The Long Game
What is the purpose of a live album? More often than not, it’s just a cynical solution to contract obligations, a fast, easy, and cheap way for a band to fulfill the last album of their deal or a space-filler for times of writer’s block or studio troubles. It can be a historical artifact for bands with deep vaults, a bonus-disc reason to buy a new reissue, or a souvenir for fans who want to take home more than a t-shirt.
But occasionally, the live album is a statement by a band whose concert reputation far exceeds the commercial success of their studio work. It’s a chance to document (with maybe a little post-production help) the buzz around the type of band that you’ve got to see in person to understand. Live at Leeds is probably the paragon of this category — The Who were already famous, but none of their singles or LPs had really captured the chaos of their nightly set. But you can also include Alive!, Frampton Comes Alive, Waiting for Columbus, At Budokan, Kick Out The Jams, and other records that ended up being their respective artist’s definitive release.
For Phish, 1994 was the perfect time to take a swing at this kind of live album. Although they were on a major label and headlining arenas and sheds, their albums hadn’t really made much of a dent on radio or charts. That Elektra budget allowed them to haul a 24-track mobile studio around with them for the entire tour and the NYE run, giving them 50 shows of music to choose from in assembling the final product. A Live One was their chance to show the whole music world what the word-of-mouth was all about; that they weren’t just run-off from the Dead scene, but a viable and singular concert powerhouse.
So why in the world did they choose the Bangor Tweezer? It really can’t be stressed enough what an outlier this version was, at the time they played it, even just in pure numbers. The 31 minutes of the Bangor Tweezer are 23.6% of the A Live One runtime, and nearly half the length of the second disc. Apart from You Enjoy Myself, the band hardly ever flirted with even the 20-minute barrier in October 1994, never mind the half-hour frontier. The three Tweezers preceding Bangor all fell between 11 and 13 minutes, and the last two were very straightforward — they could’ve shown up anywhere in 1990-1993 without sounding anachronistic.
[See also @mdphunk’s Tweezer Tableau dashboard, it’s better than my graph]
Really, you have to go back to the Bomb Factory in May to find an improvisational excursion that comes anywhere close to what they played on 11/2/94. And, of course, that one is Tweezerfest-style, with tangents into Sparks, Cannonball, Makisupa and the like to provide some safe harbor along the voyage. The Bangor Tweezer is a far more demanding listen, almost inorganic in a way that subsequent great and long Tweezers would avoid. It very much feels like a soundcheck jam, or a “hey hole” exercise without the actual Heys, as described by Trey in The Believer:
The next level is, I start a pattern and then Page harmonizes with it. We make a jigsaw-puzzle pattern. Then Mike finds his place in the pattern, and Fish finds his place in it. And we’re all listening to each other. Now, only when you hear that all the other musicians have stopped searching, once you hear they’ve locked in with what you’re playing, you say, “Hey!” So, since we’re still listening so intently to each other, we should all say “Hey” at the same time, but if we don’t—if someone says “Hey” when you’re still searching, they’ve basically just told you, “I’m not listening to you.” So we found, very quickly, that it meant you had to always be listening to three people other than yourself. And the music, we found, improved immensely by not navel-gazing. So now the idea is, I’m not paying any attention to myself at all. I’m just responding to what they’re playing.
It’s also not very melodic, where other big jams find spontaneous themes or chord progressions, and fairly arrhythmic — only an insane person could dance to this Tweezer. Some stretches could almost be called minimal, such as when it strips down to one chord, some laser noises, a piano squiggle, and wood blocks around 12:45. Other parts are frighteningly intense, such as the cock-rock riff of 17:00 and the stomach-lurching way half of it drops off for a start-stop segment. It pretty much falls apart at 22:45, with several minutes still to go, and the stretch from 23:40 to 26:00 is some of the most annoying music I’ve ever heard Phish make. It is a full meal, without the more confident longform flow of the Tahoe Tweezer or the patient development of the Palace Tweezabella, to pick a couple classics. I’m confident in saying that it’s nobody’s favorite Tweezer.
Clearly, putting this half-hour jamstrosity on the band’s first live album was a huge risk. The fact that they did might be related to the effect I talked about for the 10/23/94 Harry Hood: the desire to use A Live One as a statement of not just the band they were, but the band they hoped to be. In the case of the Bangor Tweezer, it’s not so much the illusion of a big-time band playing big-time venues, but the image of a band that’s not afraid to push the envelope hard in a concert setting, no matter how many people are watching. It’s a little like putting Union Federal on the Elektra re-release of Junta, offering a tantalizing glimpse at the outer bounds of what they could be doing improvisationally each night, if they felt like it, and if you should be so lucky.
Remember that 1994 (and 1995, when A Live One was released) was still a time when they were still very much trying to escape the Dead’s shadow. One thing the Bangor Tweezer has going for it is that it’s the kind of jam the Dead would never have played, even at their Dark Starriest — it’s too clinical, convoluted, and music school nerdy. Phish knew they were good at long, patient, emotional peaks, and they’re in evidence on Hood and Slave, just as the band’s ability to straight up rawk is demonstrated by Chalkdust and Wilson. But the Tweezer represents a jamband scene angle more unique to Phish, mapping the pretzeled progginess of a composition like You Enjoy Myself (the 2nd-longest track on ALO) onto a free jam.
That their chosen method of delivering that message took up so much real estate on A Live One was a big risk, though the fact that the live album was still their biggest seller to date (maybe still is?) justifies the decision. One could still argue that a different Fall 94 jam could have played the same role as the Bangor Tweezer much more effectively — I’m curious about how the Phish-naïve would have responded to the Providence Bowie in the same spot — or maybe they could’ve merely excerpted their favorite parts, as they did with the even-longer Bozeman Tweezer and interstitial track Montana.
But nobody can question the courage it took to include a performance that challenging in their first, best chance at proving their live chops to the masses. And most rewarding of all, it proved a challenge to Phish themselves; not for nothing that A Live One was released the same month as both the Mud Island and Finger Lakes Tweezers, which take the indulgences of Bangor even farther. Just as Phish in 1994 and 1995 wanted to prove that they were worthy of playing the biggest venues in America, they also wanted to prove they were fearless enough to alienate the audiences inside those arenas.
[Stub from Golgi Project.]