SET 1: Poor Heart > Caravan > Cavern > Taste, Guelah Papyrus, Train Song, Rift > Free, The Squirming Coil, La Grange
SET 2: David Bowie, A Day in the Life, Bathtub Gin -> The Lizards, You Enjoy Myself -> Rotation Jam > Sixteen Candles > You Enjoy Myself, Harpua -> Champagne Supernova -> Harpua
ENCORE: Rocky Top
If you want to see a band that had a good year in 1996, look no further than Oasis. While their second album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was released in late 1995, the mega-hit of “Wonderwall” the following year upgraded the band from Britpop darlings into global superstars. The Gallagher Brothers’ blaze of success culminated in a sort of Clifford Ball of Oasis’ own: their concerts at Knebworth, which brought an estimated quarter of a million fans to the famous English festival ground the weekend before Phish brought their somewhat smaller crowd to Plattsburgh.
Phish probably got their fill of Oasis as they toured the continent in the summer of 1996; while they were very popular in the U.S. that year, they were simply omnipresent in the U.K. and Europe. The world may have been starting to tire of “Wonderwall” by that summer, but “Champagne Supernova” — released as a single in May 1996 — would have likely been the earworm on every radio they passed by in July. Some might say that Phish would respect a rock band getting a 7-minute song on the airwaves, but the 12/29/96 Harpua would narrate differently.
After ruminating on the similarities between the Harpua plot and The Grinch and rushing through the preliminaries, the Harpua/Poster Nutbag fight opens up a portal to the underworld. There, the Uber-Demon — who looks a lot like Tom Marshall — unleashes “the horrible sound of hell,” which happens to be “Champagne Supernova.” Harsh! (Fishman went even further in an interview from July, calling them, among many other jabs, “slick bullshit.”)
Last year’s joke-cover of “Shine” felt like a more appropriate punching bag, as a song that represented all the lowest common denominator decisions that Phish refused to make to achieve radio success. But with the benefit of hindsight, Oasis doesn’t seem all that bad, certainly unworthy of being lumped in with one-hit wonders Collective Soul and (the following year) The Proclaimers.
Though Oasis would soon succumb to classic rock n’ roll excess on subsequent albums, Morning Glory holds up as chock full of big, dumb, catchy rock songs. Being anti-Oasis at the time was usually about something other than the music: their media-engineered opposition to the posh boys of Blur or Radiohead, the obnoxious (though usually hilarious) behavior of Noel and Liam, or their copyright-flaunting swipes from The Beatles and other British greats. As Tom told me when I asked about the choice, “We picked it because they were fun to hate, but were secretly a favorite of mine.”
In fact, the parallels between Phish and Oasis run deeper than throwing the biggest concerts in their respective home countries in 1996. Phish, well, they once played an entire Beatles double album and tonight, they play one of their 37 Beatles covers, A Day In The Life, just a few songs before goofing on “Champagne Supernova.” If Morning Glory happens to be full of overt Beatles theft, Billy Breathes isn’t totally free from those sins itself, Phish is just a little more artful about how they assimilate their influences.
But more generally, both bands were proud keepers of the classic rock flame at a time when that sound’s pop culture decline was steepening post-grunge and into the era of boy bands and rap-metal. As my pal Steven Hyden put it in his excellent book Twilight of the Gods, “Phish is a classic-rock band that just happened to be born twenty years too late” — a description equally apt for Oasis. Later he says, “Phish interprets classic rock the way Zeppelin and the Stones interpreted the blues,” another line that could apply to both bands; Zeppelin and the Stones were just as guilty as Oasis of swiping the occasional riff, they just pilfered from then-obscure 78s instead of the most popular rock band ever.
If anything, 1995-1996 finds Phish converging upon some of the same territory as Oasis from a very different starting place. The process of growing into bigger venues and larger crowds involved Phish embracing some of the big rock tropes they may have once mocked, playing less fussy jams and writing simpler material. Listening to the world-conquering swagger of Oasis at Knebworth, it’s hard not to hear some of the same confidence oozing out of a great Phish Fall 95 show, or the more spread-out peaks of 1996.
The key difference between the two bands comes down to self-awareness. I don’t think it’s a reach to say that Oasis didn’t spend much time theorizing about what they were doing; they wanted to be big rock stars like their heroes, and they willed it into being, to the point of being predictably crushed beneath an old-fashioned Behind The Music combination of hubris and intra-band/sibling squabbles. Phish, even as they embraced the trappings of classic rock, still kept it at an arm’s distance. Consider the rest of 12/29/96 Set II, which also includes a rotation jam and a deranged solo Mike piano performance of “Sixteen Candles,” never mind the Harpua shell around the “Champagne Supernova” cover. Steve again:
“[Phish] turned their geekiness into a positive by acknowledging their distance from the classic-rock gods, reimagining rock history as a fun house for a special breed of rock nerd who is simultaneously reverent and irreverent toward the genre’s conventions. In the process, Phish pushed classic-rock mythology into a postmodern realm.”
Oasis is anything but postmodern; they are as earnest as the Queen is British. In 1995, Noel Gallagher summed up the band’s philosophy as “All I ever wanted to do was make a record. Here's what you do: you pick up your guitar, you rip a few people's tunes off, you swap them round a bit, get your brother in the band, punch his head in every now and again and it sells." But that still leaves some room for accidental overlap. Asked about the nonsensical words to “Champagne Supernova,” Noel Gallagher summed up the band’s perspective:
This writer, he was going on about the lyrics to "Champagne Supernova", and he actually said to me, "You know, the one thing that's stopping it being a classic is the ridiculous lyrics." And I went, "What do you mean by that?" And he said, "Well, Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball — what's that mean?" And I went, "I don't know. But are you telling me, when you've got 60,000 people singing it, they don't know what it means? It means something different to every one of them."
60,000 fans singing silly lyrics that become individually meaningful through the transmission vehicle of rock and roll music, played by musicians at the height of their powers? The horrible sound of hell sure sounds familiar…
"Some might say that Phish would respect..." Nice ;)
Haha yes I caught that too. Great write up! I love those first two oasis records.