Yearbook Photos
12/28/95, Worcester, MA, Worcester Centrum
SET 1: Split Open and Melt, Gumbo > The Curtain > Julius, Guyute, Horn > Rift > Fast Enough for You, Possum
SET 2: Timber (Jerry The Mule) > Theme From the Bottom > Wilson > Buried Alive > Tweezer -> I Didn't Know, Uncle Pen, Slave to the Traffic Light
ENCORE: Fee > Tweezer Reprise
At its best, the Phish New Year’s Eve run is a synopsis of the year that it concludes. A deep voice intones “Last season on The Phish From Vermont…” and a four-night montage of highlights ensues, a microcosm of the sound they’ve established in the previous 40 to 80 shows. A band in today’s digital distribution world might release a live album to serve as a status report for fans; Phish, in the 90s, used their annual closing run, always well-taped and well-distributed, to catch us all up.
The run is also better when it comes after a short break, when fall tours creep into early or mid-December and there isn’t much time to forget the evolutions of the calendar year. 1995 boasts the shortest hiatus between fall tour and holiday run from when the four-show New Year’s tradition was started in 1992 through the present day: a mere 10 days, the same vacation length as the mid-tour break after Halloween. It’s also the first year where they set up shop at only two venues, the Worcester Centrum and Madison Square Garden, instead of pulling up stakes every night. The first half of the run even marks their first return to Worcester since a previous New Year’s classic, the aquarium antics of 12/31/93.
All the ingredients were there for 1995 to be an exemplar year-capper, and the extra shine is apparent from the very first show. 12/28 tends to be the runt of the holiday run’s litter — savvy Phish fans know that, especially in 3.0, it’s the warm-up show, where the band finds its footing and maybe, at best, begins to tease their plan for the big party at the end of the long weekend. But not 1995, which delivers a message that there was no easing in necessary with a Melt opener.
The band is out of vacation mode immediately; the crew, maybe not so much. There’s an uncharacteristic shriek of feedback in Gumbo, and a partial PA outage in Rift, prompting Trey to call it “the avant-garde version” of the song. That such occurrences are rare enough to warrant show notes is testament to Paul Languedoc and his team, which has become invisibly capable of making Phish sound natural in big rooms after last year’s more conspicuous experiments with quadrophonic sound. It’s a synopsis of the crew’s own growth, rehashing in fast-forward their on-the-fly, high pressure adaptation from arena amateurs to seasoned pros.
All is well by the second set, which takes a roundabout path to the night’s highlight in Tweezer. Each of the first three nights of the 1995 NYE run pivots around a landmark jam, forming a trilogy that fulfills the yearbook responsibilities of the mini-tour before 12/31 provides the grand finale. This Tweezer might be the least-heralded of the three, but it’s genuinely one of my favorite jams of the year, providing a recap of how 1994 Phish became 1995 Phish.
Tweezer was the breakthrough song of 1994, the laboratory for Phish to see how far they could push their improvisation in front of a live audience. From The Bomb Factory through Bangor and Bozeman, these jams tested the limits and the stopwatch by taking some of their practice room listening exercises public, the four members taking turns introducing musical ideas, fleshing them out, and then, as soon as one ripened, hopping to the next. It’s a dizzying approach, but Phish thought so highly of the results that they put all of Bangor and a piece of Bozeman on A Live One (and would release the other 42 minutes of the latter 25 years later).
By the time fans heard that live album in late June 95, Tweezer had changed again, either absorbing the dissonant aggression of other summer jams or extending the 94 approach even further, letting the emergent musical themes develop and slowing down the flipbook. Then the song shifted again for the fall, both slimming down and bulking up, becoming the anvil where Phish honed their arena-rock blades to a deadly edge. If you came to Champaign or New Haven expecting the quirky prog ditties of the ALO Tweezer — a version only released a handful of months prior — the Fall Tweezers were here to give you a swirlie and an atomic wedgie.
In its 22-½ minutes, the 12/28 Tweezer manages to recapitulate all of these phases, without ever losing its focus. Trey leaps into the jam with a raunchy rhythm tone and there’s a little bit of start-stop, but it’s Mike who takes charge, introducing a strange, sing-songy repeated two-note pattern (listen for it around 8:30, or 16:30 if you’re listening to the Live Bait 7 SBD) that the whole band picks up on and tosses back and forth for the next few minutes — Fishman even ends up singing it. It’s exactly the kind of experimental, Zappa-esque cartoon theme they preferred in Fall 94, the only difference being that they hold it for longer than a commercial break.
But the section that follows is pure 95, most notably in how Trey steps back (notably, without the mini-kit) to share the spotlight. Here again, Mike is assertive, foreshadowing the next night’s bassfest with an extended and exotic solo over Fishman’s dark Latin shuffle. There’s a patience and restraint to this stretch (roughly 11:00 to 17:00) that the Phish of a year ago couldn’t have pulled off without interrupting it for a megaphone-and-drill-and-vacuum interlude, or something similarly absurd. It just casts a textural spell and slowly builds in intensity, all four members adding ingredients to the cauldron.
And since this is Fall 95, it eventually boils over, representing the foaming-mouth intensity of the last two months with an almost direct reprise of the New Haven Tweezer panic attack, complete with fakeout slowdown. I would never speak ill of that Tweezer, but this one hits different, a crazed release at the end of a winding journey instead of a Kool-Aid Man running through a succession of brick walls each thicker than the last. It disintegrates into the spookiest I Didn’t Know since Lakewood, bringing the recent history lesson to a close.
It’s a masterpiece, but one that lives in the shadow of the triumphs to come in the next three days. Unlike the other 95 Tweezer I hung a narrative on, there is zero hesitation between the segments described above, no moments where the jam spins its wheels and waits for inspiration to strike. Three very different musical passages spawn from each other without any friction, a smooth guided tour through a calendar year’s worth of hard-fought evolution. Like a picture says a thousand words, it’s a jam that writes a whole thesis: here’s what’s changed since the Phish you heard on A Live One — hope you can keep up.
[Ticket stub from @ambropel.]