We’re Coming To Your Town
10/26/94, Boone, NC, Varsity Gym, Appalachian State University
I gotta be honest (as Prince would have me be), there’s not a lot to dig into musically in this show. It’s not a bad show by any means; there are average-great versions of Antelope, Reba, and Bowie, and a YEM that gets into a bunch of hijinks, including a Vibration of LIfe, a Simple reprise, and some Catapult lyrics in the vocal jam. Anyone who wasn’t a maniac listening sequentially through every show of Fall Tour 94 would probably have lots to say about this show. But being that maniac, it feels like just another tour date to me. Which is totally fine; Phish is learning 30 Beatles songs to premiere in less than a week, they can’t be expected to pull rabbits out of their hat every night on the march north to Glens Falls.
So instead I’ll take inspiration from a link sent my way by @HitsLocker when I live-tweeted this show two year ago:
Yes, it appears this fateful Wednesday night on the campus of Appalachian State University was a was a right old shitshow. If you don’t want to read the full article, consider this highlight reel:
Dave Robertson, Appalachian Director of Student Programs from 1985 until this past summer, estimates at least 50 Volkswagen buses caravanned into Boone and wandered the downtown area looking for somewhere to park and camp the day before the show.
“I didn’t know they had that big of a loyal following,” Robertson said. “But they did, and they came here in droves.”
…
“Faculty would leave campus for lunch and come back to find their parking spot had turned into a Phish tailgate,” Robertson said. “These were clearly not Appalachian students.”
Unbeknownst at the time to University Police, Nitrous oxide, a gas, that when inhaled, gives a euphoric high, was being sucked out of balloons on Sanford Mall.
“We thought they were blowing up helium balloons,” Robertson said.
It wasn’t until the show started that one of the student employees informed him that these balloons were actually filled with “hippie crack.”
…
On the south side of the gym, a 15-foot human ladder managed to remove a window and climb atop each other’s shoulders to jump in. This was quickly noticed and put to a halt by officers, Robertson said.
…
In retrospect, Robertson notes that, although there was chaos and at times the potential for someone to get hurt, the Phish crowd was never violent, just very eager to see the show.
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Canonically, the first really tough Phish ticket was six days later, for the aforementioned Halloween show at the Glens Falls Civic Center. But even for this midweek stop in northwestern North Carolina, it sounds like demand was well above supply. The last time Phish had played in the state, just 4 months earlier, they had booked the Walnut Creek Amphitheater in Raleigh, which holds over 20,000 people. Even if that night was severely undersold, the jump down to a 3,500-cap college gym with students taking tickets at the door seems ill-advised.
A recurring theme of my essays this past week has been the quantum state of the band between big-league and bush-league in late 1994 — 10/21 demonstrated how the music had outgrown the size of the typical venue the band was still playing outside of their home region, and 10/23 talked about the aspirational arena-rock image they’d project on A Live One. The tales of this night at Appalachian State completes the trilogy by demonstrating how the logistics of Phish hadn’t kept up with the band’s sudden burst of popularity.
We’re still nine months away from the Grateful Dead’s final show, the moment, according to the old heads, when things really started getting nuts on Phish tour. But we’re already entering the era where the tape alone can’t tell the full story of a night on tour — it doesn’t give us the mood of the scene outside the venue, and how that influenced the music that unfolded inside the doors or gates. Case in point, a pretty good, if unremarkable, Antelope takes on an added tinge of darkness knowing that it happened shortly after a bunch of wooks bum-rushed the doors.
Since nobody got hurt on this night in Boone, it’s funny to chuckle at Phish unleashing mayhem upon an unsuspecting campus. It’s a little sad too; the band clearly enjoyed the surroundings, with Trey comparing it to Burlington, and the now-routine bluegrass set is right at home in the Appalachians. But whether they were truly banned from Boone or not, the events of the day made it clear that they were now too much of a juggernaut for this kind of scenic, out-of-the-way stop. In order to maintain their trajectory, Phish had to stop terrorizing college towns, or at least move on to terrorizing larger ones.