Velvet Appalachia

A Summer 95 Live Album

Aug 21, 2020

Velvet Appalachia - A Summer 95 Live Album

“That's what we're shooting for...Sun Ra meets Velvet Underground at a bluegrass festival. In the middle of Appalachia.”

This quote, from a goofball interview the band gave Burlington’s Vox magazine in May 1995, ended up as the thesis of my journey through Summer 95. Trey and Jon were likely joking — it’s quickly followed by a reference to Deliverance and Mike suggesting the alternative self-description “Iggy Pop meets Jerry Garcia and kicks his ass” — but like all good jokes it contains a kernel of truth. Phish were about to embark on a tour that would challenge their audience like never before, adding the three ingredients listed above to their established geek-prog base, welding the collective polyphony of bluegrass to the dissonance of experimental rock and the uncompromised vision of the Arkestra. As aspirations go, you can’t do much better.

So when I sat down (after a generous break) to create a mix for the fast and furious Summer 95 tour — following the same double-disc set rules as my Fall 94 set, Another Live One — I tried to reflect that spirit as best I could in 160 minutes or less. That’s...not so easy. Summer 95 is a wild beast to tame and corral into a compilation. It’s best known for immense sagas of improvisation that would dominate a compact disc; you could put together a two-disc set with just the Mud Island and Finger Lakes Tweezers, or pick one and fill the second disc with one (1) Bowie and a (choose one) Jim > Free or Disease > Free.

For this collection, I’ve decided to omit those big jams, putting the spotlight instead on some of the spectacular moments that lie in their long, long shadow. I strove to represent the character of those historic events: the marathon explorations of tension that mark the Jones Beach Tweezer, the Raleigh Jim, and the summer’s famous Bowies. But for purposes of accessibility and novelty, I’m sticking to performances that provide that flavoring in more palatable durations and packaging. Nothing here breaks the 20-minute barrier that they finally started to flaunt with regularity in 1995, but none of the tracks are playing it safe either.

As brief as it was, the Summer 1995 tour left me pretty exhausted, as most of these shows and featured jams presented heavy meals. Doing them all in roughly the same timespan as they were played — 22 shows in a bonkers 27 days — put my Phish-listening endurance to the test, and may have influenced me to rate this tour slightly lower than many fans. But when readers pushed back on my lukewarm reactions to some of the tour’s most famous shows or jams, we always concurred that the deep-dive experiments of Summer 95 were a necessary step for the band, a probe sent to the outer limits of what they could get away with sonically now that they had hit the touring big time. On the subsequent tour, they took a step back from that frontier, and in doing so produced one of their consensus classic runs. But there’s no Fall 95 results without the long nights in the lab of Summer 95. Here’s a dispatch from that month of boundary-pushing and discovery.

Chalk Dust Torture (6/20)

There’s no easing into this tour. The Chalk Dust from Blossom at the halfway point of the tour accurately reflects the urgency of Phish storming sheds from coast to coast for the first time, starting to sharpen their unwieldy material into a fine arena-rock point while still allowing imperfections of weirdness. The jam could easily just be a Trey feature, but it’s buffeted by intrusions of dissonance and Trey’s new effects pedal obsessions, each of which fail to fully derail the song but instead just throw more coal on the boiler. It’s a concise exhibit of how both the large venues and the more experimental improv of the summer started to creep in on even the most straightforward material.

Theme From The Bottom (6/7)

Summer 95 is also known for an influx of new material that would set the tone for the rest of the decade in Phish songwriting. The first of these new songs to ripen was Theme, which was already pretty mature in its maiden voyage at the Voters For Choice benefit in May. The song’s second-ever performance goes beyond maturity to suggest an enticing path not taken for the song, featuring a jam that flirts more heavily with the noisy alternative-rock peddled by fellow Summer 95 headliners Sonic Youth. Instead of the triumphant solos we’ve come to expect from Theme’s open section, Trey deploys a detuning-like effect that evokes seasickness, pushing it hard until the band goes almost completely free around the 8th minute, joined by the cosmic buzzes of Page’s new, rarely-used synthesizer.

Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove (6/10)

The one potential cheat to my “no marathon jams” rule sneaks by on the technicality of being three songs in one, a 36-minute suite in three movements. I gushed about this sequence in the June 10th essay, but the perspective from the other end of the tour only makes me appreciate it more. Here is a sublime mixture of the light and the dark, the dance party and the freakshow, exquisitely proportional in a balance that Phish wouldn’t regularly master until 1997-98. If the rest of this tour would err on the dark side in its most exploratory phases, at least they had already laid this footprint, terrorizing and seducing the crowd in equal measure.

If I Could (7/1)

If you need a breather after that Mike’s Groove workout, I completely understand. Here’s a wonderful If I Could to take the edge off, another performance I raved about in its show’s essay, foretelling its inclusion on this mix. But here the ballad is sequenced in its proper place, as the cooldown after an adventurous piece of improv, a whispering breeze of straightforward beauty. No slight intended to Strange Design, but it’s a role I wish it played more often in this year of Phish.

Possum > Ha Ha Ha (6/30)

Phish weren’t quite the all-cylinders arena-rock force they would be by the end of the year, but they could solo it up with the best of the jam circuit when they weren’t raining noise jams down on unsuspecting hippies. The secret sauce that puts them beyond their peers in this zone is the Trey-Fish partnership/rivalry, two virtuosos playfully egging each other on. That competitive spirit would hit its zenith in the fall, but as this Possum demonstrates, it was rounding into form in the summer too. What would normally be a gradual, linear escalation from foot to peak gets taken to and past the point of absurdity, passing through Dave’s Energy Guide and finding extra gear after extra gear. Perhaps uneasy with any macho excess it suggests, Phish chases it with an appropriate dose of Gen X sarcasm: a coda of Ha Ha Ha.

David Bowie (6/13)

Bowie is pretty indisputably the MVP of Summer 95, with every appearance a memorable version that builds off the insanity of last December’s nightmare in Providence. This one, from the Riverport Amphitheater, might be the least well-known, in part due to its humble 17:37 runtime in the company of giants. But to my ears, it hits the Goldilocks spot for the band’s experiments in tension-without-release, finding an eerie motif right off the bat and iterating slowly for ten minutes before exploding into the song’s composed climax. Later versions would repeat this playbook for twice as long, an impressive and courageous feat that nevertheless produces diminishing returns to my ears.

I Didn’t Know (6/15)

Many of these punishing jams were chased with either sentimentality (Strange Design, Acoustic Army) or levity, and from looking at the Lakewood setlist you might assume this an example of the latter case. But that night’s knotty Stash didn’t so much resolve into one of Richard Wright’s barbershop oddities as decay, and for once, I Didn’t Know got the existential horror treatment its lyrics suggest. Sung at quarter-speed over an ambient drone, with a free-jazz Fishman trombone solo for added creepiness, it’s another sign that no Phish song was safe from the encroaching darkness in Summer 95.

Reba (6/19)

Which is not to say that they couldn’t still be pretty when they wanted to be. When the band ran the Deer Creek show this summer as part of their Dinner and a Movie webcast series, this Reba drew rave reviews from the Twitter crowd, for good reason. It’s all about the patience — with no serious diversions, it oozes its way to 16 minutes (whistling included) and feels light as a feather, a band effortlessly snapping into four-way conversation on a song that fits like a favorite old hoodie by this point. A sunset Reba in the midwest, that’s summer.

Split Open and Melt (7/1)

One would think that Melt would have had a bigger season, since it had grown into the primary source for dissonant Phish over the preceding two years. But most of its Summer 95 versions fly under the radar, perhaps because the fussy meter of its jam kept the song tethered relative to the fuzzier borders of Bowie, Tweezer, and Mike’s. However, the Great Woods Melt is a keeper, fusing the song’s “who’s keeping time?” game of hot potato with the ferocious playing of those longer improvisations. That it came in the first set of a show, and only four songs after the soulful If I Could from Disc 1, shows just how much the Phish palette was expanding on this tour.

Slave to the Traffic Light (6/15)

A subtly unorthodox version that begins its customary climb from the quietest of spaces — just Trey plucking harmonics in a quiet, undersold amphitheater, soon joined by a halting Fishman pattern. The loping rhythm creates an unusual, unsteady vibe to the jam which might not be to everyone’s taste, but it pays off in a roof-rattling peak that feels vindicated. On a tour where the band was stingy with its emotional release valve, it’s the perfect punctuation mark.