The Lead Out
11/12/95, Gainesville, FL, O’Connell Center
SET 1: My Friend, My Friend, Llama, Bouncing Around the Room, Guelah Papyrus, Reba, I Didn't Know, Taste That Surrounds, If I Could, Split Open and Melt, Hello My Baby
SET 2: The Curtain > Tweezer > Keyboard Army, Sample in a Jar > Slave to the Traffic Light, Hold Your Head Up > Cracklin' Rosie > Hold Your Head Up, Possum > Tweezer Reprise
ENCORE: Fire
One of my pandemic obsessions has been getting into professional cycling. Part of the appeal is the motivation it provides me to ride my own bike, part of it is the opportunity to gaze longingly at exotic European landscapes in a year when I’ve barely left my block. But I’m also a sucker for sports that are tactically impenetrable for beginners, offering an intellectual puzzle on top of the instinctual competitive excitement.
For example, there’s the sprint, a part of the race that you would think is as simple as “dainty bike men pedal as fast as possible.” But leading up to the sprint segments in the middle of a stage, or for the big sprint finish after a couple hundred kilometers of riding, there’s a whole ballet of teamwork that goes into setting up the sprinters for their final burst. In some cases, the most important cyclist is not the sprinter himself, but the lead-out man, the dude who chugs away thanklessly as a human windscreen in front of his sprinter for as long as he can bear before peeling off to allow the star to grab all the glory over the final few hundred meters.
The celebrities of Fall 95 are the big jam vehicles, the Tweezers, Bowies, YEMs, and Mike’seses that make the playlists and the Twitter brackets. But Phish in Fall 95 also had a deep stable of domestiques, the role players that set the stage for the team captain and then loyally recede to the wings. Oftentimes these songs don’t feature much improv themselves, but they ramp up the energy and create the circumstances for subsequent songs to reach new heights — the photo negative of the cool-down ballad. Think early 2001s, or Oh Kee Pa Ceremony, or Sparkle, or Wilson.
Or think my favorite of this breed: The Curtain. When I ran the numbers on songs that increased in frequency from the first leg to the second leg of this tour, The Curtain jumped out, trailing only Bouncin’ in the magnitude of its late-fall boost. After only three appearances between summer and early fall, The Curtain showed up a whopping 8 times between tonight in Gainesville and the NYE run, a two-month hot streak for a song that often gets forgotten for long stretches of tours.
Dating back to 1987, The Curtain has always occupied a strange space in the Phish catalog, existing in both its With and “Without” variants and getting stripped for parts when the band wrote Rift. Without its vestigial jam, The Curtain feels unfinished even at six or seven minutes of runtime, all the compositional fussiness of a Reba or a Hood building up a surplus of potential energy without sealing the deal. But the amputation creates an abrupt cliffhanger that can be a very effective piece of a setlist, a roller coaster hill steep enough that you can’t see where the track on the other side leads, or if it exists at all, raising your heart rate.
For three consecutive Fall 95 versions, including this one, that track led to Tweezer, maybe The Curtain’s most exquisite pairing. Tweezer was played less in Fall 95 than one might think, its impact magnified by the outsized reputation of each individual version — every version from Champaign through the end of the year gets a jamchart highlight. This particular Tweezer is like a debriefing session of everything Phish learned from playing Quadrophenia, a Who pastiche of slow riffs, Drowned-esque piano, and Fishman doling out punishment to his drums one crazy fill at a time.
Would this Tweezer have found such a monsterous stomp without its Curtain prelude? It’s impossible to know. But members of Phish often talk about how songs such as YEM or Reba (or more recently, Fuego or Mercury) with long passages of composition get them in sync for the ensuing jam. Maybe Curtain > Tweezer is such a potent combo because Tweezer lacks those synchronized exercises, an open-ended simplicity that will eventually suit the band’s style, but might have been a handicap in 1995. Tweezer has to follow the lines going south, gathering the energy to break free on its own.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]