The Loud Part Quiet
10/7/95, Spokane, WA, Spokane Opera House
SET 1: Julius, Gumbo > The Fog That Surrounds > Mound, Possum, The Mango Song, Acoustic Army, Wilson > Run Like an Antelope
SET 2: Makisupa Policeman, Cars Trucks Buses, Split Open and Melt, Strange Design, It's Ice > Contact > Frankenstein, Harry Hood, Sweet Adeline
ENCORE: Fire
At 8:50 of this show’s Run Like an Antelope, I said out loud (to nobody; nobody here cares) “Aha! Here is where Fall 95 finally starts.” It’s that magic trick in a great Antelope jam where the band appears to have reached the highest of peaks, where they are certain to drop off into the song’s closing sequence. But they don’t, finding a further incline beyond the peak, and running up it like a maniac. That final push beyond where a normal band might stop, a leap into absolute ecstatic delirium, is the magic ingredient of Fall 95, and it’s been all too absent thus far in the first two weeks of the tour.
It’s Phish’s second consecutive night in an intimate, highbrow venue — this time the Spokane Opera House — and once again they are honing their arena rock chops despite playing for a tenth of an arena crowd. It starts with a confidently bloozy Julius, a Gumbo that gets a couple extra cycles, a Fog That Surrounds that sets a new high water mark for the still-unsettled song’s jam, and a Possum with a unique intro and a wave at Dave’s Energy Guide. But it’s the set-closing Antelope that sets off the fire alarms, putting the structural integrity of the Expo 74 architecture to the test.
Still, that big roar in a small room isn’t what I want to talk about for this show, but rather the opposite. There are the usual small-venue tricks in the form of an Acoustic Army and a seemingly microphone-less Sweet Adeline, but also a handful of atypical moments of extreme quiet mixed in with the balcony-shaking peaks. The second set opens with Makisupa Policeman, never a rager, but extra mellow in this appearance, with Trey calmly droning through a leisurely, dub-soaked middle just “15 minutes” after shredding in that Antelope. Later, there’s an unusual, elongated It’s Ice breakdown with the October spookies, an autumnal variant of the summer’s full-blast nightmares.
But that’s all build-up to the Hood, a gem of a version that resuscitates the song from its strange back-benching after it bloomed gloriously in the first half of Fall 94. This one gets so quiet, that at one point Trey plays “unamplified” according to both phish.net and phish.com, relying upon only the hollow-body of his Languedoc to project notes (you can hear it starting at 6:30). It’s not a trick I’ve ever heard him pull before, even in the barely-audible diminuendos of 93/94 Foams, and it’s pretty magical, “an extreme display of dynamics” as Shapiro puts it. But it’s just as notable that the jam eventually builds to the song’s new “wall of sound” ending, eschewing the “you can feel good about Hood” resolution in favor of a tidal wave of noise that provides an emotional climax the milk slogan never could.
The difference between the near-silent floor to the all-out conclusion is a sonic distance that many bands of Phish’s stature wouldn’t risk over an entire show, never mind within a single song. And while one could argue that it’s just the singular influence of a venue with acoustics fine-tuned for opera singers, it’s an approach the band would also port over to much bigger rooms; not for nothing does one of the most famous jams of the tour contain a silent jam. The dynamic range isn’t always as obvious as Trey unplugging his guitar mid-jam (or windmilling with the sound off); it’s often more like this show’s Melt, which features a prolonged start-stop, quiet-loud jam with some truly alien drumming from Fish in the spaces between chords.
It must be reflex for any band to scale up their volume with their crowd size, so Phish deserves some credit for pushing the soft as well as the loud at this stage. Perhaps the smaller venues of this west coast swing helped, yo-yoing as it did between big rooms such as Shoreline and Memorial Coliseum and the smaller settings of San Diego and Spokane. Routine as they may be, these early-tour shows allowed for the exercise of both sets of muscles, the subtle touch and the broad strokes, enabling them to combine both extremes as the crowds got consistently large eastward.
[Ticket stub from Steve Bekkala.]
Addendum:
My first show. The Antelope was the sickest thing I'd ever seen. So quiet into a wall of sound!