Music To Read the Newspaper

11/28/95, Knoxville, TN, Knoxville Civic Auditorium

SET 1: Stash, Dinner and a Movie > Bouncing Around the Room > Foam, I Didn't Know, Divided Sky, Guyute, Hello My Baby, Sample in a Jar

SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Maze, Suzy Greenberg > Uncle Pen, Free, Hold Your Head Up > Wind Beneath My Wings > Hold Your Head Up, Run Like an Antelope > Contact > Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, Funky Bitch

ENCORE: The Squirming Coil

Listen on phish.in

The Tennessee shows at the end of November are a bit of a side mission, a distracting inland detour on Phish’s victory march up the East Coast. But both shows have meaningful guest appearances, beginning tonight with a very Phishy joke: a literal “sit-in” by Col. Bruce Hampton, who silently reads a newspaper as he is serenaded by Fishman with Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings.” This... beautiful? No. Touching? Maybe in the “inappropriate” sense. Let’s call it...inspirational moment forever enshrines Hampton as one of the band’s idols. 

“I am a creation of this man’s will,” Fishman prologues dramatically. “I, everything that I am and everything that I’ve done, has been because of his operation of the strings of my puppet being in his hand.”

I’ll admit to a blind spot when it comes to Hampton and his various projects over the years, from the Hampton Grease Band to Aquarium Rescue Unit to countless other configurations. It’s personally a little baffling why he was such a guru for Phish, appearing with the band annually in the early 90s, welcoming Phish members (most frequently Mike and Fish) to play with his bands many times more, even starring in Mike’s 2001 film, Outside Out. Phish jamming with ARU makes historical sense, as they were peers in the 90s jamband world, but I’ve never really understood Col. Bruce’s whole deal, or why an older, portly man with a mustache was such a figurehead for that whole scene.

So I called in my fellow scholar in jambandology, Jesse Jarnow, to help explain. Earlier this year, Jesse pulled together Greasebase, an index of all known Hampton Grease Band shows, and he’s got some other big writing projects on HGB in the hopper.

“I think Bruce was a big influence on Fish & Mike especially, once they met him, as sort of their own ‘local’ Beefheart/Sun Ra that they could be pals with,” Jesse wrote back. “Bruce was both an older outsider with some cosmic theories and also had pretty remarkable taste in music and musicians. Not only that but he was a serious underground music lifer who'd been sweating it out as a professional weirdo for two decades by the time they met him.”

Hampton first came to “fame” with the Hampton Grease Band, a group rock critics often triangulate at the center of the Venn diagram where the Dead, the Allmans, and the Mothers of Invention overlap...and time-shifted about 15 years, that’s not a terrible description of Phish either. Apart from maybe Junta (the version with “Union Federal”), Phish never made an album as out there as the Grease Band’s Music To Eat — for which it’s obligatory to mention its legend as the “second worst-selling album in the history of Columbia Records” — but it certainly sounds like the kind of record they’d have in heavy rotation back at Goddard College.

The double LP is full of long, multi-segmented songs, nominally psych-rock at its core but constantly being pushed off-center in unexpected directions. And unlike the Dead or the Allmans, it’s unashamedly funny, psychedelia stripped of its trendy coolness but without the deep cynicism of Zappa. Live, the Grease Band was even stranger, provoking unsuspecting hippies with band associates lurking onstage eating cereal, watching television, sewing, and playing chainsaws, logs, and anything else at hand.

“Even though they probably weren't a direct influence on Phish, the Hampton Grease Band were unquestionably the most Phish-like of the late '60s and early '70s underground bands, even more than the Mothers of Invention,” — Jesse again. “They very much had an internally developed all-but-literal secret language that came from endless gigging and endless practicing. They played TV cartoon themes in medleys, played long jams, included surreal theatrical gags, never repeated sets, gigged constantly, practiced constantly.”

As tonight’s serenade would indicate, the influence of Col. Bruce is felt strongest in the onstage persona of Jonathan Fishman, a ball of hair in a dress who, when he’s not behind the kit, deploys a number of non-musical objects musically and musical instruments un-musically while singing, er, non-traditional lead vocals. You could drop him into any of the photos or stories of the Hampton Grease Band live and he’d fit right in. Throughout Phish history, any danger of Phish sinking into muso navel-gazery is sabotaged by Fishman; he’s the force of chaos threatening to knock Trey’s musical charts into the gutter at any moment. 

More broadly, Col. Bruce arguably serves as an avatar for staying true to Phish’s inherent weirdness and never letting their audience get comfortable. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that they played such a commercially suicidal show in the Hampton Coliseum last time out. Fall 1995 could have easily been a tour where Phish “cleaned up their act” to satisfy bigger crowds and migratory Deadheads, but they mostly couldn’t help themselves — dialing back on the narration songs feels like the only concession of the tour. Their prankster spirit has held all the way up to the present era, where wacky experiments such as acrostic sets and Kasvot Vaxt have injected new life into the band and shows (e.g. 7/14/19 or 12/30/19) that reach the deepest sublime also dip into the completely ridiculous. They wouldn’t be Phish if they weren’t being mischievous dorks.

There’s a rich landscape of cultural inputs that fed Phish’s weirdness — many of them catalogued in Jesse’s superb Heads, an excellent holiday gift for the hippies in your family — but Col. Bruce was likely the most accessible, running as he did in similarly jammy circles. Though he only made one other appearances with Phish after this sit-in, playing a jackhammer during “The Overload” at Halloween 96, he’d remain an external chaotic force for Phish up until his eerily poetic onstage death at the Fox Theatre in 2017; in one example, keeping Mike out too late the night before 7/27/03. Puppetmaster might be hyperbole, but the Colonel certainly provided some marching orders.

[Ticket stub from Steve Bekkala. Thanks to Jesse Jarnow!]