Setlist Storytelling

11/25/94, Chicago, IL, UIC Pavillion

Let’s just take a moment and look at this beauty together:

Also Sprach Zarathustra > Mike's Song -> Simple > Harpua > Weekapaug Groove -> The Mango Song > Purple Rain > Hold Your Head Up, Run Like an Antelope

Oh baby, that’s the stuff. That setlist is like ASMR to me. Look at all those beautiful right arrows. You almost don’t even need to listen to the set to know that it’s good, it’s like reading a box score of a no-hitter. 

I get the sense that the November 25th show lives in the shadow of its Chicago ‘94 box set companion at the same venue five months prior. That show features a legendary Bowie with a Mind Left Body Jam (the dopest of all Grateful Dead references) and was the scene of Trey’s oft-repeated epiphany during the Divided Sky pause. As he told Charlie Rose (ugh), that was the moment when Trey realized he didn’t even have to play notes to improvise and that the crowd would still hear it, or that he saw music as color, or...something, I’ve never really fully understood it, but it sounds neat.

By comparison, this Black Friday show along the Eisenhower doesn’t have anything quite so explicitly mystical. According to phish.net, it has the first-ever glowstick war, a dubious honor given both the legend of the Great Went Hood Glowstick War and the fact that glowstick wars quickly flipped from awe-inspiring to injurious. Instead, this show features an early example of a leap forward that is almost procedural, but which I’d argue is far more important in the band’s development than really long Divided Sky pauses.

That advance is set construction, the treatment of a set as more than just an arbitrary 75 minutes on stage, but a blank canvas for an extended musical statement. Previously, they’d used this approach primarily to deliver Gamehendge or album sets, relying upon a rock opera or pre-established track list to define the path. But rare are the sets, to this point, that draw upon Phish’s own catalog to create an emotional arc, with songs chained together by segues to create a holistic experience, not just a sequence.

In order to make this leap, the band first had to go backwards, sacrificing their reflexive eclecticism. What leaps out about this show, in the context of Fall 94, is that there’s no bluegrass, the second date in a row they’ve kept the acoustic setup in storage after the deep dive of last week. But bluegrass is just the latest symptom of Phish’s (admirable) compulsion to prove their fluency in a wide range of musical genres, often to the detriment of set flow. Consider three nights ago in Missouri, when that masterful Funky Bitch jam is followed up by two quiet Beatles covers, wrapped around the prog of The Curtain, a Runaway Jim that detours into the faux-hardcore of BBFCFM, the bluegrass mini-set, a triumphant Hood, and an AC/DC cover. A fun set, no doubt, but not a block of music with any clear narrative structure other than whiplash.

In contrast to that set’s jagged line, 11/25 is all smooth contours. 2001, still in its concise infancy, is the perfect lead-in to any set, and always pairs exquisitely with Mike’s. The transition between Mike’s and Simple is well-practiced (maybe too much so) by this point, and the second jammed-out Simple gets to a weird enough place that the “oom pa pa” of Harpua isn’t a jarring interruption. A Harpua full of rowdy energy (and energy beams) spills over fittingly into Weekapaug, which navigates a high-difficulty segue into Mango Song by shifting the underlying rhythm. Page’s piano drives us from Mango to Purple Rain, which could have been a disruption but wasn’t — more below. The requisite HYHU is followed by the set’s longest pause and an unfortunate disc flip in the box set, but there’s a fiery Antelope to put the exclamation point on a grammatically perfect 80-minute set.

Intriguingly, they’re able to do this with songs that have been in the cupboard for a while. They’re starting to understand the magic of the Mike’s Groove bookends, which they only really started filling with non-Hydrogen material in 1993. Here, it wraps around a half-hour of music that, while excellent, could easily derail a set’s momentum — a very experimental Simple jam, and a lengthy Harpua narration. Instead of having to cold reboot the set after Jimmy’s plea for a pet dog, they can simply flow back into Weekapaug, a satisfying resolution. 

Even more impressive is how it incorporates the Fish segment without a stumble. Prince deserves a lot of the credit here; Purple Rain is a song so classic not even a vacuum solo can ruin it. But it’s also a fun twist on the “cooldown” song, before that was really even a thing, and its hijinks team up with Harpua in the set’s emotional tug-of-war between dark intensity (Mike’s, Weekapaug, Antelope) and humor. 

This night isn’t the first to pull off this trick — the similarly Mike’s Groove-anchored second set of 12/30/93 comes to mind as an antecedent — but it’s well-timed in the middle of a tour of such enormous progress. As I said the other day, the pieces of the Modern Phish puzzle are suddenly coming together at a rapid pace, after years of incremental evolution. That setlist up top only looks so iconic and attractive because it’s laying the foundation for hundreds more like it.

[Stub from Golgi Project.]