Norm Breakers

12/1/95, Hershey, PA, Hersheypark Arena

SET 1: Buried Alive > Down with Disease > Theme From the Bottom, Poor Heart, Wolfman's Brother > Chalk Dust Torture, Colonel Forbin's Ascent > Fly Famous Mockingbird, Stash, Cavern

SET 2: Halley's Comet > Mike's Song -> Weekapaug Groove, The Mango Song > Wilson > Suspicious Minds > Hold Your Head Up, David Bowie -> Catapult -> David Bowie

ENCORE: Suzy Greenberg

Listen on phish.in or Spotify

There are rules of grammar for Phish shows, regulations on what is supposed to happen when, and in the proper order. The great Phish shows violate these rules: jamming a song that doesn’t normally expand, leaping into deep improvisation in the first set, playing only a small number of songs or playing a lot of songs, split up and reprised. The great Phish tours break these rules night after night, until the band and audience are left thrillingly adrift from the usual structures, with no idea of what comes next. 

Hershey kicks off the legendary month of December 1995 by violating one of the band’s most ironclad rules. For a decade they had played Mike Gordon’s song called, inventively, Mike’s Song. For the last seven years they had paired it with Weekapaug Groove, usually providing the bread of a sandwich around I Am Hydrogen, though lately mixing up those middle ingredients. But until tonight in Hershey, they had never grafted the two songs directly together, a...bread sandwich, I suppose, but way tastier than that metaphor sounds. 

As an affront to Phish norms, Mike’s -> Weekapaug is as dramatic as opening a show with Tweezer Reprise, a trick they’ve pulled twice already this tour. But while it may be the greatest four minutes in live rock music, Tweeprise is usually the same four minutes every time. Directly connecting the open potentials of Mike’s and Weekapaug is like touching the jumper cables together, guaranteed to generate sparks and even danger. That’s reflected here in the fact that this Weekapaug starts — and remains for 8 and a half minutes — in the wrong key: F instead of the normal D, lending the song a new layer of derangement.

But to back up slightly, this whole night in Hershey feels like the band pushing against the script, fueled by the usual late-tour restlessness. Each set opens up with a rarity for the time in Buried Alive and Halley’s, and the former is chased by the long-awaited return of Down with Disease, conspicuous in its absence since late June, snubbed by a tour that would have suited it perfectly. Later in the first set, Phish rejects its own recent, self-imposed near-ban on the narration songs, with Trey unable to resist the chocolatey surroundings and the proximity to King of Prussia, PA. It’s a pretty hilarious narration, even if it barely touches on the Gamehendge mythology, and it produces the perfect epigraph if I ever turn these essays into a book: “I hope you are all with me and following this story; if not, ask the guy next to you.”

Those bustouts and hijinks (and a darn good Stash) are already enough to qualify Hershey as a memorable show, but it’s the Mike’s -> Weekapaug that lifts it even further. If you don’t buy yesterday’s argument that Dayton is an honorary member of the December 95 club, then let me declare this exact segue as the official kickoff of the legendary month. The Mike’s is tremendous, with a prophetic Trey/Fish machismo showdown in the middle, the undercard to tomorrow’s musical fistfight, a speed test that builds from a high-strung hush to a roar. Phish has always played fast, but now they’re doing it with an imposing muscularity they learned by osmosis from The Who, and it’s producing exhilarating results. 

The mini-kit, as ever, threatens to bring down the party, but Trey swings his guitar back around with mischief in mind. You can hear the forbidden segue occur to him in the rhythm part he starts playing right away, and a couple minutes later they’re there, all four members in on the plan in a matter of seconds, even in that erroneous key. Nobody even looks at each other until just before they start singing. 

With such an unconventional beginning and without Hydrogen or a substitute breather in between, there’s no way they could just play a typical Weekapaug. The higher than normal key makes the song feel extra manic, no doubt because they’re concentrating twice as hard at playing a familiar song in an unfamiliar scale. There’s the slightest attempt at a funk jam, but this is not the time or place — Trey wah pedals his way back to a furious pace and refuses to release, whipping the band on faster and faster and faster. It’s almost painful to watch the long shot starting at 28:50 of Mike blurrily slapping almost too rapidly for a standard-definition camcorder to capture.

Phish’s collective finger stays in the socket for the rest of the show, even across closed-jam songs such as Mango, Wilson, and Suspicious Minds. The Bowie that closes the set is the year’s shortest, believe it or not, but so feral it feels like anything longer would collapse the venue in a cloud of cocoa smoke. It’s almost a throwback to Bowies before the song led the charge into experimental marathons in Fall 94, but so much heavier than any early 90s version.

That’s the irreproducible, magnificent tension of December 95 to my ears: Phish perfecting the sound they had gradually assembled over their first dozen years while already starting to find interesting ways to violate and rewrite the formula. These are songs played to their absolute fullest without deviating too far off their initial blueprint, but smashed together in unpredictable ways, giving them new life. Phish may be a wild animal in 1995, but you can still squint and see a straight line leading back to what they started in the dorm cafeterias and french-fry joints of the 80s. But you can also sense the seeds of rebellion digging in, the jagged lines to come.

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]