We Spent a Year in Your Head
10/20/98, Sony Music Studios, New York, NY
SET 1: Sleep, Frankie Says > Ghost, Roggae, Guyute, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Driver, Albuquerque, Birds of a Feather, Piper, Taste
Listen on phish.in or watch on YouTube
Sessions on West 54th was a Manhattan knockoff of Austin City Limits, a weekly concert program beamed across America between Masterpiece Theater and regular showings of Yanni: Live at the Acropolis on the local public television station. The aesthetic was cozy and tasteful, with a small audience of polite fans surrounding the performers on the soundstage where Nirvana recorded their MTV Unplugged episode. It was a sterile environment, but the artists featured over its three seasons capture the late 90s as a utopia of eclecticism – Phish shared an episode with Rufus Wainwright, preceded by the wild double bill of Liz Phair and John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards, and followed by an episode with Los Amigos Invisibles and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars.
It was the best possible place for Phish to make a televised stop on their promotional circuit, a program that would let them record a full set of performances that didn’t have to be abridged to fit between commercial breaks. Even though the final product was cut down to half an hour and three songs, the full recording session eventually leaked, and it captures a fairly authentic Phish set halfway between the quiet intimacy of the Bridge School and the well-behaved new record pitchmen of the Fillmore show. Even if it’s slightly unsettling to hear them rip a respectable Ghost jam in front of a seated crowd on their best Broadway behavior, it’s a truthful introduction to Phish circa 1998.
That said, I’m far more interested in the non-musical portion of the Sessions on West 54th taping on this date. For its second season, the program had recruited David Byrne as host; a somewhat odd choice given that Byrne’s entire persona is twitchy social awkwardness. Watching his instructions to the audience at the start of Phish’s taping is excruciating, and the show also put him into very claustrophobic black box spaces to interview each week’s featured artists – this being a man who was uncomfortable even interviewing himself. But it pays off with Phish in one of my favorite interviews with the band, at a time when they were less and less likely to sit down for an honest Q&A.
The uncut interview fades in on them discussing Vermont outsider artist J. Willis Pratt, of all things, and ends with Page awkwardly pretending to thoughtfully nod at Byrne while they capture room tone. Byrne makes me feel better about my terrible interviewing habits with musicians, starting off with “Three of you guys were engineers…” (what?) and making no attempt at a natural flow between questions. And the prompts themselves are some real Phish 101 cliches: tickets, taping, trampolines, and vacuums.
Fifteen years into their career, Phish has heard these questions a thousand times and have been screwing with the clueless journalists asking them for most of it. But in this case, the interviewer is someone they deeply admire and, most importantly, want to impress. Forget the masses of PBS viewers out there who will eventually watch the program, these are four 80s college-rock nerds sitting mere inches away from the frontman of the dang Talking Heads, and it’s obvious which side of the interview is more starstruck.
So even while the stories they tell are well-known Phish lore – Mike’s spiritual experience during an early show at Goddard, the first trip to Colorado, their inspiration for the summer festivals – they’re told with unusual detail and enthusiasm. Page gives a wonderful explanation of their cut-up method in making The Story of the Ghost that is, not coincidentally, very similar to the origin story for Remain in Light: improvising, finding promising segments, and sculpting them into proper songs. Later, they reveal what they learned from each Halloween album cover (including the one Byrne says he was “involved with”) and the lingering benefits of living inside another band’s collective head (or Heads) for a spell.
“It becomes a study, a mediation,” Mike says. “We're listening to the album a lot during the fall before Halloween and practicing it and, like you said, getting into the heads of the people who made it without knowing them, necessarily.”
But the most interesting theme across the entire interview is how Phish fits their career into the prevailing DIY aesthetic of the time. Byrne asks about the tickets-by-mail system, still a burning music industry question in the wake of Pearl Jam vs. Ticketmaster, and they shrug it off as an easy solution – all you need is a newsletter with 150,000 subscribers. Allowing fans to tape was just a smart way of facilitating a word-of-mouth marketing campaign: “We were touring the whole country before we ever signed with a record label,” Trey says. They boast about their ability to put on and design in-house every detail of the summer festivals right down to the number of port-o-lets, “I think it’s another option in a world of SFX and corporations buying up the concert industry,” Trey adds
It’s a little bit of cred-polishing in front of Byrne, who came up in the CBGB punk scene (before quickly signing the Talking Heads to Sire Records, a division of Warner Music Group). But Phish also comes by it honestly, and it’s a worthwhile correction from the prevailing narrative of the band as just Grateful Dead Jr.* Three years removed from Jerry Garcia’s death, the Story of the Ghost cycle offered Phish a new opportunity to tell their story outside of that heavy shadow. And the cosmopolitan, genre-agnostic environs of public television was a good place to start.
And the version of "Taste" is great.