Tickets Available at the Box Office
6/29/94 — Raleigh, NC, Walnut Creek Amphitheater
For any fans who jumped on in the back half of the 90's or later, this is an amusing, almost unfathomable image. With the lawn open, Walnut Creek holds more than 20,000 people, so 25% capacity would look very empty and sad indeed. That’s a pretty disheartening turnout for the band’s first shed date in Raleigh — even for, as @WolfGuitar also pointed out, a Wednesday night — and especially on the heels of a hot, sweaty Midwest run where they filled up venues of a more reasonable size.
But the night’s empty seats are a reminder of another challenge Phish faced in 1994: was it possible for Phish to do what they do on the scale of outdoor sheds and full-size arenas? At the time, this was not a settled question, despite a smattering of dates in New England amphitheaters and college basketball/minor league hockey arenas. Only five years before this point, they were still playing restaurants, frat parties, and student unions (exactly five years before, they were playing to a hundred-some people at The Front, of course). In those intimate environments, performing for a crowd of friends and regulars, the essential weirdness at the core of Phish was forged. Could those same shenanigans possibly work in venues 250 times as large?
As years passed, the lack of any overnight successes was a blessing for the live show, which was allowed to grow incrementally along with the venues. By ‘93 and early ‘94, Phish’s sweet spot was the theater; itself a funny image, given the historic sites and ornate interiors that bore witness to the debauchery of a jamband crowd. But at the same time, the band’s ever-optimistic bookers were already dipping their toe into the shed circuit, especially close to home. After a trial run in 1992 opening for Santana, 1993 saw Phish first visits to Red Rocks and Wolf Trap, headlining debuts at Jones Beach, Great Woods and the Mann Center, and H.O.R.D.E. appearances at stops in Richmond and Middletown. Spring/Summer ‘94 had a handful of college basketball arenas on the itinerary, an accidental gig on the main stage at Starwood, a two-night return to Red Rocks, and will soon wrap up with visits back to Jones Beach and Great Woods and their first top billing at SPAC.
Despite the hallowed ground status many of these names carry in Phish history, they were still largely punching above their weight at this point. Walnut Creek, lying outside of their New England base, was especially ambitious; when they last visited North Carolina, only two months earlier, they entertained 3,000 at the Grady Cole Center in Charlotte. It’s not like The Triangle, with its overabundance of college students, is lacking for mid-size music venues. But instead of a packed theatre or a respectably full basketball arena, Phish found themselves playing to half-empty seats and a deserted lawn at Walnut Creek.
Yet whatever the booking agent logic that got them there, the band appears to make the best of this night by using it as a practice session for their hopeful, eventual transition to the touring major leagues. After all, despite the low ticket sales, they’re still playing an amphitheater, with the opportunity to hear what their songs sound like bouncing off the high, broad ceiling of the pavilion and out into the summer air. Close your eyes, or maybe adjust your field of vision to only take in the first few dozen rows, and it offers a glimpse of the future, conducting noise for a coalescing mass of 25,000 people instead of a more compact 2,500.
The experiment takes different shape in the night’s two sets. At the outset, they hit the stage with all the momentum of an excellent, expansive June — obligingly giving Sample a try in its natural environment, but then diving deep into uncompromised versions of Reba and David Bowie. There’s an I Didn’t Know with Fishman playing a drum pedal on his legs, an invocation of Catapult in the intro to Bowie, and the intentionally difficult clapping intro to Mound, a sly, Phishy goof on the typical rituals of arena-size bands and crowds. Golgi immediately settles in as a big-venue set closer, with a good old-fashioned shout-along lyric, bookending a good old-fashioned (for Phish) high-difficulty middle.
At first, the second set appears to be headed the same direction, opening with way-out-of-its-element Phish jazz in The Landlady and the equally esoteric Poor Heart. But starting with Tweezer, it begins to sound like Phish is playing it safe…at least for them. Tweezer is now a no-brainer of a crowd-pleaser for any size venue; you can palpably feel the audience raise its intensity a notch as soon as the riff starts up. But in its usual early ‘94 incarnation — with a jam that grows progressively more entangled until it finally cracks and sputters to a close—it takes the air out of a room this big. By the next summer, Phish will be inflicting far more complex and experimental Tweezers upon large outdoor crowds, but that confrontational confidence hasn’t appeared yet, leaving this version cold.
From there, Phish tries out more traditional large-crowd moves: the lighter-waving ballad of Lifeboy, a reprise of UIC Pavilion’s extended Divided Sky pause, a doubleheader of fist-pumping finales in Suzy and Cavern. In the encore, they hit upon one of the absolute best songs to hear at an outdoor summer show (Ya Mar), but play it a couple hours too late, long after the sun has set. Do all these decisions work? Sure. But it also has the slight taste of playing-it-safe that tainted earlier Hoist-heavy shows of this year, a conscious effort to broaden their appeal that sacrifices some of their ability to surprise and challenge.
So what were the results of this shed “soundcheck”? Well, that ‘95 near-sellout at Walnut Creek featured a five-song second set, and the next time there in 1997 produced an official-DVD-worthy show. So eventually, they found the formula that could entertain a fully-sold Walnut Creek and its cousins across the country, so much so that they’d survive to become one of the few reliable shed-filling rock bands remaining today. But like all Phish advances, it didn’t happen overnight, and three-quarters-empty amphitheaters, depressing as they may have been, weren’t the worst places to find their feet.
[Thanks to @WolfGuitar for inspiring this angle. After writing this essay, I read David “Zzyzx” Steinberg’s chapter on the show in “This Has All Been Wonderful,” which expresses similar thoughts — no thought-borrowing intended on my part. If you like my ‘94 posts, definitely pick up David’s book, which is an invaluable primary source for what it was like following the band on this tour.]