The Right Album
The Right Album
10/31/94, Glens Falls, NY, Glens Falls Civic Center
The true Phish Halloween Miracle is that they always picked the correct album. OK, the fans helped, at least for the first couple of years, in a surprisingly fruitful pre-internet example of crowdsourcing. And the theory doesn’t hold up so well in 3.0, unless you count the non-cover costumes, which I could easily argue (and have!) were exactly what the band needed in those years. But the first four Halloween musical costumes are chef’s-kiss perfect milestones for the band’s rapid evolution in the 90s.
When the band came up with the musical costume idea and put it to a fan vote, I’m pretty sure The White Album is not what they had in mind. Most classic albums are 45 minutes or so, 8 to 12 songs, the kind of collection Phish could learn on the fly, pad out with jams here and there, and produce a typical-for-the-time set of an hour and change. What they didn’t count on is that most Phish fans, if given the choice, will vote for More Phish, the maximum amount of Phish, with all other criteria about what would make a good concert set secondary to that goal (this is my guess for why Joe’s Garage supposedly was the actual poll winner in 1995, but declined by the band).
So instead they got The White Album, the longest and most difficult Beatles record. With plenty of iconic Beatles LPs to choose a favorite from, only weirdos (like myself) choose The White Album. It’s the self-indulgent sound of the band beginning to unravel, deciding they no longer need an editor or even each other’s input. This is a major reason why I love it, but it’s an odd, even rude, slab of music to saddle your favorite band with for their first crack at a new Halloween tradition.
Whether it made for a musically successful Phish show is debatable. Or so I thought, before I ran those Phish.net numbers the other day and discovered that 1994 has the highest average rating of all Halloween shows, narrowly beating out 1996 by six thousandths of a point. It can’t be all that excellent first set Reba, so I’ll chalk its lofty status up to attention bias — if you merely expressed the slightest interest in Phish in the 90s, XLIIs of Halloween 94 and NYE 95 magically appeared in your mailbox.
Because honestly, the White Album set is a demanding listen. The album is paced weirdly for a live performance, and Phish plays it very straight with only a sprinkle of improv and reinterpretation. Hard to blame them, when they had to learn 30 songs and squeeze them in between two full sets of a show that, bizarrely, didn’t start until 9:30 on a Monday night.
But I’d also argue that the show’s classic status in spite of those flaws is down to it just feeling like a bold step that was Very Right for Phish to take in fall 1994. More than any other Beatles album, more than most of the other albums that were rumored to be in contention (Innervisions, Dark Side of the Moon, the ever-present Zappa catalog), The White Album feels harmonious with the spirit of Phish in 1994, and the changes they were experiencing.
The Deeper You Go, The Higher You Fly
The White Album is the beginning of the end for The Beatles, and you can hear the four members drifting apart between the grooves of its four sides. It’s not just the first Beatles album without their photo on the cover, it also doesn’t even have a photo of them all together inside — it’s four individual portraits arranged in a row. But the positive spin on that separation is that they were all discovering their personal voices; not what it meant to be The Beatles, but what it meant to be John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
Phish wasn’t on the verge of a breakup in 1994; instead, they were in the early stages of becoming a more egalitarian enterprise. There’s always a gravitational pull towards Phish just being Trey’s band, both because of the traditional leadership role of the guitarist in a rock band and Trey’s surplus of enthusiasm and energy. But 1994 feels like the point where the other three really started to assert themselves, while Trey sought new ways to sit back and leave room for his companions, leading to big musical changes.
At the very least, covering The White Album forces them to distribute vocals among all four members, and this particularly benefits Page, who sings wonderful versions of “Blackbird,” “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Sexy Sadie” at a time when he had few such spotlights in the Phish songbook. There are also songs that weren’t written guitar-first, such as “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Honey Pie,” songs that require Trey to sit back and play rhythm guitar — something he enjoys doing, but rarely, at this time in Phish history, felt confident or calm enough to pull off with regularity. Pretending to be a band with four strong voices forced Phish to further wrangle with what a more even distribution of responsibility in their own group would sound like, an itch they were already starting to scratch.
Half Of What I Say Is Meaningless
For all its Serious Album trappings, The White Album is goofy as hell, full of genre pastiches, inside jokes, and studio experiments. In other words, it’s right in line with what Phish liked to do in the early 90s. It’s a funny detail that the only Beatles song that Phish had covered before 10/31/94 was “Piggies,” of all things, way back in 1985, and “Fee” might as well be an animal-switched remake of “Rocky Raccoon.”
So while being forced to cover the full, strange deep-cut depths of this double-album didn’t really set them on a new path, it’s nice when the general-consensus Greatest Band of All Time turns out to have been doing sort of the same thing as you: burning through different genres like a kid playing dress-up, writing (and leaving in) bizarre song fragments such as “Wild Honey Pie” and “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” and trying out weird, loop-based excursions that give the audience no quarter. Feeling like they were on the same page as The Beatles no doubt gave them the confidence to go further in these scattered directions, a boost that would pay off in the next batch of new songs and the eventual blob-based recording of Billy Breathes, a pretty White Album-y album.
I Look At You All
It’s not quite Beatlemania, but there were some more fan hijinks outside of this show, as the ticketless horde attempted to storm the doors in an echo of 10/26’s tomfoolery. I keep coming around to this point in these essays, but this week really feels like a pivotal one when Phish was forced to realize that they’re no longer a cult band for New England college kids, but something approaching legitimate rock stars — still a cult band, for sure, but now one that sells out shows and leaves a bunch of people outside desperate to get in.
They’ve not quite grown into a comfortable arena-rock band yet — that’s the message of next year’s Halloween — but they’re also facing the fact that the theater circuit is no longer sustainable, and they probably need to start acting like the big band they want to be, not the small band they were. Part of actualizing that swagger is covering the goddamn Beatles, the biggest rock band there is, and pulling it off convincingly. What’s more, large-scale, earnest anthems such as “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Revolution” come out sounding great, surely encouraging the band that they can pull off those kinds of grand statements without the safety net of a tongue in cheek.
It didn’t have to go this well. They could have played The White Album once, had a few laughs, kept a few songs around as occasional covers, and looked fondly back on a unique show and a hefty challenge met. But sometimes when you wear a costume, if it’s really well executed and it catches you at just the right time, you end up working pieces of it into your regular daily style. Phish pulled off this trick at four Halloweens in five years, and certain components of those one-offs just never left their DNA. It could’ve been a novelty, but instead it was therapy.