Lassie’s Pedigree

12/29/94, Providence, RI, Providence Civic Center

Musically, the Providence Bowie is the punctuation mark on Phish’s long 1994. There are still two more shows to be played, and they’re big ones, but they’re significant for reasons that are largely peripheral to the music played on stage. December 30th and 31st are an epilogue, while this night’s centerpiece jam is the end of a year-long arc that truly launched way back in early May in north Texas. The Bomb Factory was the first step towards longform Phish jamming, but there was still work to be done to carve it into the shape we know today. This Bowie is the next big milestone.

While it’s impressive, the Providence Bowie isn’t anomalous. The 12/29 version of the song was preceded by some equally ambitious versions in the fall, including a nearly 26-minute portrayal in Grand Rapids on 11/14 and my treasured Minneapolis Bowie from 11/26, which outlasts Providence by five minutes and change. But both of these jams are quintessentially Fall 1994 — they have moments of transcendent invention, and moments of tedious indecision, often in close proximity.

What makes the 12/29 Bowie special is that it gives you all of the former with none of the latter, a 31-minute high-wire act of sustained improvisation that they had not achieved previously. And this version accomplishes that feat by stitching together the best parts of its hit-and-miss ancestors into a breathtaking half-hour that never spins its wheels. 

From its 11/14 parent, the Providence Bowie inherited a rebellious streak. Unlike the more open-ended Tweezer, which easily adapted itself into a freeform improv launchpad in 1994, Bowie has a pretty standard Type I mold that had to be broken to achieve full flight. In Grand Rapids, they barely get a couple steps down that well-worn path before diving instead into the dark brush. There’s a little discordant Mike figure at 5:00 that Trey follows, and apart from the thin bread crumbs laid by Fishman’s hi-hat, they never really retrace their steps. 

Instead, it almost sounds like they’re playing exquisite corpse around a campfire, taking turns introducing a creepy concept and letting the others riff on it. This pattern goes on for quite a long time, with only the slightest Bowie jam reprieve at 13:43, until it reaches one of the spookiest moments I’ve heard on a Phish tape, a stretch where the band is mostly silent while the crowd chants and woos in unison; when I did this last time, I called it a “Satanic ritual.” There’s even some band whistling afterwards, to really foreshadow 12/29. But this dark weather never really clears up — when the tension finally breaks, it pretty quickly transforms into the end of the song — which is admirably sadistic, but still one-dimensional and a tough pill to swallow.

Enter parent #2, the Bowie of the Orpheum Theatre, which reaches its impressive length in part by doing both a typical Bowie jam and a Fall 94-style free-for-all within its 36 minutes. Here, the extra level of darkness is provided by a long, drum-less quartet of vacuum, megaphone, one-string bass, and piano. I love it, but that’s not what trickled down to Providence. Instead, it’s the aftermath, when everyone hops back on to their primary instrument and creates a musical passage that is completely foreign to Bowie. It retains the menacing pace of the song, but splices it with rock swagger and a brighter key to build a frenzied peak before the usual trills come in and take the baton across the finish line. 

In Providence, to paraphrase the meme, they got them a jam that could do both. Like 11/14, this version doesn’t spend much time on the Bowie tracks, with some Page piano shards and Mike tangents keeping it off-balance and Trey concentrating on effects and textures alone for several minutes. But instead of staying in this unsettling mode for the long run, they hit upon an idea around 16:00 that mirrors the finale of 11/26. This direction both raises the intensity of the jam and calms down its ADD, teeing up a McGrupp-ish section from 20:00 to 24:00 where the key flips major, Page indulges his inner Keith Jarrett, and Trey gets set to tear into a mid-jam climax befitting of a Slave or Hood. 

But where this version does more than just recombine its ancestral DNA is at 25:25. There might be musical reasons why they can’t just go into Bowie’s natural conclusion here, given that they’ve changed the usual keys. But the ambient section that follows, and its subsequent dissolve into the Lassie/whistling/whispering nightmare, is a brilliant, counter-intuitive choice. It reminds me, structurally, of the tantric move near the end of the A Live One Hood, where everything points to a logical climax and then the band, collectively, pulls out the rug. It’s an emotional tension/release, worked into the broader structure of a marathon jam instead of between bars. 

It’s stupendously good. It’s also an act of psychological terrorism on Phish’s fans. My favorite story from the show is Scott Bernstein’s, who says his neighbor was literally hiding underneath his seat by the end of the jam — a completely understandable response. That uplifting sunny patch in the middle just makes the ensuing horror even more mind-cracking; it’s the cruel, false assurance of safety before the killer comes back for the final reel. I don’t care what drug, or lack thereof, was in your system that night, the barely audible schizophrenic whispers followed by the band screaming “Do it NOW! Do it NOW NOW NOW!” could send the sanest fan into a psychotic break. 

The triumphant success of the Providence Bowie underscores why many jams of equal duration in Fall 94 tend to leave fans cold today. It achieves what a lot of those jams are missing, and what all the great jams of Phish history possess: a narrative. At a time when many jams felt like public displays of their practice routines, or did just one or two things really well for a long time, it’s a revelation to hear a jam that weaves several distinct plot beats, even including a big twist for the final third. After the Providence Bowie, it was obvious that jams could do more than just set time records or test the band’s and the audience’s limits — they could tell a story, even if that story was a tale of cosmic horror.