The Portuguese Opening
The Portuguese Opening
9/30/95, Mountain View, CA, Shoreline Amphitheatre
SET 1: My Friend, My Friend, Cars Trucks Buses, White Rabbit Jam > Reba, Uncle Pen, Horn, Run Like an Antelope, I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome, Sample in a Jar
SET 2: Runaway Jim > The Fog That Surrounds, If I Could > Scent of a Mule, Mike's Song -> Keyboard Army, Weekapaug Groove -> Suspicious Minds > Hold Your Head Up > Cavern
ENCORE: Amazing Grace, Good Times Bad Times
The fourth show of the tour brought the most important debut of Fall 95, symbolically speaking. Suspended in the back shadows, stage right behind Page, is a very large black-and-white checkered board. After two songs, Trey explains the deal — over the next few months, the band will take its traditional tour bus chess matches to a new level, playing against the audience through nightly moves. At the start of Set 1, Phish will move a white piece; after the setbreak, a fan representative will make their reply, as voted on at the Greenpeace booth.
It’s unclear why this band/audience battle wasn’t ready for opening night — perhaps the chessboard originally showed up at 18 inches to a side instead of 18 feet. The official unveiling is also a bit rinky-dink, as Chris Kuroda, in a rare stumble, misses his cue to light up the board. Page and a fan named “Pooh” take three moves each to kick off the proceedings; Page causes a murmur when he moves the bishop in his second turn, apparently invoking the uncommon and daring “Portuguese Opening.” While birthday boy Trey narrates the action, Mike and Fish jam on a local classic with second hand chess references: Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”
Band/fan interactions have been at the core of the Phish experience since their days in Vermont bars, of course. But the chess match represents a new turn. In the 80s and early 90s, most of this interplay put band and fan on the same team, creating in-jokes and secret languages to reward the faithful and tease the novice. The audience responded by creating rituals of its own, such as the Stash claps or the Wilson chant, which the band eventually made room for. Early Phish could never resist a good prank — setting up a microphone and hinting at a Neil Young guest spot, pump-faking the first Halloween cover set with the Dark Side of the Moon heartbeat — but that was just good-natured ribbing between pals.
Conversely, the chess match feels like the first time the band and fans were in direct competition. The two groups might be friendly opponents, but they’re still playing a game with a winner and a loser, and by all accounts Phish took their chess habit very seriously. During the next show, in Seattle, Trey will end his chess game explanation with an emphatic “We will CRUSH you.” As the Schvice put it:
The tradition of bands playing chess against their audience dates back to the times of Gregorian chants. Chanters vs. Monks. The Monks usually won. The great bluesmen of the 20’s and 30’s named their label Chess Records in honor of the legendary matches that took place in the blues halls and juke joints of the deep south. And who could forget the giant chess board that hung behind Jimi Hendrix on that misty morning in Woodstock, NY. In this tradition, Phish plays their audience in chess. The band’s convoluted strategy has kept the audience guessing. Victory is inevitable for one of the teams…
But the chess match also represents a musical trend that started developing as far back as Fall 94, a new adversarial approach that has changed the tenor of the Phish live experience entirely.
The primary instinct of Phish, and Trey in particular, is for everyone to have a good time. The typical show structure of the early 90s was designed around this principle, usually providing a sampler platter of all the things Phish does best: a genre-spanning slice of their repertoire, a few examples of extended improvisation, and all the trampoline-hopping and vacuum-sucking their reputation promised. Veterans could experience the nuance and differences from night to night, but newbies got the full spectrum to chew on, hopefully connecting with at least one of the many darts — musical or spectacle — that the band threw out on a nightly basis.
The summers of 1993 and 1994 started to challenge that audience more through the frequent deployment of segues, lightning-fast medleys that asked fans to keep up with unexpected transitions and reprises. But on the other side of the Halloween experiment, Fall 94 raised the ante, introducing marathon improvisational segments that sometimes drifted far afield from melodic, danceable music. First-timers and even some seasoned veterans expecting a fun night out were now forced to reckon with 30-minute-plus jams that featured avant-garde use of megaphone sirens, drills, and spooky whispering. Some of those frightened audience members probably never came back, but with Phish’s audience growth on a steady climb, they didn’t have to care.
Summer 95 doubled down on this confrontational approach, loading up on dissonance and making the long jam an almost-regular feature of the second set. Fall 95 would pull back from this experimental brink, but find new ways of defying audience expectations, a tactic that would continue for the rest of Phish’s peak decade. Band members will rotate instruments, Trey will take off his guitar for extended jams, they’ll reject the Halloween fan vote and play their own choice, they’ll play songs in the “wrong” places and jams in the “wrong” songs. The competitive spirit will even take hold within Phish — Scent of a Mule develops a duel, and the Trey and Fish speed battles build in intensity through the fall.
Tonight in Mountain View, there are a few examples of these face-offs. The chess segment is followed immediately by a Reba played at Ludicrous Speed, a death-defying stunt for a song so complicated. Fish stomps back on the accelerator in the final, post-whistling “bag it, tag it,” and Trey strikes back a song later, playing the intro to Antelope and then, as soon as Fish joins in, hard-shifting into Horn. When the Antelope finally does appear, its corrosive middle jam foreshadows just how effective the Trey/Fish rivalry can be...when applied to the right song.
As for band/fan antagonism, there are a few subversive sparks beyond the board game. It’s an apt tribute, but Trey saying “we’re going to play one of Jerry’s favorite songs” and then playing the Bill Monroe/Hank Williams bluegrass staple “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” is surely not what Shoreline fans hoped for. Later, there’s the perversity of the Mule Duel, and a Mike’s Song that’s just inching into some dark territory when it abruptly steers into Keyboard Army (avoiding the traditional Hydrogen, which would only make one appearance the entire tour). And for Fish’s featured piece, he debuts Elvis’ Suspicious Minds, the rare Henrietta cover that features no vacuum, trombone, or cymbals — just an electrified cape.
As audience ultimatums go, it’s no Providence Bowie. But part of Fall 95 is figuring out the right balance of fan service and antagonism, doing enough to keep arenas full of the converted and the curious happy while also pushing the envelope a little farther each night. The tour would add a new wrinkle to the regular cycle of provocative transformation, allowing their fanbase to get comfortable with a particular sound just in time for Phish to jump back out of reach. The game starts tonight, with Page moving bishop to b5.
[Ticket stub from The Golgi Project. Screencaps from this most-show video.]