Open Ending

7/3/95, North Fayston, VT, Summer Stage at Sugarbush

Phish’s party on the ski slopes of Sugarbush brought an intensive summer course to a close. With 22 shows in 27 days, there wasn’t much time to relax or reflect on how the music unfolded between June 7th in Idaho and July 3rd in Vermont, either for those playing it, those watching it, or those writing about it a quarter-century later. But Phish, especially when they’re playing shows, never stands still. So it’s time for my usual end-of-tour rubric: What are the things they could do in the final shows that they couldn’t do at the start of summer, or at the end of last year?

The two nights in Sugarbush aren’t the best shows of the tour (I’m going with 7/1 for that award) and they aren’t the most representative either, with a heavy dose of hometown hijinks. But zooming out to a four-day holiday weekend in combination with the two shows in Great Woods, the final run of shows does feel different, more of a preview of what Phish will bring to the fall tour than what they explored for the three weeks prior. Here is a quartet of new themes that jumped out to me from that last foursome, which served as an epilogue to one tour and a prologue to another.

The Distant Smell of Cowfunk

One of the pleasures of diving deep into this tour has been the occasional unexpected flash-forward to my favorite years of Phish, the psych-funk of 97 and its disintegration into the rich ambient of 98. The premature birth date of the former phase is usually charted back to the Albany YEM of 12/9/95, with a jam on “Theme From Shaft” previewing the sound of the future. But there are little teases of “James Brown on his worst night” throughout Summer 95, notably in the 6/30 Weekapaug Groove, where 6:30 - 10:30 is a fall 97 premonition, complete with a stop-start jam and Trey wah-pedal breakdown at 9:00. 

Two nights later at Sugarbush, they’ll excavate the syrupy strut of Camel Walk, a song that hovered over the sound of 1997 while only appearing three times, for the first time in 758 shows (it’s greeted with silence). In the second set, Page’s lightly-used clavinet gets a starring role in Makisupa Policeman, which builds to a layered drone crescendo reminiscent of the godly 11/19/97 version and many arena-ambient 98/99 moments. The tools might not all be there yet, both in terms of band gear and band mentality, but by starting to experiment more deeply with texture in 1995, the seeds were planted to bloom in two years’ time. 

The New Songs (and Old New Songs)

Camel Walk didn’t stick around but its fellow bustout on 7/3 did. The song that old-school Phish fans know as Timber Ho! — actually Josh White’s 1930’s blues “Jerry The Mule” — hadn’t been heard from since 1992, but it would go on to make 11 more appearances in 1995. It’s the classic case of an older cover hibernating until it fit the current moment (see also: Sneaking Sally Through The Alley, Cities, Boogie On Reggae Woman); in this case, the off-kilter progression and ominous rhythm of the song fit the darker jamming style of the year. It fits so well, in fact, that they keep on playing it in the very next song, threading its chords through the intro of the 7/3 Bowie. 

Some of the actual new songs and covers from the Class of ‘95 won’t fare so well in fall. Spock’s Brain and Glide II are officially in storage, Don’t You Wanna Go? has only one final appearance yet to make, Lonesome Cowboy Bill is off the ranch until they cover Loaded. But most of the songs that survived have laid down roots in solid positions, and are starting to feel less like awkward intrusions to the general show flow.

Theme didn’t make it to Sugarbush, unfortunately, but its final version of the summer on 7/1 is a triumph, starting out as a fresh breeze from the claustrophobia of Maze but turning the screws in its own way as Trey deploys a wild detuning effect in the jam. Its sibling Free has bounced around between the first and second sets, but filled roles well as a set opener (6/29), late-set rocker (7/3), and a melodic landing pad after extended dissonance (6/26 and 6/16). Strange Design is a gentle release valve for other high-throttle jams, including the Jones Beach Bowie and the unfinished Stash on 7/1. Only poor Prince Caspian is still adrift, just kind of plopped down in the middle of the first set on 7/1 and still without much of a beginning or end. 

Sharing The Wheel

Speaking of Free, it has come to light over the course of these summer essays that Trey’s mini percussion kit was likely not yet onstage, despite what the Boise show notes would have you believe. But the intention behind that new piece of gear — de-emphasizing Trey’s lead guitar and bringing the other members into more prominent roles — remained a focus of the tour. Instead of going BUP-tik, BUP-tik through the entirety of a Free or Mike’s jam, Trey backgrounded himself there and elsewhere by focusing on atmospheric effects, pedal-hopping and conceding the steering wheel. 

July 1st has a couple great examples of this exercise paying off. The rare second-set Stash works itself into a nasty tangle like many of the summer’s big jams, but Trey disappears around the 15 minute mark, ceding the front of the stage to Mike playing an aggressively overdriven lead until Trey comes roaring back in with a wall of feedback at 16:45. The band can’t really recover from this power rebalance, pulling the plug and shifting into Strange Design. Later, it’s Page’s turn, leading the way on a special version of Hood described adeptly by Scott Bernstein at Jambase: “Each riff is so striking it wouldn’t be a surprise if the keyboardist had prepped for his time to shine in advance of the show.”

Democracy also helps the half-hour Sugarbush Bowie move more compellingly than its equally prolonged but denser relative in Jones Beach. There’s Page leading the Bathtub Gin jam on clavinet, Mike nudging the band into a deranged stretch at 16:00, Trey brusquely triggering a maniacal run through of Johnny B. Goode, and Fishman taking the captain seat after it’s done. For the second time, the jam out of the baffling Chuck Berry cover is a keeper, with Timber-style drums keeping an otherwise noisy stretch from losing momentum and paving the path back to the song’s finale.

Spread It Round

If you’ve been following the essays all month, you may be surprised to hear me speaking positively about the Sugarbush Bowie; I was surprised too. My feelings about the length and intensity of the summer’s extended jams have drawn some pushback from a few of myfavoriteonlinePhishthinkers, yet I remain resolved that, by Jones Beach, Phish’s Summer 95 approach of relentless, harsh improvisation was burning out. But this Bowie moves back towards my sweet spot, with several different themes explored both before and after the embedded oldies cover, and less of a one-dimensional focus on piling tension upon tension.

That perceptible shift comes after three shows that had scaled back the idea of the second-set jam centerpiece, with no individual tracks crossing the 20-minute mark between 6/30 and 7/2. Yet the total amount of improvisation in those shows isn’t reduced, it’s just distributed more evenly. Consider July 1st again, which goes deep and dark in four different songs: Melt, Chalk Dust, Maze, and Stash, each of which explore similar dissonant territory as the singular long jams of earlier shows. But spread out, it’s much more tolerable and even sometimes punches much harder — the 7/1 Melt is one of the most hair-raising experiences of the summer, even at a “lean” 17-and-a-half minutes.

The itch to pull the plug sooner can backfire for sure, as heard on the 7/2 Tweezer, which is just getting warmed up when a playful Mike tease of Ha Ha Ha triggers both an excellent segue and a premature end. But in general, my personal Phish taste would rather suffer those early terminations from time to time in order to get the more organically extended jams, when pushing forward feels like the right thing to do instead of a pre-show decision. Where those more fond of Summer 95 and myself agree is that their conscious effort to find the outer limits of their improvisational abilities was an essential step for the future evolution of the band, leaving this month as an incredibly important tour for Phish...even if some of its rewards wouldn’t be reaped until much later.

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project. Two more posts coming your way this month, then I’ll see you again in September.]