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Phish has never been very good at the whole “touring in support of a new album” thing. In theory, this summer swing was scheduled to promote the release of A Live One, their first official live recording. But A Live One didn’t come out until June 27th, at which point almost three-quarters of the tour was already in the books. Only six shows remain to feature the album at a time when their fans could actually hear and purchase it, if “featuring the album” was actually a useful live strategy for Phish.
Of course, live albums are different from studio albums; one could argue that just the act of playing concerts at all was sufficient advertisement for the loyal and the curious to patronize their local record shop. And it’s not like A Live One contained any “new material,” at least for Phish fans into tape trading — Montana would have been the only mystery track for their core audience, even if half the songs hadn’t appeared on a studio album. Still, you’d expect the extensive curation that went into choosing 1994 highlights for A Live One to influence the band’s priorities on the subsequent tour, leading to an almost subliminal promotion effort.
The first of two nights at Jones Beach is about as close to a “record release party” setlist as you’ll get from Phish. The band plays 5 of the dozen songs included on A Live One, a concordance that seems too improbable to be mere coincidence. For further evidence, those five tracks also include the least-common song to appear on the new collection, Gumbo, and an extremely difficult half-hour Tweezer, just like the one on the record. (A Tweezer, by the way, that is the most forced of the summer’s marathon versions, though one with a pretty prominent Free jam in the middle, the final phish.net-approved Dave’s Energy Guide, and a strong “Cannonball” tease.)
The overlap made me wonder whether the songs featured on A Live One got more of a push in Summer 95, either as a subtle form of publicity or because of the band’s listening project in assembling their live album. I compared the frequency of each song’s performance in Summer 95 to Fall 94 (not including the NYE run) and found that the answer is...maybe.
Four songs — Stash, YEM, Chalk Dust, Tweezer — were played at pretty much the same rate as they were last fall, in somewhere between a quarter and a third of all shows, reflecting their regular rotation. Three A Live One songs were played less often: Bouncing was down a tick, Simple came down from it’s insane near-50% rate of Fall 94 to a more reasonable 1-every-4 rotation, and Wilson dropped the most, going from 22% of shows last year to a mere 2 appearances in the 22 shows of summer.
The more compelling evidence that A Live One was fresh in their minds is the group of four songs that got a boost from Fall 94 to Summer 95: Gumbo, Harry Hood, Slave, and Coil. Hood and Slave don’t get huge bumps — both go from 22% to 27% — but they fill an increasingly important role in this summer of dark, challenging improv, providing a blast of euphoric, melodic jamming to rescue fans from the deep explorations of the summer’s Bowies, Tweezers, and Mike’ses. Coil provides a different kind of cooldown, the obligatory Page solo finding new poignancy in front of larger crowds. And Gumbo, though still not a frequent presence in setlists, gets new opportunities outside of the occasional horn section sit-in.
However, the influence of A Live One went beyond individual songs. The faux “sets” of the double record lay down the setlist structure for Summer 95: a songier first set followed by a second half that features a massive piece of improvisation. That had been the case previously — ALO was consciously programmed by the band to replicate a Phish show — but the jam scales had started to tip more heavily to the second set by the end of 1994, a trend that only continued in 1995. Now, a five-song “set” is no longer a CD-length contrivance.
The multiple-show compilation format of A Live One also means it’s heavy on standalone tracks rather than segues or song suites — the only real transition is the manufactured run of Gumbo > Montana > YEM. Coincidentally or not, segues are also rare in the Summer 95 tour, with the band concentrating more on the improvisational opportunities within songs, rather than between them. Sets sometimes play out like recording sessions, with clean space before and after each song for future editing...at the occasional cost of overall set flow.
But it’s the decision to include the hefty Bangor Tweezer on A Live One that seems to have left the deepest impression on the subsequent tour. As I wrote back on that show’s 25th birthday, it was an odd choice, not just for the risk of alienating the new fans they were trying to attract, but because that performance was such an anomaly for Phish at the time. But tapping that big Tweezer for the official release turned a rare event into a regular one, as almost every show in Summer 95 got a jam of similar length and often comparable complexity.
That’s probably the most mischievous effect of holding back A Live One until this tour is nearly over. If you weren’t a regular tape trader or hadn’t attended a show in the specific window of November/December 1994, there was nothing to prepare the casual fan for the freeform jamming they were force-fed this summer. I imagine this was the first point in Phish’s career where they actively lost fans, either from the intense, more experimental jamming or from the loss of venue intimacy. Fortunately for them, A Live One was about to import a whole bunch more.
[Ticket Stub from Golgi Project.]