Whispering Breezes

7/1/95, Mansfield, MA, Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts

Ballads will always be a controversial topic in the Phish community. Some fans, if not a majority, would prefer that a Phish show keep the intensity unrelentingly high-pitched, blasting through their set without a pause for breath. They’ll say the almost mandatory “cooldown song” is a bummer interruption to the party atmosphere, a concession to Trey’s worst cornball instincts; it is, at best, a chance to run to the bathroom. I’m not saying I agree, but I do sometimes empathize, particularly when those Velvet Sea piano chords come creeping in at the end of a hot jam. 

The thing is, Phish themselves probably felt similarly for many of their early years. In 1995, the Phish ballad was still a recent phenomenon, a feature they had really only added to their repertoire in the last couple years. Over the band’s first decade, Tela was practically the only song you could slot into the ballad category — and even there, Page was singing about multi-beasts and the foul domain of an evil despot. Even ballad covers were a rarity; scanning through the band’s first ten years, only Taj Mahal’s “Corinna” really qualifies as a regular, and it was shelved by the 90s.

That stance only started to soften when material destined for Rift was introduced in 1992, with Silent in the Morning and Fast Enough For You providing some slow-dance material at last. Anomalous as it was, Fast Enough was considered strong enough — either by Phish or Elektra — to release as the first single from that record, a decision that didn’t really work out. 1993 added Lifeboy, the band’s most earnest song yet by some measure, which made it onto Hoist along with a new ballad that debuted on record before it made it on stage: If I Could. 

There are times when I think If I Could is the greatest of the Phish ballads, and Summer 95 has provided plenty of those times. They had it nailed by the end of 1994 — it’s why I included the 11/20/94 version with Rev. Jeff Mosier on Another Live One — but the tender, empathetic song sounds even better in the open air venues of 1995. It’s hardly ever played in the post-jam cooldown spot, staying entirely restricted to the first set this summer, but it makes a strong case for why Phish needed to get proficient in the perilous art of the ballad.

Even with such sparse material to draw from, If I Could is kind of a Frankenstein of what worked best in previous Phish chillout songs. The cyclical riff at the start is kin to the repeating figure in Silent in the Morning, the sumptuous Page solo in the middle could be the start of a Coil solo, and the big Trey finish is the Tela climax with a little less peacocking. But it’s the additions that put it over the top: a stirring bridge where the song truly lifts off while highlighting their newly-mature vocal interplay, and a big WOAH-OHHH finish that amps it up to megachurch zeal at the end. 

The song’s early performances are tentative, perhaps because of the guest-heavy conditions found on Hoist, where Alison Krauss took a twangy verse and the outro was drenched in strings. But by this show, the four-piece arrangement is locked in, so much so that Trey adds an additional, previously unheard intro, a halting solo piece that sounds halfway between Train Song and The Horse. The solos section feels less like Page and Trey taking turns than like a pairs figure skating routine, Trey gradually building his Leslie-speakered arpeggios beneath the piano lead until he is thrown gloriously free. In a time when they were still more intellectual than emotional, it’s a heartrending performance. 

Even appearing early in the show, If I Could offers a critical balancing force against the intensity of a white-knuckle night in Mansfield. As if aware that the half-hour dissonant deep-dives of Jones Beach were a bridge too far, tonight Phish distributes the dark intensity across a handful of songs and both sets, including a terrifying and thrilling 17-minute Melt, an 18-minute Stash that can’t find its way back home (and instead seeks refuge in the band’s newest ballad), and blistering versions of Chalk Dust and Maze. Broadcast live across the Greater Boston region by WBCN, these performances must have scared the bejeezus out of at least a few unsuspecting listeners tuned into the frequency.

It all turns out to be a very strong argument for the necessity of the ballad in the dawning era of Arena Rock Phish. With the band pushing so hard to sound bigger, rock harder, and jam deeper, an earnest and softly-sung sweet song provides a critical emotional counter-balance. One could argue that they’ve tipped too far in that direction, particularly at moments in 3.0, but in their envelope-pushing period of the mid-to-late-90s a well-placed and -played ballad can add essential colors to the show’s spectrum. 

As for If I Could, the song largely disappeared soon after this triumphant performance, only showing up four times in the fall and spottily thereafter. The new Strange Design and the soon-to-be-debuted Billy Breathes would start eating up its real estate by the end of the year, and the debut of several soft-rock numbers in the 1996 acoustic sets (Waste, Talk, the aforementioned Train Song) would further seal its fate. Maybe If I Could also suffered from the Hoist backlash I mentioned a few shows back, or maybe the band thought (wrongly) that they could never do the studio arrangement justice. In its later, sleepier appearances, it never quite reaches the epiphanies of 94 and 95 — the WOAH-OHHHs are gone, but the heartstring-plucking legacy remains.

[Ticket Stub from Golgi Project.]