Walk With a Giant

10/3/98, Tinley Park, IL, World Music Theatre

SET 1: Birds of a Feather, Farmhouse, The Moma Dance, Runaway Jim -> Arc -> Down By the River, Moonlight in Vermont, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? > Amazing Grace > Uncloudy Day

There’s a famous televised live performance in the 90s where Neil Young shows up on stage, infiltrates a band at the height of its powers and immediately seizes power. They play one of Neil’s songs, and despite the Canadian singer-songwriter having a good three decades over his younger playmates, he’s whipping them into a higher gear they didn’t know they had available. With that irreproducible tone searing out of Old Black and his fierce huddle-stomp posture, Young bends his impromptu backing band to his will, molding them into a makeshift facsimile of his most-trusted companions, Crazy Horse. 

That performance was September 2nd, 1993 at the MTV Video Music Awards; the band was Pearl Jam, the song was “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Young Phishcrit was tuned in to see all his favorite alternative rock bands of the day, with Pearl Jam ranking high among them. When Neil Young appeared and Eddie Vedder presumptively proclaimed “you know this guy,” I was only vaguely familiar with him as a singer with a couple soft-country songs on the classic rock station, possibly even conflating him with his fellow Neil, Diamond. But by the end of those 7 minutes, I was over Pearl Jam and grunge and fully invested in the deep songbook of Neil Young. 

Fast forward five years, and, to quote a much earlier case of Young invading a band and taking it over: deja vu. Now I’m in college, watching Country Music Television for the first and only time in my life to see my new favorite band take the stage as the unlikely final act on the all-star Farm Aid bill*. I now know very well who Neil Young is, as he’s assumed his permanent place as my favorite solo artist of all time, so I get pretty damn excited when I see him stroll on stage and pick up a backup Languedoc (!) in the middle of a Runaway Jim jam.

If that weren’t enough, after a wall of noise somewhat charitably labeled “Arc” by the phish.net scribes, Neil calls for just about the most exciting song possible: “Down By The River.” Phish had played “Cinnamon Girl” a couple times the year before and “Albuquerque” all summer, and had apparently agreed with Neil that afternoon to play “Powderfinger” when he would later sit in. But Neil does what Neil wants**, and he decides on the spur of the moment to play one of his most open-ended songs: three verse/choruses with nothing but yawning improvisational space between. 

Phish, devoted students of classic rock that they are, knows how to play it. And the next twenty minutes are, for my money, the best guest appearance in a Phish set ever. It is, again, my favorite solo artist playing with my favorite band, so of course I would say that. But it also lives up to the impossible expectations that equation sums to in my mind. To this day, it feels like a silly dream that it even happened, never mind that it worked so unbelievably well.

Though he’s a serial collaborator with a long trail of backing bands, Young has immense gravity. When he joined Crosby, Stills and Nash – already established as the biggest rock supergroup in history at the time – he somehow became the most essential member. For decades after, CSNY sold out stadiums and arenas, while CSN played the casino and state fair circuit. Pearl Jam went on to have a long and storied career and remains one of the most popular touring rock bands to this day, but in 1993 Neil made them look like a high school Battle of the Bands act. They shouldn’t feel bad, it happens to lots of guys.

However, with Phish, the effect is bidirectional. Neil choosing one of his heaviest cuts signifies a certain level of trust in what Phish can do as his backing band, but it still only requires a simple two-chord vamp. Crazy Horse delivers the song with more crunch than creativity; their job – and they do it incredibly well – is to provide the bedrock platform upon which Neil can unleash acidic guitar geysers. 

Crazy Horse is just about the best at what they do, and what they do…ain’t what Phish does. First, there’s Trey, who offers – dare I say it – the most constructive guitar partnership Neil had experienced since the days of Danny Whitten, who is practically Neil’s co-frontman on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Frank Sampedro, Whitten’s successor in Crazy Horse, is a rhythm guitar metronome; Stephen Stills, Young’s eternal foil, is always ready for a guitar solo battle. But Trey gives you equal measures of both, and more importantly, the instinct and wisdom to flip between the two modes at just the right time – a talent this jam exemplifies. 

