Space Station Champaign
10/22/95, Champaign, IL, Assembly Hall
SET 1: AC/DC Bag, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own, The Sloth, Runaway Jim, Weigh > NICU, Fast Enough for You, It's Ice > Poor Heart > Sample in a Jar, I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome[1], Stash
SET 2: Golgi Apparatus, Possum -> Catapult, The Curtain > Tweezer -> Makisupa Policeman -> Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, Life on Mars?, Uncle Pen, Slave to the Traffic Light > Cavern
ENCORE: Sweet Adeline, The Squirming Coil
The University of Illinois campus is an island in a Central Illinois ocean of corn and soybeans, and Assembly Hall is perhaps its strangest feature. Built in the early 60s for Fighting Illini basketball, it’s a spaceship caught in the act of making a crop circle, an EPCOT flying saucer squatting next to UofI’s experimental farmland, which wafts the smell of cattle into the lot. I’ve been there twice — for Phish in 96 and a monster truck rally — and always thought of it as the Hampton Coliseum of the Midwest, an otherworldly building in the middle of nowhere that intermittently operates as an unlikely cathedral for live rock music.
Phish’s first of three yearly stops at Assembly Hall is a Sunday nighter that’s a bit on the songy side, with a handful of tracks (MMGAMOIO, Sloth, Weigh, Golgi, Curtain) finally receiving their fall debuts. Like any medium-bustout grab-bag show, that makes for choppy setlist waters, but the injection of manic energy from last night in Lincoln still hasn’t worn off, which papers over the cracks. A sold-out college crowd of 16,800 — their biggest since Shoreline — is with them all the way, even hooting and hollering for an unusual (Type II?) Sweet Adeline in the encore where they rotated to face all four sides of the arena; yes, they can even sell seats behind the stage now, they’ve really made it!
The best segment of the show comes in the middle of the second set, when the band finally taps into Assembly Hall’s cosmic energy. The obvious option, 2001, was burned last night in Nebraska, so it will have to wait for the next two years. That forces them to dig a little deeper and stitch together one of their oldest songs with one of their newest covers to anchor a suite of planetary exploration.
It starts back at the Tweezer, a version considered by scholars of Tweezerology to be the first great one of the tour. It certainly improves upon the unremarkable three that preceded it, while still keeping the jam focused on just a couple of themes instead of a dozen. The first half is Phish in full-on Monsters of Rock mode, with Fish hitting his kit hard and Trey guiding the band into a Tweeprise-reminiscent ascending pattern (perhaps trying to restore the balance from Nebraska, tonight’s Tweezer is unreprised). The back half is power-funk, building off page’s clavinet and a Trey riff that will later turn up more famously in the Albany YEM.
If Tweezer is the lift-off and high-G race for the stratosphere, Makisupa is when they enter the weightlessness of space. It’s not the ambient tsunami they’d play in the same song in the same room two years later, but at 7 minutes long (with Trey whispering ad-libbed lyrics about various management/crew members turning up in his bed...beats me), it’s an extended exercise in patience and dynamics, the antithesis of Tweezer’s furious stomp.
Those dynamics repeat themselves when they reach their destination, a double shot of songs about the Red Planet that couldn’t be more different. Big Black Furry Creatures From Mars is Phish’s jokey 80s attempt at hardcore — if cowfunk is James Brown on his worst night, BBFCFM is Black Flag bombing — and its become a sort of release valve for the excess energy of the last two years. I can’t confirm that Trey was running around the stage with his megaphone, but it certainly sounds like it; it’s not the Mission to Mars ride, it’s the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Phish chases that ruckus with Life on Mars?, even more regal in its second appearance, the snare hits and high notes echoing off the concrete dome of Assembly Hall.
That these four disparate songs improbably work as a half-hour block of music exemplifies the point Phish has reached in a little under a month of touring. They’re comfortable, cracking open the songbook, not cramming the new songs in where they don’t belong — in fact, there’s no 1995 vintage originals in this show at all! The jams are intense, adventurous and terse, done in 15 minutes or less. There’s no fear in front of a big crowd, in a large arena they’d never played before, deep in Big Ten country. Like a spaceship in a cornfield, they’re a beautiful, reality-bending anomaly.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]