Middle Act
SET 1: Poor Heart > A Day in the Life > David Bowie, Billy Breathes > Taste That Surrounds, Bouncing Around the Room > Rift, Wolfman's Brother > Runaway Jim
SET 2: Timber (Jerry The Mule) > Kung, Mike's Song -> Rotation Jam -> Mike's Song, My Long Journey Home, I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome, Strange Design > Weekapaug Groove, Harry Hood, Hello My Baby, Poor Heart
ENCORE: Poor Heart Reprise, Fire
In an age when any yahoo with a YouTube channel, podcast, or newsletter fancies themselves an expert on The Arts, the standard three-act storytelling structure has lost all of its mystery. The first third is for meeting the characters and the setting, the middle stretch is the confrontation, the final act is the resolution — boom, you got 95 percent of all narrative fiction. It’s probably a mistake to superimpose this completely artificial structure onto real life, but as many documentarians know, sometimes it just works out that way.
November 1995 is a fine month for Phish, but in the race for second place, I’d put it behind June and October, leaving only the stubby ends of July and September beneath it. The Midwestern run at the end of October is a triumph, leading up to the payoff of Quadrophenia, and it’s only natural that there’d be a refractory period after. At least November is a shallow one; it’s too consistent to be a hangover, it’s just more of a recalibration, facing a fresh conflict as the stakes grow even higher.
You can see it best in the dates that were no doubt circled on the band’s calendar from the very start. If you’ll allow a little bit of calendar-fudging, it’s a trilogy of The Palace of Auburn Hills, the Capital Centre/USAir Arena, and the Hampton Coliseum — three of the largest venues on the tour and, it must be said, three arenas frequented by the Grateful Dead, whose ghost still hangs over the fall. At The Palace, they tried to play a normal show and got swallowed up by the cavernous space; in Landover, they tried to jam their way out of a bad start and failed. So in Hampton they try a third strategy: Let’s Get Weird.
It’s slap-happy from the start. According to Brad Sands on Under the Scales, they hit the stage planning to open with A Day In The Life, an audacious choice for their first song in the Mothership. But onstage Trey called an audible for Poor Heart instead, for the first of three times in three different tempos that evening. After the pre-planned Beatles, they drop the earliest Bowie of the tour, giving it the blistering, straight-ahead treatment of yore. Even when the setlist settles down, they’re still flooring it — don’t know if I’ve ever heard a faster Bouncin’, and the Rift that follows sounds like further punishment for Fishman, given the inhuman tempo Trey sets.
And that’s the normal set. Set 2 brings an obtuse Timber jam and a disquietingly soulful Kung, before a Mike’s that goes completely bonkers. That’s right, it’s the first-ever Rotation Jam, an inevitable development from the Chekhov’s Guns of Acoustic Army and Keyboard Cavalry, and a fun experiment. But it goes on for 13 MINUTES, a full 17 percent of the second set of their debut in one of the most-hallowed jamband venues, all spent with people not playing the instruments they are trained to play. It reaches peak absurdity when Fish is given a couple minutes unaccompanied on Page’s baby grand making pretty much the same sounds my toddler does when he sneaks onto my in-laws’ piano.
That’s followed by everyone on keyboards perversely not playing Keyboard Army, an off-model major-key, kinda rad Mike’s ending, a bluegrass mini-set, and the inevitable Strange Design before the safer shores of Weekapaug and Hood more closely approximate what sane people would expect from a rock concert. Just when those paying customers are feeling safe again, they end the set with the song from the dancing frog cartoon, play the slow version of the song they started the show with, and then attempt to reprise an ultra-slow version of the same song, where they finally find an absurd decision they can’t follow through on and bail out with a Hendrix cover.
Phew. As a connoisseur of Phish curiosities, I love it. But if it’s safe to assume that every Phish show is somebody’s first, it’s especially true on this tour, including thousands of Deadheads attempting to fill a void and likely a significant number picking the site of the famous “Warlocks” run to break the ice. What would a Phish novice make of the same country song reappearing thrice, in progressively decelerated form? Or the hairy man in the dress playing a series of instruments he’s clearly never attempted before? Or Kung? Would they even have stuck around for the excellent Hood, the night’s best indicator that Phish was perfectly capable of commanding the Mothership?
That’s why, putting my own enjoyment aside, this show feels as off-target as The Palace and the Cap, in its own way. The three shows together would make up the dressing room montage in the second act of the Phish Fall 95 biopic, the nerd trying out various trendy outfits and looking ridiculous as an impatient mentor looks on and shakes her head in frustration. Eventually, Phish will find the right balance of all three strategies — the straightforward rock numbers, the big jams, and the sense of humor— and get comfortable in the country’s most famous arenas. But that denouement, wherein our heroes conquer their fears, slay the dragon, and win our hearts forevermore, will have to wait for December.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]