But playing off another guitarist, no matter how skilled, is still familiar territory for Neil, and that’s where Down By the River goes at first, chasing the first chorus with a high volume salvo of dueling solos. Then Phish welcomes Neil into the fold, instead of the expected vice versa, starting a four-way conversation that invites him in as a fifth voice. First, there’s Fish dropping down the intensity at 3:30 by switching to wood blocks, placing the song back in its moody fever-dream origins instead of reflexive amphitheater pyrotechnics. Neil responds with a characteristically slow and understated riff, saying more in a repeated 8-note phrase than most guitarists can articulate in an entire night of solos.

It’s a test, and by the time Neil has played the melody four times through, Phish has reshaped itself around this new base, listening deeply and offering thoughtful complement as he escalates and iterates (he edits it down to a mere five notes by the end) and loses his hat. After the second round of vocals, there’s no more small talk necessary and they can dive straight into the deep end. Neil starts to play a rapid shuffling point/counterpoint with Trey, the kind of telepathic volley he used to have with Whitten. Who’s playing lead? Who’s playing rhythm? Who cares? What’s important is that Neil is not the undisputed bandleader, and Phish are not playing with deferential awe, but nudging him from all sides into promising new directions. 

Over this stretch, Trey is still very much being his 1998 self, playing a long effects-laden sustain in the 12th minute and almost triggering a bweeoooo. The rhythm section (including Page) draws upon the past three years of honing their arena-rock chops, fanning the flames of the guitarists without ever settling into a bored routine. It eventually reaches a noisy crescendo approaching the galeforce of another one of Neil’s 90’s adoptees, although one he never sat in with: Sonic Youth. At 16:30, the wave breaks, there’s a quick string scrape duet, and they’re still finding new turf in the “be on my side, be on your side” wind-down. It feels like they could have kept playing for another 20 minutes, if Willie wasn’t getting impatient on the side of the stage.

It’s transcendent enough to lend some credibility to the rumor that Neil asked them to be his backing band on a future tour – a story I’ve never seen officially confirmed, but one I often like to daydream about. The logistics don’t line up, with Phish having a new album to promote and Neil about to enter another acoustic phase with a year of performing alone and recording Silver & Gold. But this isn’t just a momentous Phish jam, it’s also one of the best things Neil played in the 90s…and he had a hell of a 90s. It’s noisy, weird and nuanced, playing to Neil’s strengths and also pushing him out of his comfort zone; for a guy who has never liked to stand still musically, it would’ve been a welcome mid-career challenge.

The subsequent songs with Willie Nelson are a bit of an anticlimax and much more typical of a guest appearance: polite and awkward. They also explain why Phish got the “headliner” slot over more esteemed artists on the bill – they were the best candidates to play house band for the grand finale. They’re joined on organ by Paul Schaffer, who is attracted to superjams like a moth to a flame, and an awkward family of Native Americans.

Phish seems to struggle with Willie’s more-jazz-than-country meter, and resorts to playing their generic bluegrass beat beneath “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “Uncloudy Day.” But doing “Moonlight in Vermont” with the Stardust man himself is a real bucket list item, and Trey still gets one last feature with his solo in Amazing Grace – somehow the last time to date that Phish has performed the spiritual, and what a way to retire it, standing next to Neil and Willie.

Slightly unsatisfying dessert course aside, Phish had already proved their case to VJ Alison Stewart (“that was a jam, jelly and a smear of peanut butter,” she says as the hosts cut in and remind people to donate), perplexed CMT viewers nationwide, and anyone who ever doubted that they could stand toe-to-toe with a rock legend. In April 1993, they were joking that Neil Young was going to show up any moment and play with them; five years later, they had manifested that prank into reality. Phish spent the mid-90s gradually transforming their postmodern joke on classic rock into the real deal. Standing their ground against Hurricane Neil, where so many other bands had been steamrolled, was their final exam. They passed.

* - Also on the bill, besides the usual Farm Aid triumvirate: Steve Earle, the Del McCoury Band and…Wilco! An early dad-rock convergence.

** - In fact, he played “Powderfinger” in his own solo set earlier that evening, as Trey humorously relates.