The Opposite of Ripcord

6/22/95, Canandaigua, NY, Finger Lakes Performing Arts Center

The Finger Lakes Tweezer, immediately and forever portmanteaued into the Fleezer, is the logical endpoint of Summer 95 so far. It may not be the longest jam of the summer — unless you liberally include the transition out of Theme and the reprise, it falls short of the 50-minute Tweezer a week earlier in Memphis. But it’s certainly the most dominant jam of the tour, and maybe Phish history overall, in how it takes over an entire set of a show. The setlist is a terse wonder that has tantalized Phish fans for a quarter century: Theme > Tweezer > Tweezer Reprise. That’s it, that’s the set. 

There are Phish fans out there who would love nothing more than for the band to come out and play a single song for 75 minutes each set, and this show — apart from festival secret sets — is likely the closest they’ll ever come. Even the longest Phish jam ever, the hour-long 11/29/97 Runaway Jim, is chased with four songs, while the Mud Island Tweezer is the centerpiece of a five-song set. Here, the only non-Tweezer programming is a new song most in the crowd probably hadn’t heard yet, and the dessert course for a 42-minute Tweezer is...its own reprise. 

The question of whether this extreme setlist construction went too far is probably answered in the fact that they never did anything like it again. The legendary four- or five-song sets to come more evenly distribute their contents, typically including multiple lengthy jams instead of just a single heavyweight. As Phish fans know all too well, Trey prefers to periodically return to the lilypad of a composed song, even when he’s in a jammy mood. 

It would be too snarky to say that the Fleezer makes a case for the ripcord, but it’s not wildly off-base either. The path of the improvisation feels more akin to the avant-garde jamming of Fall 94 than the more direct and patient jamming of this summer, and to my ear it has none of the narrative propulsion that makes the longer Mud Island Tweezer such a surprisingly easy listen. There are individual segments that I love in these 42 minutes as well, but also many decision points where they could have cut this Tweezer short and given the good people of Canandaigua a couple more songs without sacrificing much, apart from the historical novelty.

There’s two of these moments in particular that feel like major intersections in the Fleezer. The first comes in around 19:43 on the SBD (released on LivePhish as filler for 6/20/95, in case you’re looking), when Trey starts singing The Who’s “My Generation” over seemingly unrelated instrumental backing. Kevin Shapiro mentions that it is “played in the bluegrass style of the previous night’s soundcheck (see also 10/31/95),” but I must respectfully disagree — the 6/20 soundcheck doesn’t circulate, but it doesn’t really resemble the Halloween encore, which is closer to a “Foreplay/Long Time”-style rearrangement.

(Sorta) covering “My Generation” feels of a piece with Johnny B. Goode from a few shows back — another rock n’ roll song so ubiquitous as to be an almost corny choice. But where their take on JBG is in the raucous spirit of the original, it sounds like they’re goofing on My Generation; on Halloween, they’ll take it even further by “trashing the stage” with their acoustic instruments and setting off an explosion like Keith Moon in 1967. If one take on the Summer 95 tour is Phish doing a satire on amphitheater rock while actually playing amphitheaters, this slapdash Who tribute is solid evidential support.

But like the Johnny B. Goode of 6/17, My Generation isn’t a terminus to the Tweezer, just an interlude. Once again, the choice to return to jamming is a good one, as the segment immediately following (roughly 21:45 - 27:00) is another deep space dive with Mike in the cockpit, in this case going up the Eno family tree to sound like Krautrock legends Neu!. It’s wonderful, though the next several minutes are a harder sell, as Phish goes free-jazz: Trey spins his megaphone and takes over on drums, Fishman does his best Ornette on the vacuum, Mike fires up the drill, Page goes The Rite of Spring on his piano, and everyone screams their head off. It’s impressively confrontational, but also a bit redundant after the similarly noisy 5-minute transition between Theme and Tweezer earlier in the set.

After a solid 7 minutes of this clamor, Mike offers up another turn-off point, flat out playing his part of Rift starting at 34:45. It would’ve made for one hell of a segue, but Trey Says No, and instead sparks the jam’s final segment, a dreamy, Floyd-style build to Tweeprise. Again, it’s nice, but perhaps gilding the lily — a Slave in the same spot would have been less statistically noteworthy, but just as emotionally satisfying. 

It’s all splitting hairs — what else is an over-analytical newsletter good for? It’s completely nuts that there’s a 50-minute Tweezer and a 42-minute Tweezer eight days apart that we can pick nits off 25 years later. But it’s also a phenomenon that Phish would never repeat, due to either their own critical assessment of the music or a sense that they pushed boundaries too far for at least some of their fans; in my Pharmer’s Almanac, one review refers to the Fleezer as “intolerable”. It’s hard to imagine that negative of a reaction in the Phish community today, but the Fleezer remains a useful outlier, its ups and downs an argument that “just jam” is too easy of an answer for Phish.