The Next Freebird

12/11/95, Portland, ME, Cumberland County Civic Center

SET 1: My Friend, My Friend > Ha Ha Ha, Stash, Prince Caspian, Reba, Dog Log, Llama, Dog Log, Tube, McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters, Julius > Cavern

SET 2: The Curtain > David Bowie, The Mango Song > Taste That Surrounds, Scent of a Mule, Harry Hood, Suspicious Minds > Hold Your Head Up, Funky Bitch

ENCORE: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Listen on phish.in

It’s not always a given that the Big Moments we look back on in Phish history felt that way immediately at the time. But the Albany YEM must have felt pretty momentous even to the band, because tonight at the Four C’s has all the pressure release of the day after the big game or the final exam. You know you’re in for some hijinks when the streaming site lists three different “Banter” tracks in the first set. 

Tonight is, of course, the famous “Dog Log” show, when Trey announces that the band has secretly been recording an album on the road, consisting entirely of different arrangements of their early song about getting poop on their shoes. It’s hard to tell if he’s joking; the White Tape original hadn’t appeared in front of an audience for over 200 shows, but it frequently turns up in soundchecks, and the concept is not out of bounds for a joke Phish would take far enough to actually release someday. Tonight’s two gags even foreshadow the Big Cypress “cheesecake (say it like you’re pissed)” prank, though it’s pulled off far more effectively in Maine. 

The Dog Log goofing is the band allowing themselves to be silly and self-indulgent after a big achievement, and so I’m going to take the license to do the same. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Bowie Intro Megamix, 41 minutes of lo-fi hi-hat and Trey noise to study to, taken from all 17 Bowies between 9/27/95 and 12/30/95.

I didn’t just make that track because I’m bored and out of ideas at the end of the tour, I promise. I think the Bowie intros of this tour have been consistently fascinating, particularly as the main jam of the song has largely returned back to “normal” after the marathon experiments probing the dissonance limits from this summer. The really out-there improv has moved aft to the song’s spacey intro, particularly on versions like tonight’s, which drifts eerily for just over five minutes. 

I’ve been so into the Bowie intros of this tour that I thought for sure they must be getting longer. But the data doesn’t back me up — that’s right, you’re getting both a poorly-crossfaded mix and graphs in this one. 

Neither the length of the intro nor the percentage of the song spent in the intro have shown any upward trend between September and December, though the two longest intros (tonight and 11/21 in Winston-Salem) appear pretty late in the year. For every stretched-out, tantric Bowie intro, there’s a prematurely ended counterpart, like the very early first set Hampton version, or the previous performance at UMass. But the lengthier prologues do tend to line up with more notable Bowies overall — the 11/21 is the “Take Me To The River” sandwich, and the Fox and Austin versions, which both pass 3 minutes in the intro, are heaters.

These elongated preambles offer another glimpse of Future Phish, though maybe not as specific a prophecy as the Albany YEM. The band has been trying for at least the last two years to focus on texture, most obviously via Trey adding new pedals and tones and Page expanding his keyboard arsenal. But Bowie is the most obvious and regular slot where they give those new toys the space to open up; Makisupa is the other one that comes to mind, though it’s played much less often, or the breakdown of Free, but that’s mostly a Trey pedals-and-kit feature. A long Bowie intro like tonight’s, where Trey is looping distant howls and industrial glitches, Page is making UFO noises on his Moog, and Mike is adding irregular thuds, is just a danceable groove away from predicting the stretched-out 2001s on the horizon, or the post-rock direction of 99-2000.

A good experimental intro also exerts a positive influence on the Bowie jam proper, bending the route of a improv section that has regressed in terms of predictability (but not intensity) this fall. Tonight’s version is definitely my favorite of the tour, and possibly of the year — a controversial statement given all the beloved half-hour Bowies of summer, but long-time readers may remember my fatigue from all those punishing endurance tests. 

This one splits the difference nicely, ramping in classic Bowie fashion, but reintroducing strange squelches of digital noise from the intro at 12:25 keeps it on its toes. They’re a periodic intrusion, until Trey harnesses some of that metallic, post-punky tone into an odd, Latin-tinged jam in the 14th minute, the rhythm echoing the percussion freakout of the beginning. It’s testimony to how texture is another knob they can turn to deepen a jam, another alternative route to the diminishing returns of Loud and Fast or Unrelenting Tension.

I’m not going to run all the numbers, but I suspect Bowie intros are only going to get longer; I may have personally witnessed the longest one of all at Deer Creek in 1997. But it’s less important how this approach developed within this particular song as it is how textural jamming infected many other parts of the catalog, offering the next turn out of cowfunk just as funk jams offered an exit from Golden God arena-rockin’. As 1995 comes to its triumphant final chapters, there are time laboratories to be found almost everywhere

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project. We shall not speak of the guest appearance.]