Precisely Divided

12/31/96, Boston, MA, Fleet Center

SET 1: Axilla > Peaches en Regalia > Punch You in the Eye, Cars Trucks Buses, Stash, The Horse > Silent in the Morning > Divided Sky, Sample in a Jar > Tweezer Reprise

SET 2: Chalk Dust Torture > Wilson > Sparkle > Simple -> Swept Away > Steep > Harry Hood -> Prince Caspian > Character Zero

SET 3: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Auld Lang Syne -> Down with Disease > Suzy Greenberg, Run Like an Antelope, Bohemian Rhapsody, Julius

ENCORE: Amazing Grace

New Year’s Eve 1995 casts a long shadow — at least a year long. For Phish, at that point in their history, it was like pitching a no-hitter in game 7 of the World Series: an uncompromising, diverse, and confident musical performance for a sold-out crowd at the most famous venue in the country on the biggest night for live entertainment. The music wasn’t just well played, it was adventurous, true to Phish’s drive to always evolve even as they walked that high-pressure tightrope. Even the gags landed, staying true to the band’s essential sense of humor and giving the night a non-musical narrative. It’s not just a masterpiece, it’s the culmination of everything they’d been working toward for their first dozen years.

As I’ve written again and again this year, that success established the central dilemma of 1996 as, “Now what?” Phish took a shotgun approach to answering that question. They spent the first half of the year off the road and recorded an album with an entirely different process than they had used before. They attempted to break into new overseas markets, swallowing their egos and opening for their mentor across Europe. Back home, they went even bigger, throwing their first major festival and bringing 70,000 fans to a pop-up community in upstate New York. And then, over the fall, they flirted with the most dangerous path away from the junction of NYE 95: they dabbled as an ordinary band.

Let me be clear: that’s “ordinary” on the sliding scale of jambands. To set the baseline, it’s most instructive to look at their nearest peers at the time, Dave Matthews Band and Blues Traveler. All three bands came up with roughly the same changing setlist philosophy, but DMB and Blues Traveler found the mainstream success that eluded Phish. It was a double-edged sword, backing them into the corner of “playing the hits” night in and night out. And they both submitted to expectations — DMB played “Ants Marching” at 113 out of 126 shows in 1996, Blues Traveler played “Hook” at 51 of 69 (though “Run-Around” only 22 times, surprisingly). The nightly formula became a mixture of hits, deeper cuts, covers, and usually just one big, planned improvisational showcase. It was nothing to be embarrassed about, since that’s roughly where the Dead landed in the 80s and 90s as well.

Phish never had the hits, but they did have “hits” in the sense of crowd favorites or songs, such as Bouncin’ or Sparkle, that more casual fans would recognize. With that substitution, they pretty much adhered to the above formula in the early 90s, when they were methodically building their fanbase from coast to coast. But as their peers got big and got safer in their show construction, Phish grew more unpredictable, through the segue and tease hijinks of 1993, the expanding volume of jams in Fall 1994 and Summer 1995, and the delirious rule-breaking of Fall 1995. NYE 95 followed through on this trend, with its set-ending, unresolved Mike’s and surprise Halloween comebacks. 

The reversal of this trend is the most alarming regression of 1996, and the fall tour in particular. Even without the excuse of radio hits, they fell back into predictable setlist structure, albeit now without even the regular bluegrass/Big Ball Jam/Fish song puzzle pieces from the early part of the decade. Around a nightly second set jam in Simple, Mike’s, Tweezer, or YEM (all themselves somewhat formulaic, typically moving into and out of a mini-kit segment) they hung a collection of songs without much connective tissue. When there was set flow, it was of a contrived sort, without the thrill of spontaneously discovering new narratives and surprising juxtapositions.

On New Year’s Eve 1996, appropriately enough, they play the holiday show you’d expect from this approach. It’s a show that hits its marks, and nothing more. The first set is a string of high-energy openers, the second set reps the new album and the MVP jam vehicle of the year, the third set is all upbeat fan favorites and a debut cover with the rock cliche of a gospel choir. Aside from the inherent weirdness of the Phish catalog and the marathon three-set structure, it’s everything a “normal” band would do for their big year-end concert.

After all the hijinks in the first three shows, it’s a letdown that the NYE “gag” — balloon drop and extremely foggy 2001 countdown aside — is a fairly trite cover, played shakily (oof, that a capella intro). Queen might not have had its biopic-fueled 21st century renaissance yet, but 1996 was four years after Wayne’s World had lodged “Bohemian Rhapsody” into the pop culture zeitgeist, and covering it with that time delay was a little like covering Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” in 2010. Recruiting a gospel choir for it was also a whiff — sorry to nitpick, but the song’s famous interlude is mimicking/satirizing opera, not gospel, and it’s not like Phish doesn’t know any opera singers. Further, the trope of adding gospel choirs to rock music made by (mostly) white people always strikes me as icky, a shortcut to borrow some cultural authenticity. It’s not a great look for Phish, either here or on Hoist, and it hasn’t aged well.

Leading up to the gag, the music is rushed and professional. Simple and Hood both pleasantly burble through their jams, the latter achieving a hypnotic though peak-less effect, the former a dud after several excellent fall versions. The night’s highlight, Disease, is mostly balloon-popping and Trey geysers until a brief funk jam from 10:30-12:30 — as the first official jam of 1997 it’s thematically appropriate, but there have been better prophecies of the transformative year to come. Maybe the most interesting part of the tape is the weird SBD mix broadcast a day later on WBCN, which seems to think Phish is a Page-fronted project, complete with a hot mic picking up his moans (?) during solos. 

1996 couldn’t have ended any other way; it’s a fittingly frustrating capper to a frustrating year. Because we all know where this story goes, there’s not much angst in listening back to the year, but there also hasn’t been as much hidden knowledge to excavate as I had hoped. It’s clear that most of the big changes to Phish’s sound were happening offstage; there are plenty of exciting feints in the direction of 1997’s renaissance, but nothing that really gains traction by the time the calendar flips. Onstage, the gravitational pull is constantly in the direction of normalcy, the road happily left untraveled. After a year of renovation attempts, the riddle of how to top 1995 was left unsolved, waiting for more purely musical and drastic measures to unlock the solution.

[And an appropriately grumpy essay to end this year as well! Thanks so much for following along with me through one of Phish’s more uneven years, and for sharing memories, photos, stubs, and encouragement. I’m very excited — though a little nervous — to dig into next year, and relieved to have 1996 in the rearview mirror. See you in The Ninth Cube tonight, and in Europe after a brief break. Happy New Year!]