Let’s Tune It Up
7/3/96, Trento, ITA, Stadio Briamasco
SET 1: Runaway Jim, Stash, Sparkle > Taste -> Llama
In the summer of 1992, Phish got their first chance to go abroad, opening six shows in Europe for The Violent Femmes. A month later, they made their maiden voyage through the U.S. shed circuit supporting Santana, playing 26 shows from Merriweather Post Pavilion to the Cal Expo Amphitheater. The partnership was valuable even beyond the big-time exposure, as Carlos Santana became something of a guru to Phish, indoctrinating them with his ideas about the spirituality of improvised music and creating one of the most enduring metaphors about the Phish experience.
“There’s a feeling we always talk about,” Trey told NPR in 1994. “When we went out with Santana, he had brought up this thing about The Hose...where the music is like water rushing through and as a musician your function is really like that of a hose. And well, his thing is that the audience is a sea of flowers, you know, and you’re watering the audience. But the concept of music going through you, that you’re not actually creating it, that what you’re doing is...the best thing you can do is get out of the way.”
Four years later, Phish were once again opening for the guitar legend’s band, for their second excursion through the Old World. Over a busy July, Phish would open a dozen Santana concerts, play a multi-band Belgian festival with a funny name, and book five normal two-set shows in England, Holland, Italy, and Germany. It was an extremely tentative toe-dip into a new market, spent largely in the shadow of another artist, serving up 45-minute tasting samples of their music. Still, in a time where Phish was scouting for their next move, another run with their mentor might have seemed like a good source of inspiration.
However, there was now a different power dynamic to this reunion. Later in 1996, when Phish will be selling out Madison Square Garden, The Spectrum, and The FleetCenter, Santana will be on Phish’s 93/94 circuit of more modest venues such as The Greek, The Sun Dome, and The Beacon. The year before, Phish had finally found record store success with A Live One, while Santana hadn’t seen a record go gold since before his opening act was formed. Of course Phish didn’t have (and never will have) a “Black Magic Woman” or “Oye Como Va” radio staple, but in 1996, Carlos Santana was still three years ahead of the massive cross-genre hit Supernatural, which would give his career an improbable second wind with a younger generation of fans.
Where Santana still heavily outranked Phish in 1996 was international clout; by the time they linked up in Europe, the headliners had already played that year in Colombia, Brazil, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, The Philippines, and Korea. Their stage show is a polished, melting-pot crowd-pleaser, but it also doesn’t settle for the easy state-fair greatest-hits route. Sure, there’s the obligatory Black Magic Woman > Gypsy Queen > Oye Como Va medley in the middle, but there are also hints of Santana’s fusion phase (tonight’s show opens with a brief “In A Silent Way” jam), new age sermonizing (“Open up your heart and let it come into your house...I’m talking about making friends with angels”), and slightly Vegas-y — dare I say, “smooth” — Latin pop.
It’s a unique blend, and pleasant listening, but it doesn’t sound a thing like Phish. The Phishiest elements of his set are the Hendrix worship (two different covers, and neither of them cheap: “Spanish Castle Magic” and “If 6 Was 9”) and a love of cheeky teases (“I Feel The Earth Move,” “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” “Soul Makossa”, to name a few). It’s jammy in the more standard sense, with lots of solos from Mr. Santana as well as featured spotlights for his current band members. Even without all the hits, it seems to satisfy the several thousand Italians crammed into a fourth-tier soccer stadium in northern Italy.
Phish’s European Vacation, on the other hand, gets off to an inauspicious start. The opening run was actually supposed to start the night before, in Lonigo, but Phish’s set was rained out (the boys sat in for part of Santana’s set and tore through a ripping Sonny Sharrock cover, a Marley medley with a great Trey solo, and Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” featuring both Trey and Page doing their Eddie Hazel. Listen below). In Stadio Briamasco, Trey’s guitar is uncharacteristically way off-tune as Runaway Jim starts, and he has to sheepishly announce that he’ll fix it during the song’s breakdown.
Yet the crowd response is friendly. Somehow, it sounds like a significant portion of the crowd know how to do the Stash claps, suggesting that either a number of extremely dedicated American fans made it over or that A Live One was bigger in Italy than I would have imagined. Apart from Stash, Phish concentrates their very short setlist on some of their most urgent material, including the lightning tempos of Sparkle and Llama, and the debut of Taste’s final form.
They also get some help. If you’re wondering why the crowd freaks out over Fish’s vocal turn in Taste, it’s because Carlos and percussionist Karl Perazzo have entered the stage. They stick around for the last third of the set, turning the new template for Taste into one of its most unusual performances straight away, and livening up Llama with extra rhythmic complexity. Reversing the usual opener/headliner dynamics, Carlos is hard to hear in the mix until a nice conversation with Trey in Llama, while Perazzo — who will go on to play with Phish in the fall for their most important show and week of the year — effortlessly folds right into Fishman’s idiosyncrasies.
The guest spot and the previous night’s reversal seem a promising start to the bands’ shared summer, pushing both seasoned veteran and newly-confident apprentice out of their comfort zones. But somehow, according to the phish.net data, it’s the last time members of the two groups would share the stage for the entire tour, apart from an undocumented sit-in on 7/19. Unlike 1992, when Phish would almost always join Santana for a segment of the headliner’s set, the two bands mostly kept to their own set times in 1996. Perhaps Phish didn’t feel like they needed the endorsement as they tried to find a foothold in Europe, perhaps Santana wasn’t comfortable with their understudy’s newfound leverage. Either way, it removes the most promising angle from a befuddling career choice for Phish, a potential that we get the sole glimpse of on this first night in Trento.
[Huge thanks to James Scott for posting his recording of the 7/2/96 sit-in!]