm section with Page flitting between co-lead and support roles. For the back half, it’s a dive into texture, as Trey sits back and refuses to play a clean note for five minutes while the rest of the band settles into an ominous groove.
Neither the Bowie nor the Tweezer are anywhere near as overtly confrontational as they became over the last 12 months. But they’re still toying with the crowd, no matter how well they’ve studied up in advance, dancing just a step ahead of their audience like a boxer anticipating his foe’s next move. In the days where news traveled slowly, moving at the speed of newsgroups and padded envelopes instead of instantaneous couch tour transmission, Phish excelled at this cat-and-mouse game. And like all Phish tours destined to be classics, the fans of the time weren’t quite sure yet if they were being played.
[Poster by Les Seifer. Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]