Survival of the Fittest

6/18/94, Chicago, IL, UIC Pavilion

Last week, as occasionally happens, the online Phish conversation turned to one of my favorite topics: evolution. As a former biologist, I’m usually conflicted about when the E-word is applied to Phish. On one hand, it’s my preferred metaphor for describing and analyzing their history as a band. On the other, the way evolution is commonly applied to that history in these conversations is not entirely sound from a biological perspective, which tends to jab at the pedantic side of my brain.

Generally, the way Phish fans talk about evolution is not the Darwinian version that is the basis of modern biology, but the Lamarckian theory that Darwin’s ideas eclipsed. The textbook Lamarckian example is the giraffe’s neck — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theorized that early giraffes stretched to reach food high on trees, then passed that slightly longer neck onto its offspring, who stretched a little more, and so on, until you get today’s lanky herbivores. Before the discovery of genes and the mechanisms of heritability, this made a lot of sense*. And to be honest, it probably is an okay metaphor for the artistic process: the artist stretches his or her talents in one direction or another, and if it works, they keep going that way.

But Darwin’s extensive field observations and decades of study flipped the Lamarckian idea around and removed the agency of evolution from species. Instead of adaptation passed down to offspring, Darwin’s theory of natural selection put the power in the hands of the environment, which sorted out the animals best suited for survival and reproduction at any given time and cruelly discarded those that weren’t. In this scenario, evolution could almost be described as accidental — a given animal just happens to have the right genes for the right setting, and if that setting abruptly switches from lush forest to dry desert, suddenly they’re not so successful after all.

What does this mean for music? I propose that it means we should always consider the environment when talking about an artist, considering how it contributed to success or failure and how their sound changed over the course of a career. Musical success also has a large component of dumb luck — a grunge band that peaked in 1988 (say, The Melvins) is going to find a lot less fame and fortune than one that burst on to the scene in 1992. But environment is more than just musical trends, it’s the venues that the band plays in, the state of mind of the band members (including, yes, drugs), the equipment they use on stage and in the studio.

To bring it back around to Phish, another tenet of the theory of evolution is that, on a species level, it’s good to be diverse. If every member of a species of insect is white because that helps them hide on trees, that species is in trouble when industrial pollution turns all the tree trunks dark gray. But if the species supports a wide range of colors, there’s going to be a few individuals that keep the family going when that kind of color shift occurs**.

If you think of Phish as a species, they are very healthy in this regard. By the early 1990’s, they play practically every genre of modern American music. Their improvisational approach gives them a high “mutation rate,” incorporating more and more styles into their arsenal through spontaneous exploration (nicely described by The Baby’s Mouth last year). In evolutionary terms, that makes them incredibly fit — sudden changes in environment won’t kill them off, they’ll just bring out different aspects of their biology. Over the course of 30 years, playing practically every venue in the United States, modifying and upgrading their equipment, and changing as musicians and friends, that’s going to create a whole lot of evolution, a whole lot of different phases.

The important thing to remember is that evolution produces change, not “improvement.” A species can only be judged on its fitness relative to a given environment at a particular time — comparing a crocodile now to a crocodile’s ancestor 75 million years ago is interesting scientifically, but making a value judgment about which one is “better” would be silly. To extrapolate to Phish, this perspective frees us from the endlessly tiresome ranking of eras. Everyone’s got their preferences, of course, but the Phishs of 1989, 1999, and 2009 are entirely different animals, operating in entirely different environments.

Which brings us to 1994, a time when two pretty serious environmental factors were driving Phish’s evolutionary change. For one, there’s Hoist, their most commercial release to that point, and all the attendant music industry games that came with promoting it (such as a slightly awkward appearance on Danny Bonaduce’s radio show the afternoon of June 18th). There’s also the continued escalation of venue size, a trend that started in summer 1993, where theaters and ballrooms that hold a couple thousand people gradually give way to college basketball and minor league hockey arenas that hold ten thousand.

