Phish Sings The Bluhs
2/25/97, Munich, GER, Incognito
SET 1: Runaway Jim > My Soul, One Meatball, Little Red Rooster, Got My Mojo Working, Stash, Waste > Taste, Loving Cup
SET 2: Beauty of My Dreams > Sample in a Jar > Punch You in the Eye > Free, Fee -> My Friend, My Friend, Down with Disease > Prince Caspian, La Grange, Sweet Adeline
ENCORE: Chalk Dust Torture
If you were listening to the winter European tour in real time and trying to predict Phish’s next steps, I’m not sure you would have landed on funk. Apart from a few flashes here and there, the “James Brown on his worst night” strategy wasn’t really on display yet. Instead, the band debuted a bushel of new covers that cast a wide net across genres: an Elvis ballad, a new bluegrass tune, some LA roots rock, and classic Marley. But if you were triangulating the strain of music Phish seemed most into on this run, you’d probably pick the one represented by the most-played new cover: Clifton Chenier’s My Soul.
Chenier is mostly known as a zydeco artist, his accordion bringing a Cajun flavor to his take on blues, jazz, and R&B. But Phish has no accordion (get on that, Page!), and their arrangement of My Soul is a straightforward 12-bar blues, punctuated by guitar and piano solos and shrill backing vox. Debuting in London, My Soul would go on to feature in 8 of the tour’s 14 shows, not to mention 30 of the 67 shows in 1997. They really liked playing My Soul.
And I really did not/do not care for it. There are very few Phish songs I would say I outright despise, but My Soul is the very first one that comes to mind. I didn’t even see it that much, only running into it about once a year in the 90s. But I’ve been baffled to watch it become something of a desirable bustout in the 3.0 era. Unless you kids are just being ironic, I never can tell.
The core of my distaste comes from a personal bias that 36FTV listeners are familiar with: I just don’t generally care for the blues, and I especially do not care for Phish playing the blues. Like any good Chicagoan, I respect the genre. But blues is a very structured form, its joy found in how performers put their own imprint on a tried-and-true formula, instead of how they break that mold in surprising ways. Which runs counter to my appreciation of Phish, and how they are constantly cracking apart and expanding the boundaries of songs, whether their own or those borrowed from another artist.
But that doesn’t apply when Phish plays the blues, when they are unfailingly painstaking, polite, and predictable. It’s true for My Soul, it’s true for Funky Bitch, it’s true for Jesus Just Left Chicago, and it’s true on this night in Munich, where Phish plays (after the obligatory My Soul) a trio of blues songs with guest singer and fellow expat Sydney Ellis on lead vocals. Together, they play “One Meatball” (first recorded by Timber songwriter Josh White), the Muddy Waters favorite “Got My Mojo Working,” and — of most interest to jamfans — Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster.”
That’s right, the same LRR that Bobby Weir tormented millions of Deadheads with in the 80s and 90s. Vocally, it’s in much more capable hands with Ms. Ellis, and there’s no slide guitar, thank the gods. But where the Dead could at least offer a convincingly (if maybe not always intentional) shambling and loose blues backing groove, Phish is just too competent, like a blues band you’d hear in a nice family restaurant, or a Lifetime rom-com set in a tourist blues joint.
They sound more at ease later in the show when they play a song (Loving Cup) by the greatest blues-rock band of all time, and another (La Grange) by the greatest American blues-rock band of all time. The Stones and ZZ Top may have started out playing blues standards, but they found their greatest success by hybridizing the genre with other forms. Phish are natural hybridizers themselves; in fact they’re hybridizers of those hybridizers, transforming classic rock a further epoch beyond its blues-swiping origins.
So while there’s a certain “roots” music flavor to the new crop of covers in early 1997, it’s easy to hear why they were just diversions. Funk, where the band eventually found sure footing, is much better suited to Phish’s mongrel sound, itself a future-facing stew of jazz, R&B, rock, and undefinable psychedelic ooze. And it’s far more open-ended, a genre with rules that are meant to be tweaked, modified, and broken. In the game of dress-up that seems to accompany every Phish transitional period, funk provides the springboard that the blues cannot.