Secret Sets
8/15/96 and (Very Early) 8/17/96, Plattsburgh, NY, Plattsburgh Air Force Base
8/15: Jam, Hold Your Head Up Jam, Jam, Jam
8/17: Flatbed Truck Jam
The two best sets of Summer 1996 were unannounced and played in the dark for only a few hundred lucky and dedicated fans. Sometime around 9 p.m. on 8/15, as thousands of cars winded their way into Plattsburgh Air Force Base and parked on the runway, Phish soundchecked to an empty field in the middle of the small municipality their organization had built from scratch for the weekend. Two nights later, the quartet would ride on the back of a flatbed truck at 3 a.m., creeping through the campground and playing Pied Piper to a crowd of insomniac wooks.
These two completely improvised and predominantly instrumental sets would contain the most experimental music Phish played all summer, as well as all the foreshadowing of the late 90s a Phish historian could ask for. That’s a remarkable contrast with the actual shows Phish played for paying audiences in Europe and the U.S. over the last six weeks, which have been troublingly safe and regressive. It’s a fascinating case study for a question that has always itched at the back of my mind: Are Phish actually a better band behind closed doors than what we are privileged to see in person?
That’s a thought that’s probably occurred to many a Phish fan ever since the first soundcheck was recorded and leaked. The band always seems to be 1000% looser in their nightly tech rehearsal, giddy from getting off their tour bus and feeling no pressure to satisfy anyone but themselves. In the early 90s, that usually meant weird covers that would never see an official performance, as well as the occasional elusive bustout they were withholding from public view. But in the late 90s, these sessions would drift closer to true band practice, featuring the improvisational exercises the band often cited in interviews and some of their purest playing, unspoiled by conforming to the boundaries of “songs.”
As you can tell from the setlist up top, the Clifford Ball soundcheck is one of the latter. Apart from a brief flirtation with Argent’s most famous hit/Fishman’s least favorite song, there’s no attempt at rehearsing specific songs, no practicing the Theme From the Bottom bridge or whatever. There’s a technical checklist to go through; when the video starts, the stage is full of crew members adjusting sound and lighting equipment and cameramen getting ready to document the Clifford Ball proper. But Phish plays long past the point where further tweaking is needed, until it’s just the four of them jamming for friends and family dancing in the field spotlights while Trey shouts out various food vendors in Ball Square (“That’s Mr. Sausage to you.”).
But even if they were just noodling until Paul got the levels right, the music is sublime. There’s an effortless full-band communication that sounds far more democratic than the typical Trey-conducted jams of the time, the leadership baton passed from member to member with hardly a glance. There’s no obvious “hey hole” style exercises, but every time someone proposes a new melodic idea it is pounced upon by the rest of the band, with the confidence of four people who have been playing together for over a decade. In fact, it might almost be too telepathic — there’s a fascinating conversation starting around 11:15 where Trey lightly complains about the rest of the band imitating his riffs. “It’s become like a thing that we do...as soon I heard you guys doing that, I ran away from it,” Trey observes, ever tinkering.
It all builds up to the “Mr. Sausage” jam which, as ludicrous as it might sound, is the closest thing to 1997 Phish I’ve heard all summer. Over a repeated gnarly riff and some wah guitar, Trey advertises concessions and Ball Radio and paraphrases “Theme From Shaft” while Page merrily Theremins over the top. They’re clearly just goofing around, but in doing so they’re playing in a completely different style than they’ve brought to the stage in 1996, their lack of inhibition creating a minimal, hypnotic dance party that they wouldn’t attempt to recreate in front of an audience until the next calendar year.
The Flatbed Jam, which Trey describes in typical hyperbolic fashion as “possibly the highest moment in our career” in the Clifford Ball documentary, might be less musically satisfying, but the circumstances more than make up for it. Casting the mold for what would become the traditional late-night “surprise set” at every Phish festival thereafter, the Flatbed Jam is a charmingly low-budget production, the truck decorated with Christmas lights and tiki torches like a fraternity backyard and ushered by security horses. The music they play is perfectly dreamy, stripped of effects but still ambient, woven spirals of notes from Trey, Page, and Mike over an all-cymbal rhythm from Fish.
What these two sets share is an openness that Phish hadn’t found a way to work into their day job, at this point. There may have been longform improvisations played before a live audience in Fall 94 and Summer 95, but those experiments feel much more contrived, head-strong, and confrontational than these ego-less, fluid full band voyages. The Gordian knot that Phish would attempt to solve in the next few years would be how to bring the magic of these hidden moments to the main stage, porting that feeling of playing for themselves in the dark over to playing for tens of thousands under bright, bright lights. For now, that translation is as elusive and frustrating as the final moments of the Flatbed Jam, where the truck speeds up into the night while the fanbase runs futilely after, just out of reach.
