One For The Stay-At-Home Types

7/13/95, Ed Sullivan Theater, New York, NY

Phish’s second appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman came less than 7 months after their first, a rapid encore by national TV standards. The circumstances of this return visit were much less hectic — last time around, Phish squeezed in their appearance between soundcheck and showtime of their Madison Square Garden debut, while this time they had 10 days off the road to prepare, and the whole day free to hang out in the green room with fellow guests Kevin Bacon and Pete Sampras. 

But they still made time for a Phishy twist. In their first visit to Letterman, while nominally promoting Hoist, they played Chalk Dust Torture, a song from two albums prior that would later appear on A Live One. This time around, after Dave holds up a copy of the live double-disc collection, they play Julius, a song from Hoist that doesn’t appear on the new set. My sympathies to the poor consumer trying to explain to a record store clerk about that song they heard on Letterman last night.

Likely due to the tight schedule on 12/30/94, Phish’s Letterman debut provided viewers with a fairly unvarnished experience. Trey is wearing the same clothes he wore for most of Fall 94 (and some of 1995 as well), Chalk Dust is abridged but otherwise typical for the era, and the only interaction with “the World’s Most Dangerous Band” is letting Paul handle the organ part. The one concession to their first time on national television is Fishman wearing a shirt under his dress.

The 1995 appearance is a much flashier production. For one, they’re better dressed: Trey upgrades his giant-sleeved K-Mart tee into a nice new button-down bowling shirt, everyone’s pants are unwrinkled (though still 500 percent too baggy, but hey, that’s the 90s), and Fishman is back to goin’ commando, as it should be. The performance is a full-on collaboration with Shaffer’s band, recruiting everyone on hand for gospel backing vocals and finger-snaps. There’s an expanded brass section as well, featuring Dave “The Truth” Grippo and a bunch of session ringers I don’t recognize. 

You can’t read too much into a 4-minute television appearance, but this Letterman stop feels particularly out of sync with where Phish found itself at the end of summer tour. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the ostracization of Hoist, with many of its songs dropping out of rotation and the band’s musical priorities doing a 180 from that album’s slick, radio-friendly rock. Julius wasn’t one of those exiled Hoist tracks, appearing at 5 out of 22 shows in the summer tour. But it still feels like a song choice suited for July 1994, not 1995, particularly when they put in so much extra work to recreate the studio arrangement (albeit layered over the faster, more direct rhythm it had assumed live).

Maybe, like Chalk Dust, Julius was played at Dave’s request. Or maybe, Phish still saw a use case for the Hoist approach when reaching outside of its core audience, a kind of code switching for formal/normal occasions. Summer 95 was a very cocky tour, with Phish daring and trusting its audiences to ride along for almost nightly half-hour improvisations. But for this gig, they were self-aware enough — or at least their Elektra A&R rep was — to know that Phish tour ≠ reality, and that there were bigger musical industry targets to aim for. 

The same week Phish returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater, Blues Traveler cracked the Billboard top 10 with “Run-Around,” and DMB was sitting at #25 on the album chart with Under The Table and Dreaming. For a brief moment this week, Phish joined their old buddies in that neighborhood, with A Live One debuting at #18 and splitting the difference between Under the Table and four at #12. But despite being their best-selling album to date (and to this day, I believe), A Live One would sink down the charts rapidly while the others stuck like barnacles — Under The Table didn’t even reach its peak position until early 1997.

But if Phish really were playing the industry game momentarily, they could’ve just kept it Cheap Trick and played the first song from their new album. Bouncing Around the Room actually was released as a promo single for A Live One, and it would attract more radio play than any of the Hoist singles, to my memory. Because of that, the song gained some notoriety on tour, with Phish fans prematurely (and, it turns out, unnecessarily) worried about a “Touch of Grey”-like effect. That was the situation when I entered Phish fandom, and it has taken me decades to realize that Bouncin’ is actually a pretty great song, the best possible version of Pop Phish. It’s both catchy and unusual, whereas Julius is...kinda catchy, and very usual.

As a result, the Letterman return is a squib; despite all the effort put into this big-band production, it still feels bland and generic. In the context of a Phish set, Julius can provide a straight-ahead rocker contrast to more complicated or open-ended material. But in isolation, it just sounds like...late-night talk show music, the kind of tune Shaffer would band-lead into commercial. With 4 minutes to capture the attention of millions of viewers who would never find themselves at a Phish show, in promotion of the album that best captured their unique character, they played it safe instead of true.

[One more post coming for Summer 95, then it’s on to prepping for Fall. If you miss me, my Grateful Dead podcast with Steven Hyden, 36 From The Vault, starts its second season today. Thanks for reading!]