The Missing Song

6/26/95, Saratoga Springs, NY, Saratoga Performing Arts Center

If you were choosing a song to entertain a large, outdoor crowd, you would probably go for one with a) a spacey build-up introduction, b) soft-loud dynamics that tee up the light show, c) a nice sing-along chorus, d) a triumphant, fist-pumping riff, and e) an open ending for extended play, should inspiration arise. If you’re Phish in 1995, you already have that song in the can: Down with Disease, the first single released from last year’s Hoist and subsequently road-tested with 57 performances in 1994. 

But at a time when Phish was realizing the exact arena-rock ambitions Disease was written for, it all but disappeared. There are only 5 Diseases in 1995, a stat so startling I checked my math multiple times. The song appears only twice on the summer tour, then vanishes again until three more turns in December. For every subsequent year, it will be in regular rotation, opening dozens of second sets (as it does on this night at SPAC) and launching many memorable jams (ditto). Yet in the year that arguably suited it best, Disease was nowhere to be found. What’s the deal?

Disease is just one of many Hoist songs mostly left out of the 1995 fun. While Julius, Sample, and Mule are still in the every-3-or-4-shows club, If I Could, Dog Faced Boy, Lifeboy (each with 9 appearances in ‘95), Wolfman’s (6), Axilla II (4), and Demand (4) are all in decline. It’s a pretty shocking shift from the previous year. At various times, the band has admitted that Hoist was explicitly written to be a mainstream breakthrough. But over the course of 1994, Phish broke through to another level of popularity almost in spite of Hoist, rather than because of it. Sales were middling, the hoped-for radio and MTV play never really materialized, and the creative leaps of fall had basically nothing to do with that batch of songs (unless you count Hoist reject Simple). 

That Sample and Julius would stick around in sheds and sports arenas makes perfect sense; both are big, straightforward rock songs that suited Phish in their more widescreen approach. But so does Disease, and the fact that it only appeared one time more than Demand (and 18 times less than Mule) is an absolute mystery. Especially given this version, a 23-minute monster that fits snugly into the simultaneous Summer 95 push to get both bigger and weirder.

It’s not exactly the first sign that Disease would enter the top tier of jam vehicles — that would be 11/12/94, which navigated both into and back out of Have Mercy. But it’s the first to feel truly modern, diverting off the traditional solo into some proto-cowfunk and a spy theme, then building stacks of knotty chords and serpentine leads like a King Crimson song. This version clearly demonstrates that Disease has the momentum of the other big-jam songs of this summer, the ability to push the band at escape velocity into the unknown. So why did they leave it on the table?

One possible answer is that Disease gets immediately overshadowed in this show by Free, which celebrates its very own coming-out moment after one of the best segues of the tour. Unlike other versions, Trey moves off his drone loop orchestrations after just a couple minutes, leaving 10 further minutes for jamming in what’s by far the longest version of Free’s debut summer. It feels like a return to the same territory they were developing in the Disease jam, but with more dynamic range and a melodic layer on top. Trey’s having such a good time with it that the heavy-chord motif they use to close out Free bleeds over into Poor Heart, of all songs.

In the end, the conspicuous absence of Disease is probably just a case of bad timing: if Disease was the spoiled child in 1994, Free’s the new baby in the house, sucking up all the attention. Perhaps if Disease had bloomed a little earlier, it would have gotten more play in its 2nd year, but for now, it had to yield to the fresher of the two songs built around a hall-of-fame riff. By 1996, when both were veterans, they could peacefully co-exist.

It’s also possible that Disease was the innocent bystander to an internal Hoist backlash. The day after this show, A Live One would hit record store shelves at last, with a tracklist of 1994 highlights that also omitted any songs from the band’s most recent studio release. By Summer 95, Phish were finding new inspiration in very old material and were excited about playing the new, leaving them little bandwidth to rehabilitate the recent. Disease, fairly or unfairly, may have been momentarily tarnished by the overt mainstream overtures of Hoist, as Phish circled back to win over bigger crowds on less compromised terms.

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project]