Testing the Waters

6/13/95, Maryland Heights, MO, Riverport Amphitheater

The summer of 95 has a satisfyingly clean geography. After warming up in the Rockies, the band aimed southeast, made one loop back to the midwest, and finished up in their powerbase of New England, with the finale just 25 miles from Burlington. Aside from the band’s anomalous pocket of support in Colorado, it’s a straightforward climb through regional differences in popularity. In Boise and Salt Lake City, they’re a cult curiosity; in Philly/Boston/NYC, they’re rock stars.

The Midwest lies somewhere in between. This is the first summer that Phish will headline most of their iconic Central Division venues: Riverport, Deer Creek, and Blossom. Whereas last summer they were still mostly playing theaters in this region, they’re now officially in the jamband big leagues, playing Riverport and Deer Creek just a few weeks before the Dead’s cursed tour and a couple months before the year’s Black Crowes-led edition of HORDE.

But where fans were literally tearing down walls to get into Dead shows in the Midwest that summer, the Phish scene there seems a little more modest. They’ll sell out Deer Creek in six days, but filling Riverport, the St. Louis area shed, on a Tuesday night is still beyond their reach. The ability of a few whistlers to carve through the vacuum of crowd noise that greets Theme and the band’s decision to do Sweet Adeline unamplified suggests that tonight’s audience was likely contained within the pavilion, at least by the time of the encore.

That may be why this show feels like a throwback, from the very beginning. It starts with a Jim Foam, the combination that opened a whopping 13 shows in 1994. I have a whole unpublished essay (part of my ongoing, very intermittent effort to backfill 1994) about the role that two-song opener played for Phish; in short, it’s an efficient way to limber up and gauge the temperature of the crowd, with a relatively straightforward rocker followed by a deliriously complicated song known, at the time, for its nearly-silent jam. Deploying it here, followed by the forthcoming A Live One “single” Bouncin’, feels very much like Phish cautiously feeling out what a Midwestern amphitheater crowd expects from them. 

This is no small question for early 1995. Unlike 1993 and 1994, which both started with fairly standard Phish shows and then, over months, carved a path to more risk-taking setlists and improvisation, 1995 came out of the gate hot. The long, experimental jamming of Fall 94 was still fresh in their minds, thanks to the review process for A Live One, and the opening quartet of shows contained a couple hints (the 6/8 Tweezer, the 6/10 Mike’s Groove) that they were itching to get back to those extended explorations. 

But was it wise to do so at the same time as they made this leap to the national shed circuit? Or should they play it safer, giving these larger paying audiences — who hadn’t even heard A Live One yet — what they expected: a couple dozen songs, a couple 10-12 minute jams, some goofy hijinks and covers, and a vacuum solo? 

The first set proceeds as if that’s the idea: a couple new songs, Stash and a sunset Reba, an old Fishman Syd Barrett favorite, a crowd-pleasing, high energy Sparkle > Chalk Dust closer. But after the setbreak, that conservatism goes immediately out the window. The Bowie that opens set 2 isn’t nearly the demonic sorcery that hit Providence in December, but it is a nasty little beast of its own. Rather than engaging in the usual tension/release fireworks of its jam, it sits almost entirely in the tension side of that relationship, hinting at resolution but not providing it fully until just a few bars before the end-jam trills. From the moment the jam starts at 5:45 with an ominous riff until the end sequence roughly ten minutes later, it’s an unrelenting grind.

A few essays back I chuckled at Phish including the Velvet Underground in their current sonic goals; as much as I enjoy their Loaded set, their collective cynicism is roughly equal to Lou Reed’s pinky finger. But this Bowie is pretty close to what a Phish “Sister Ray” might sound like, a brutalist approach to improvisation instead of their usual blissful mode. It only lacks a deranged John Cale Vox Continental organ and some lurid lyrics.

Yet even doing a watered-down Vermont Underground in a 20,000-seat venue (albeit half-full), is a courageous move for a band that just started playing at this level in this part of the country. The next night will feature an even bolder statement (at a much more intimate outdoor venue), but the Riverport Bowie feels like a conscious choice to keep exploring, even in a region where their headliner status hadn’t yet solidified. They may not be the only band waging noise terrorism on the nation’s sheds that summer — about a month after this show, I’d see Sonic Youth headline Lollapalooza at my local amphitheater, playing “The Diamond Sea” in a thunderstorm. But it remains one of the wonders of 90s Phish: as the stages got bigger, they got weirder instead of safer.

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]