Soft, Sweet Songs
9/27/95, Cal Expo Amphitheater, Sacramento, CA
SET 1: Wolfman's Brother, Rift > Free, It's Ice > I Didn't Know, The Fog That Surrounds, Strange Design, Chalk Dust Torture, The Squirming Coil
SET 2: Cars Trucks Buses, AC/DC Bag, David Bowie, Billy Breathes, Keyboard Army, Harry Hood, Hello My Baby, A Day in the Life
ENCORE: Possum
When people talk about the Fall/Winter 95 tour they’re mostly talking about December 95, one of the great months in Phish history, but only the third month of a coast-to-coast voyage. By the end of the tour, Phish will have achieved arena-rock god status, triumphantly selling out Madison Square Garden on the biggest live music night of the year and confidently reconciling the A-list venues they now regularly played with the eccentricities in their DNA. But way back in late September in Sacramento, that version of the band isn’t yet in focus.
“It’s really great to be playing again, it’s been too long,” says Trey between I Didn’t Know and The Fog That Surrounds, and oh for the time when 86 days between Phish shows was a long break. But even with such a short layoff, by modern standards, the first show of fall does not really feel contiguous with the last show of summer. By the end of that tour, the band had eased up slightly on the nightly hellscapes and endurance tests they dropped on unsuspecting jamfans through the midwest and mid-Atlantic, but it was still generally a white-knuckle experience, full of experimentation and extension.
This show is very much...not that. It’s easy to chalk it up to the usual reasons: early-tour rustiness (though they did have two days of rehearsals at the Oakland Coliseum Arena) or the influx of new material. Five songs make their debut tonight — or maybe 4-½ is more accurate, given that The Fog That Surrounds is a Taste revision — and a lot of the summer debuts join them. Eight of the 18 songs played tonight debuted in 1995, so any Central California fans not tapped into the tape trading market would have been quite befuddled.
That produces the usual choppy flow and improv-light tour opener that the jaded vets love to hate. But the qualities that the new songs bring to the table will pay off later in the tour. OK, maybe Fog That Surrounds doesn’t count, as the rare example of a Phish song taking a step back as it evolves (sorry Fishman lead vocals). Or Hello My Baby, which I never would’ve guessed debuted this late in the band’s barbershop era — seems like it would be the House of the Rising Sun of learning the form.
But the other three, while they’re never going to grow into Phish staples, are important steps nonetheless. Cars Trucks Buses is only Page’s second solo songwriting contribution to the band (after Magilla), introducing a New Orleans-by-way-of-Meters strain of funk-jazz to the Phish catalog. Keyboard Army/Cavalry/Kavalry, the sister song to Acoustic Army, is another team-building exercise that puts all four members on (roughly) the same instrument, as well as a celebration of Page’s growing rig. And Billy Breathes is the best Phish ballad to date, and possibly the best ever — an elegant lullaby for Trey’s first daughter, born between tours.
You can add one more song to that list that might not technically be new, but after a long absence, might as well be starting its second life: Wolfman’s Brother. Appearing for the first time since June 1994 (87 shows, if you’re keeping score), Wolfman’s was the first Hoist song to get exiled to limbo, its laid-back groove too easygoing for a band that still liked to sprint. Opening the tour with the song is a surprising statement that won’t really pay off — the song only appears six times this tour and still won’t hit its stride for another couple years.
What stands out about this quartet of songs is how they are all, for lack of a better word, chill. That’s not at all foreshadowing of what’s to come this year; December 95 is a lot of things, none of them chill. But the fall debuts join the new summer songs in stretching out the palate of a Phish show, expanding their emotional and sonic range in a more nuanced sense than the old Phish diversity of “we play 16 different genres, all of them fast.” It also feels like a course correction from Summer 95, a tour that in many ways felt like the terminus of the Maximum Intensity approach for Phish.
The calming effect can be felt bleeding over into this show’s two featured jams, the second set tentpoles of Bowie and Hood. Bowie features a long atmospheric intro and jamming that almost feels “jazzy,” a word I never would have used to describe its summer performances. Hood is also restrained, with a minor key swerve and a wall of noise ending that suggests the influence of Theme From The Bottom on the older song. It’s a mellow start to what will become a very fierce tour; the lamb prologue to the lion final chapters.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project. Sorry about the Dead photo up top, though it is appropriate for this tour in the shadow of Jerry’s ghost.]