SET 1: Cars Trucks Buses, Runaway Jim, Horn, Punch You in the Eye > Esther > Chalk Dust Torture, Theme From the Bottom, Acoustic Army, Split Open and Melt, Billy Breathes, Cavern
SET 2: Frankenstein, Poor Heart > Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove > Lawn Boy > Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, Kung > Suspicious Minds > Hold Your Head Up, Possum
ENCORE: A Day in the Life
After a three-week prologue full of long bus trips, smallish venues, and inconsistent shows, we’re finally back in comfortable territory: America’s Rock and Roll Heartland. I’ve got heavy no-coast bias, but I truly think you can feel the energy difference as soon as you hear the rowdy crowd packed into Kansas City’s Memorial Coliseum on an October Thursday night. As someone who has seen a vast majority of his Phish shows in the Midwest, I can confidently state that there’s a special flavor to their performances in this region, and this night marks the start of a twelve-day flyover country runway into Halloween in Chicago. It’s beautiful.
Trends of all types, maybe especially musical, change slowly in the Midwest. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it gives Midwesterners the ability to call out the coasts when they chase a fad that doesn’t have staying power. By 1995, the pop charts were already moving away from rock for good as the alternative era faded, but Classic Rock in its purest form was still alive and well on the Kansas/Missouri border. And as my buddy Steven Hyden wrote in Twilight of the Gods, “Phish is a classic-rock band that just happened to be mistakenly born about twenty years too late.” The scene around Phish playing Kansas City in 1995 likely hadn’t progressed that far from a Stillwater concert in Almost Famous. Those Real Topeka People only had to drive 60 miles.
Phish responds by leaning without reservation into their deepest classic-rock impulses, a key element of the triumphant Fall 95 sound. For the rest of the month, they’re playing arenas, and maybe it’s the rockist in me talking but there’s no music better suited for cavernous rooms built for basketball and hockey than red-blooded rock and roll. Phish aren’t dummies, they realize this fact too after headlining the fabled Gardens of Boston and New York City, where the 70s rock gods ruled. It’s time to let the FM strain of their sound proudly soar, without the layer of irony they’re used to hiding it behind.
There’s no acoustic bluegrass or unamplified a capella hymns or free jazz in this show; there is an Acoustic Army, but as we discussed this summer, that song’s acoustics-and-stools setup is right out of the Classic Rock Playbook. Chalk Dust Torture gets two extra, false endings — big, curtain call chords dominating the song’s original curlicue finish. The second set opens with Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein, a hall of fame classic rock riff, and they encore with A Day In The Life, one of the great rock album finales.
It seems obvious that they’re now working hard on Quadrophenia between shows, cramming for the big night in Rosemont at the end of the month. Naturally, immersion in one of the archetypal classic rock bands is going to rub off, and few bands did big gestures better than The Who, wrapping Pete Townshend’s artsy aspirations in an easy-to-swallow coating of volume and raw power. Phish still get weird — deeply weird — in KC; there’s a Lawn Boy > BBFCFM > Kung run late in the second set, for Pete’s sake. But a subtle flip has taken place, with the band’s dorky strangeness bending to accommodate the classic rock tropes (c.f. Trey in BBFCFM waving his megaphone like Daltrey with a microphone), rather than the other way around (c.f. a capella Freebird, absent from 1995).
The best blend of those seemingly incompatible ingredients comes in the show’s improvisational centerpiece, the tour’s lone standard Mike’s Groove with Hydrogen in the middle. The Mike’s, controversially, spends most of its jamming time with Trey on his percussion kit, even through the chords that separate the first and second jams. But even lacking lead guitar they still get heavy, Page summoning a mighty multi-boarding clamor of organ and piano while Mike provides some very Entwistle-style bass melodies. Weekapaug, meanwhile, isn’t just a speed test from start to finish, instead dropping into a fascinatingly murky middle section that is anchored by distorted bass, busy drumming, and big windmilling chords. Sound familiar? Whether it’s Quadrophenia practice or the Midwestern Fall acting as incubator, Phish is finding its footing at this stage of the tour by simply leaning into the role of the Rock Band, wherever relevant.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]