Twos of a Kind

6/25/95, Philadelphia, PA, The Mann Center for the Performing Arts

To offset the punishing 11 shows in 12 nights schedule that closes out Summer 95, Phish booked a quartet of two-night stands at Northeast venues: The Mann, Jones Beach, Great Woods, and Sugarbush. It’s another sign that the game is totally different for the band in this region — whereas the two-night stand at Red Rocks earlier in the tour was arguably to offset that venue’s smaller capacity, these runs are all at venues that pack in at least 11,000 fans, and all eight shows were sold out. 

Of course, Phish is not a band that has to find a completely fresh batch of 11-15,000 people to fill the seats and lawn each night. Even in these earlier days, most of these runs probably saw significant carryover of fans from night to night, if not from run to run, without the huge travel distances of earlier in June. That added pressure to sharpen up how the catalog is used over multiple shows played to the same faces, while balancing a batch of new material and some older songs that were clearly a strong fit for the band’s current goals. 

Phish had played multiple-show runs in the past, of course, but never at this high frequency. The only two-night run in Fall 94 was at the cozy Spreckels Theatre in San Diego, and in the marathon spring/summer tour they only sprinkled in a handful of overnight stays: Beacon and Warfield Theatres, Red Rocks and Great Woods, and a headlining slot at the Laguna Seca Daze festival. They were already capable of no-repeating these runs without strain, but how they distribute that material as the structure of a Phish show evolves will always speak volumes.

The Mann is the first opportunity of this Northeastern leg to give fans the four-set experience. The classically-inclined Philly venue was a familiar stop — these were already their 3rd and 4th headlining gigs there — and Phish sounds pretty comfortable, complimenting the crowd on their attentiveness on night 1 and coming out with a spring in their step on night 2 after not having to spend the night on a tour bus. 

They might not be repeating songs from night to night (god forbid!), but the Mann setlists reveal that, by this point in the tour, there are certain song slots held over from show to show. There’s the new song showcase, the first-set exercise in dissonance,  the Big Jam, and the novelty act. That these slots typically showed up in similar places each night likely contributes to the tour’s reputation for repetitiveness, even if the overall songlist wasn’t any shorter than usual. Doing it back-to-back in the same room throws that structure into sharp relief.

For the new song slot, 6/24 got the final Spock’s Brain until 2000 — the song’s twists and turns proving too complicated for the moment — while 6/25 gets Taste and Theme. For the early-show warning that Phish were not the happy-go-lucky hippies of their reputation, 6/24 provided Stash and 6/25 brought Melt, both jams stuffed with wave upon wave of noise and tension. 

As for the nightly improvisational centerpiece, it’s been a fairly steady rotation of Tweezer, Bowie, and Mike’s Groove all summer, with the occasional wildcard thrown in. With Tweezer still recovering from its Finger Lakes marathon, it’s Bowie’s turn at Mann1 and Mike’s/Weekapaug at Mann2, both of which provide plenty of dark moments themselves (and in the latter case, an inspired/insane juxtaposition of Seger and Blondie). And in the novelty segment, the portion of the show where Phish winks and lets its fans know that they don’t take this shed headliner status too seriously, 6/24’s Acoustic Army gives way to a rarity: Fishman’s third and penultimate take on Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?, basically the exact inverse of summer encore staple A Day in the Life.  

Amid these familiar beats on 6/25, there’s a more general Phish song type that gets some extra reps. There are a number of songs in the catalog where Page and Trey each take a turn soloing, and the first three songs of the second set contain two of the most prominent: Maze and Mule. Both versions tonight are extended, fascinating examples of Trey’s evil influence on the more genteel keyboardist, with skronky guitar comps nudging Page into a demonic organ solo on Maze and Mule going an extra freaky round for the first hint at its soon-to-be-mandatory Duel. For all the talk of equality this tour, it’s definitely Trey pulling the other members to get on his level, rather than taking a band vote. 

Both Maze and Mule manage to do a lot within a fairly vanilla improvisational structure of trading solos, and the same dynamic plays out on the larger scales of two sets and two shows as well. The predictable contours of a Summer 95 Phish show may grow a little stale during a listening project, but it was a useful framework for a band expanding both their fanbase and their sound simultaneously. If you only caught one iteration of this format in 1995, it would more than likely blow your hair back. It’s only in a two-night stand that the seams start to show...but that’s the price we all pay as repeat customers.