These major shifts can’t help but change the band, and the struggle to adapt is heard in the inconsistency and awkwardness of the spring 1994 tour. Nightly traditions such as Big Ball Jam, Fish’s vacuum showcase, and story songs start to appear less frequently, as they prove unfit for larger venues. Anthemic songs such as Sample and Disease are played a ton, not just because they’re trying to sell the new record, but because their more straightforward, simple approach works better in a big room than labyrinthine prog-rock epics. There’s even counterfactuals like the acoustic setup and unamplified a capella that show just how unstable their phenotype is at this transitional point.

But in mid-June, things start to click into place. Every show between the second night of Red Rocks and this debut appearance at the UIC Pavilion is strong, with plenty of memorable moments from each stop. Those bookend venues are also some of the largest they have played so far in 1994, especially outside of their comfort zone of New England. Whatever evolutionary pressures these new circumstances were placing upon Phish, the parts of their DNA that fit that new environment were starting to come to the fore.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the rare individual show where we have a band member explicitly talking about experiencing a breakthrough:

“We were at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago. And we were playing “Divided Sky,” and we got down to this quiet part where it gets silent. And we were getting quieter and quieter, and then became silence. And I had my eyes closed, and I could feel the crowd, and I started to — because improvising is, you`re trying to translate the — what`s out there already, greater pattern of things. And sometimes it feels like it`s coming through the hole, and you couldn`t play a wrong note if you tried; you`re just floating.

And at that moment, you are in the middle of it, and I started to see those colors, like I`m not kidding, floating around there, and I realized that I could almost — it was silent, but I could see what we were translating. And as soon as I could see them, I started improvising, but I didn`t play anything. I did everything in the sense of improvisation, except for the actual notes, and as soon as I did it, the whole place erupted. It was like, whoa, and just tears started rolling down my face, and it was at that moment that I knew that it was truly bigger than me. It. You know what I mean? There were probably a lot of moments like that, but those two just come to mind. It was amazing.”

- from Trey’s Charlie Rose interview, 2004

It’s left unsaid, but I have to imagine the size of the room (9,500 capacity) contributed to this spiritual experience. After all, they had played a couple hundred versions of Divided Sky before this, with presumably no synesthetic impact on Trey. The collective energy of an arena crowd produces an entirely different sensation than a theater crowd, or a club crowd, or a festival crowd. Trey’s recollection might just be the moment when the band’s environment and biology snapped back into alignment.

Silent improvisation aside, this show is known for its tremendous David Bowie, which travels all over the map in 18 minutes, in a way that we haven’t heard since the 4/24 version in Charlotte. But where that April performance was 20 minutes of gnarly tangles, this one hits the perfect balance of darkness and light, from the triumphant invocation of the Dead’s “Mind Left Body Jam” in the intro to the slowly-building tension and release after a taste of their own mysterious theme, Dave’s Energy Guide. This Bowie sets the template for how you mix avant-garde improvisation with collective emotional release on an arena scale, the formula that the band would go on to explore and adjust through the rest of 1994 and, arguably, the rest of their career.

One more evolutionary note from this show. I mentioned earlier the concept of improvisational mutation rate, creating novel aspects of their sound that may lay dormant for years before fully blooming. Throughout 1994, It’s Ice has been their laboratory for new sounds, and the one on this night lands in particularly interesting territory for the band’s future. Chop out the breakdown section (as I did for today’s clip), and you’ll hear an early, rather polite version of the sound that would in three year’s time become known as cow-funk, the driving force of yet another phase in Phish’s lineage. But here, in June 1994, the pieces — equipment (such as Page’s clavinet), personal interactions (a more democratic improvisational approach), and pharmacology — weren’t in place to select for this new mutation. With the fickle nature of survival of the fittest, it just wasn’t the right environment.

* — And through the growing field of epigenetics, some of those ideas are making a comeback.

* — This is from a popular example of evolution in action, the peppered moth of England.