Touring Company

6/30/95, Mansfield, MA, Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts

It’s hard to imagine today (especially right now), but the summer concert season used to be more than destination festivals, nostalgia package tours, and jambands. It might just be my age, but the 1990s feel like the glory days of the outdoor sheds, with multiple touring festivals such as Lollapalooza, HORDE, and Lilith Fair, young bands stepping up to big stages at the crest of their popularity, and, well, jambands, all passing through America’s amphitheaters between Memorial and Labor Days.

So while there is a lot to say about Phish and the Grateful Dead working the same circuit in 1995 (and trust me, I’ll get to it soon), there are plenty of other musical acts in Phish’s newfound peer group. Just take a look at the packed schedule for Great Woods in the 1995 season: alternative rock groups briefly on top of the world (White Zombie, The Cranberries, Live, Soul Asylum), classic rock giants before their steepest decline (David Bowie, Elton John, Tom Petty, Black Sabbath), legends of beer-soaked hard rock (Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Skynyrd) and some intriguing oddities (REM playing 3 nights, a BB King blues fest, and...Yanni).

On the occasion of a fairly nondescript first night in Mansfield, it’s worth thinking about where Phish fit into this musical context. There are some obvious near neighbors on the calendar, such as Wetlands pals The Spin Doctors, Dave Matthews Band, and Blues Traveler (who played Great Woods twice in 95, as part of HORDE tour and a radio station festival), former shed mentor Santana, and tailgate competitors Jimmy Buffett and the Allman Brothers Band. But I’m more interested in how they connected with — or isolated themselves from — the broader music scene of 1995.

On stage, their post-Lowell cover choices have been extremely boomer: Beatles, The Who, Chuck Berry, Zeppelin, Hendrix, and The Stones. They’ve somehow managed to tease The Breeders’ relatively recent alt-rock classic “Cannonball” in each of the last two shows, but more often find themselves sprinkling in riffs from 70s FM heroes such as Leo Sayer or Bob Seger. The most explicit crossover with the music world of 1995 might be the guest appearances in North Carolina and Virginia by members of the Dave Matthews Band, who were just starting to capture mainstream radio and album sales attention that summer in the precise way Phish had not. 

It’s crazy that 1995 Phish ran in these celebrity circles given their relatively paltry record sales. But there are certainly elements of the common Phish show in 1995 that overlap with other touring acts of the day. Here are a few particular connections to other big tours of that summer, proving yet again that Phish can be a Whitman’s sampler of musical trends. 

Lollapalooza 95: Looking back, it seems completely improbable that a major tour of American sheds would send out a lineup headlined by Sonic Youth, of all bands. Though they were the cool older siblings to the alternative rock scene, Sonic Youth never experienced the crossover success of Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, or the dozens of other bands they influenced. Lolla 95 was apparently such a misfire that the festival over-corrected in the other direction in 1996, tapping Metallica as headliners and killing off the meaning of “alternative” once and for all. But for kids like me (attending on my 16th birthday, a full year before I first saw Phish) it was a traveling gateway drug to the underground, the first time I saw bands like Pavement, Brainiac, The Coctails, and The Jesus Lizard.

I wrote about the surprising amount of common turf between Phish and Sonic Youth last year, and the convergent evolution has only deepened as Phish explored noisier textures in Summer 95 while Sonic Youth played “The Diamond Sea” every night somewhere else in America. In this show, the last 3 minutes of Mike’s Song find Trey in an “Expressway to Yr Skull” feedback squall that would make Thurston Moore nod in approval. It’s immediately followed by Contact, a song so corny and slap-bassy it would make Moore and the rest of Sonic Youth collectively gag.

REM: Another band tracing a similar path across the country that summer was REM, who pulled a Reverse Phish, watching their popularity skyrocket in the early 90s while they avoided touring. That exile ended in 1995, in support of Monster, a Hoist-like compromise of their own to get their sound in sync with the fuzzier tones of alt-rock radio. Despite the reluctance of Michael Stipe, REM played a bajillion shows around the world in 1995, including going one better than Phish with a 3-night run at Great Woods in early June. 

If there’s one sound that Phish can’t pull off, it’s 80s college-rock jangle, so it’s hard to find a specific REM counterpart in their songbook. Maybe Acoustic Army could slot in as an “Endgame” style instrumental, and the spiritual inquests of Lifeboy or Strange Design sure sound like early-90s Stipe soul-searching. But by process of elimination, I’ve landed on Taste, a song that jangles in a flashy way that is much more Trey than Peter Buck, but still hits some of the same marks as “Stand.” 

HORDE: Phish was two years past outgrowing the Horizons Of Rock Developing Everywhere tour, but 1995 was the year that HORDE caught back up with them, as its founder Blues Traveler and frequent participant Dave Matthews Band both caught chart fire. By the time HORDE arrived at Great Woods in mid-August, “Run-Around” was peaking at #8 on the Billboard singles chart. But the headliner that year was The Black Crowes, a band going the opposite direction commercially while increasingly embracing the jamband aesthetic.

The Crowes set a rootsy blues-rock tone for HORDE ‘95 that went all the way down the bill, which also included G. Love & The Special Sauce, Taj Mahal, Joan Osborne, and Sheryl Crow. And part of what separated Phish from the HORDE crew is that they could pull off that genre, but would never settle for that sound alone. In tonight’s show, its representative is another sterling Summer 95 Possum, which reprises the Dave’s Energy Guide of two nights ago in an insane and far-ranging Trey solo. Self-aware as always, they top it off by seguing into Ha Ha Ha, a goofy lark that the Robinson brothers would never tolerate.

Yanni: Forget the Dead, no other artist in 1995 paralleled Phish like Greek new-age legend Yanni Chryssomallis. Touring America on the back of his very own breakthrough live album, Yanni Live At The Acropolis, the mustachioed bandleader conducted his orchestra through basically all the same venues as the Vermont foursome, even playing Deer Creek the night before Phish and Blossom the night after. I’m no expert on the Yanni catalog, but he’s basically to my parents what Phish is to me, and I’ve heard enough to recognize that his music is not that far off from the orchestrated versions of Trey’s compositions that would pop up in the 2000s. 

Orchestra or otherwise, nobody’s mistaking 1995 Phish for Yanni, but if you squint your ears just right and add some syrupy strings yourself, you can hear some similarities in the more complex material (and maybe the watery fretless bass tone of Ric Fierabracci). If they had played it in this show, Divided Sky would be the best representative — it even sounds of a piece with Yanni song titles like “Keys to Imagination” and “The Rain Must Fall” (and did you know he has a song called “Swept Away”? How deep does this go?!?) Instead, tonight’s Phish/Yanni analogue of choice is the final stretch of Lizards, or perhaps Page’s Coil solo, which occasionally flirts with Windham Hill territory. If only Yanni had a dress-wearing vacuum soloist...