Sprinters’ Stage
Sprinters’ Stage
7/9/96, Deauville, FRA, Centre International
SET 1: Theme From the Bottom > Poor Heart, Taste > Cars Trucks Buses, Mike's Song -> Bouncing Around the Room, Character Zero
The show after Phish’s longest opening set for Santana is its inverse, a mere 38 minutes of action at the outset of their five-stop, two-leg Tour de France. It feels hurried even beyond the overall runtime, with Taste and CTB cut short, Mike’s left un-Grooved, and four songs under five minutes — practically punk rock runtimes for a jamband. The venue, a swanky casino in a seaside Northern France resort town, also seemed in a hurry to get rid of Phish and their followers. According to Stephanie Finz:
“People there were sorta snobby, and we stuck out like sore thumbs and weren’t allowed into the gambling part of the casino at all!...At this venue, there were probably about only 15 Heads there, and we had fun anyway.”
Despite the brevity, Deauville’s set is notable for finally doing something one might have expected this whole month to tackle: road-testing the new album. Phish wrapped up the recording and mixing of Billy Breathes before they departed overseas, and while it still had three months to marinate before it hit record store shelves, you’d think they would use these abbreviated sets to break in its tracklist before bringing them back Stateside.
Tonight, 4/13ths of the record shows up in a seven-song set, including one that they had previously only played in a tiny bar (though odds are there were more Phish fans in attendance at the Third Ball than the Centre International). And while three quarters of these Billy Breathers were familiar faces in 1995, they’re notable for how studio-like their performances have become.
It’s the first time we’ve heard the new arrangement of Taste without a Santana stage invasion stretching out its coda, and its gooey improvisational middle has been stripped back to a brief Page solo. Paired, as it is on the album, with Cars Trucks Buses, it’s a little Page double feature at the center, er, centre of the set. CTB also gets a shorter reading, with no reprise of the head after the false ending. Meanwhile, Trey deploys his mini-kit — the first time I’ve heard it in Europe — during Page’s piano solo, and takes a rare solo of his own in the song.
Theme has also been tightened up by time in the studio, reining in some of its noisier inclinations and coming in under 8 minutes after the 10-12 minute range of 1995. Only Character Zero sounds unleashed in this go-round, if only because there’s little to compare it with at this point — Woodstock tapes might have spread fast, but the European tour kids only had a month to B&P them before departing. In fact, Zero kinda sounds like the type of song they should be playing almost every night for impatient Santana fans, who presumably would be receptive to some unfiltered wah-pedal guitar shredding. Then again, whoever’s running the set break music seems unimpressed, throwing some shade by queueing up “Purple Haze” right after Phish leave the stage.
Amidst all the “new” material, it’s the set’s oldest song that feels most forward-looking. Mike’s Song, getting its one and only opening set appearance in 1996, finally recaptures some of that Fall 1995 ferocity, a tour that already feels much farther in the past than just half a year. The second jam (though they never play the chapter-break chords) is even more interesting, an eerie, sparse loopfest that gets whistled and heckled by the Frenchmen before graciously sliding into Bouncin’. It’s a miniature slice of 1999 Phish, hiding in a forgotten 1996 set, with an unlikely and high difficulty segue as icing.
As restrained as they are themselves this evening, the “new” songs can probably take some of the credit for this unexpected gem. Every period of Phish innovation is accompanied by an injection of fresh material, even if the actual advances take place in veteran songs. Fresh off the recording of their most experimental album yet, where the margins of songs such as Theme and Free were scribbled full of atmospheric overdubs, it was just a matter of time before that textural approach bled into the live set. And while it’s not the transformation that would occur the following year in Europe — again, in older songs; again, with a roster of rookies lighting the fuse — it’s a start.