Screaming Fields of Sonic Love

11/17/94, Dayton, OH, Hara Arena

If any bookkeepers were taking odds on which songs from The White Album set would reappear after Halloween, the easy odds-on favorite would have been While My Guitar Gently Weeps, probably paying out about 5 cents per dollar wagered. With its heavy piano and ample room for guitar heroics, it fit Phish too perfectly to be a one-off performance, and sure enough it got its second play precisely one show later, on its way to 34 appearances total. But the second song to return from Halloween 1994 would’ve been a much longer shot on the board, and a far more unorthodox match for Phish’s traditional strengths.

Helter Skelter is the heaviest song in the Beatles catalog, for reasons both musical and otherwise. Paul’s competitive answer to reading a Pete Townshend quote about creating the “loudest, rawest, dirtiest song,” it was recorded by the band in a famously punishing session; “I got blisters on me fingers” and all that. Beatles lore also speaks of a slower version from an earlier session that runs over 27 minutes — the kind of endurance test 1994 Phish could definitely get behind. 

While Phish’s Halloween version stuck to the runtime of the White Album version, it was one of the few songs they rearranged instead of mimicked. It’s subtle, but the band chose to push the song even further into dissonance, hammering away at just one chord for the verses and singing the backing vocals with intentionally out-of-tune lunacy. It makes an already deranged song tightly associated with a series of famous, grisly murders that much more disturbing, perfectly appropriate for a Halloween performance. 

But dropping that crazy-eyed Manson terror on a Dayton audience half a month later, as the opener no less, is just plain mean. Pity the unfortunates who timed their pre-show intoxicant of choice expecting to wiggle joyously along to Fee or Runaway Jim, only to have three-quarters of Phish screaming atonal harmonies at you 45 seconds in. Yet the rapid return of Helter Skelter fits into one narrative that’s played out over the course of 1994: the arrival of Noise Phish.

Even way back in April, when the band was road-testing the more polished material from Hoist, an intriguing subplot was that Trey had a new, more aggressive approach to guitar he could deploy when needed. 1993 was the apex of Trey’s classic tone, that pure, compressed sound best known in Divided Sky, The Lizards, and other early Anastasio epics. That tone is still everywhere in 1994, but you also start to hear situations where he clicks into a dirtier, nastier palette, most notably in Maze, where he uses his portion of the jam to play anti-solos — waves of drone and distortion instead of discrete notes. 

At this point, it’s customary to cite Trey’s oft-cited love of My Bloody Valentine, and their guitar-pedal symphony Loveless in particular. But there’s also a potential influence that I want so badly to be true, in spite of scarce proof: Sonic Youth. Over the years, I have collected precisely two pieces of Sonic Youth/Phish crossover evidence: a disputed brief tease of “Kool Thing” in the 8/14/93 YEM, and a 1998 interview where Thurston Moore condescendingly salutes Phish with “They've usurped the Grateful Dead's audience, which is the audience that we should have usurped, but we weren't as clever as them.”

It’s not totally outlandish though; it’s a very short walk from MBV to Sonic Youth, and Trey and Mike both cite their love of 80’s college radio, where SY were kings, on the Long May They Run podcast. Contemporaneous to Phish’s 1994/1995 expansion, Sonic Youth were also entering their jammiest phase, releasing the Dark Star-ish “The Diamond Sea” on 1995’s Washing Machine (produced by...John Siket) and playing long, exploratory versions of it every night, in many of the same sheds as Phish, on the Lollapalooza 1995 tour.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that Sonic Youth also once attempted, possibly as a joke, to cover...The White Album, an aborted process that instead produced their masterpiece Daydream Nation and the deeply strange samples-and-Madonna-covers experiment The Whitey Album. If they had gotten around to Helter Skelter, a Sonic Youth version of the song would probably sound something like what Phish worked up, though likely even more extreme. 

Because Phish were never going to be confrontational enough to fully commit to Sonic Youth-like levels of dissonance. To wit, this nightmarish reprise of Helter Skelter ends with a barbershop arrangement of Ringo’s complaint, followed up by the very not-scary Scent of a Mule, and a subsequent second blast of Noise Phish in Maze is chased with Bouncin’. But brief seasonings of noise continue to crop up throughout the show; it’s there in the Vibration of Life narration between Forbin’s and Mockingbird, in the Doppler effect megaphone siren intro to 2001, and all over the Bowie, which doesn’t go as mental as the previous version in Grand Rapids, but still torments the crowd with dissonant tension for several minutes.

I’d also argue that Noise Phish contributes to what I think is a pretty spectacular Slave to the Traffic Light, in a much more subtle fashion. Slave’s jam is typically as jamband-basic as they come, just a slow build to bliss. But Trey makes some unusual choices in this one, including two minutes where he’s mostly just hitting a power chord and letting it sustain into soft sheets of feedback. It’s a textural, less-is-more approach that will become increasingly important to Phish over the rest of the decade, in both noisy and non-noisy contexts, even if the Helter Skelter extremity of Noise Phish never again reappeared to frighten the unsuspecting.

[Stub from Golgi Project.]