You Can Never Quarantine The Past

7/21/99, Burgettstown, PA, Star Lake Amphitheatre

Five exclamation points.

SET 1: AC/DC Bag > Cities, Gold Soundz, Ginseng Sullivan, Limb By Limb, Funky Bitch > The Moma Dance > When the Circus Comes, Taste, Bittersweet Motel

SET 2: Mike's Song > Simple -> My Left Toe -> Prince Caspian > Weekapaug Groove, Golgi Apparatus

ENCORE: Brian and Robert, Bold As Love

Listen

It is always annoying when someone tries to tell you how unique their musical taste is. I’m a firm believer that people like what they like almost by accident, a combination of random exposure and social influence. Particularly today, when the cost of hearing music is almost zero and internet radio can be your cool older sibling if you don’t already have one, it’s not inherently virtuous to be an eclectic customer at the musical salad bar. It’s like being proud of your fingerprint, or your browsing history.

Which is all disclaimer to boast that: I was one of approximately 10 people at the Star Lake Amphitheater to recognize “Gold Soundz” at this show, and I lost my damn mind. Seriously, I made such a scene that setlist scorekeepers from several rows around me came over to ask what it was Phish had just played. At setbreak, I butted into any conversation I overheard about the mystery cover to recommend Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain as one of the best albums ever, brah, you should really check it out.

Because as much as I adored Phish at the time, they were the outlier in my musical taste. I wasn’t writing for Pitchfork yet, but I was certainly reading it, and my Case Logic would have been packed for this trip with Summerteeth, The Soft Bulletin, Keep It Like A Secret, and, natch, Terror Twilight. The year after this tour, I started working at the snarkiest record store in Ann Arbor and living in a house that threw indie and emo shows in the basement. I was more likely to suffer tragedy at a Yo La Tengo concert than a Phish show. 

And while I was well aware that Trey had namedropped Pavement as one of his favorites plenty of times, I really never expected the two worlds to collide. It’s hard to imagine today, when Phish regularly covers TV on the Radio and Apples in Stereo and “rock music” as a genre has been so marginalized that we all ended up on the same team. But the late 90s indie and jam scenes were pretty mutually exclusive, still perpetuating the decades-long divide of punks and hippies. So when Trey played a jangly chord and started singing words I knew very, very well to a confused crowd, it was my own personal Terrapin moment - an event I never thought would happen and that I couldn’t believe I was there to see. 

With 25 years of perspective, I can admit that it wasn’t exactly…well executed. For a song that Trey “has been wanting to play” he sure does bungle a lot of the lyrics, and the band manages to be both too tentative and too talented to recreate Pavement’s slouch-pop aesthetic. “Gold Soundz” is a great pick – it was the best song of the 1990s, after all – but there are several others I would’ve selected instead for Phish: maybe “Grounded” or “Type Slowly” to give Trey more runway for a Malkmus-esque solo, “Debris Slide” or “Two States” as a Fishman song, or “Fillmore Jive” as an epic set closer. 

But in the moment, I didn’t really hear any of it anyway. Just that it happened at all was enough. And I was thrilled that it seemed to pique the interest of Phish fans at Star Lake, many of whom genuinely seemed interested in following up on Trey’s recommendation to check out Pavement. As the Beyond The Pond fellas like to say, jamband fans can be myopic, but they’re generally open to discovering new songs that share at least some DNA with their favorites. I don’t think the reaction to Pavement covering a Phish song (which kinda happened!) would be so constructive.

That said, the lone, sloppy (but not in the right way) appearance of “Gold Soundz” doesn’t make a great argument that there was common turf to be found for Phish and indie rock, at least at the time. For that, you had to look to the second set of this same show, which is improbably anchored by a jaw-dropping 16-minute version of My Left Toe. The Siket Disc is easily the most indie-friendly Phish studio record, in no small part due to it being almost entirely instrumental. But it doesn’t sound anything like Pavement; if there’s an indie comparison to be made, it’s either Sonic Youth or Tortoise, whose album TNT was also likely taking up a slot in my CD book at the time.

Many years later, when I was pushing the concept of “indiejam” online as a movement whose time had finally come, I chatted with a prominent indie rocker (who now has a jamband of his own) about what I liked about Phish. I told him that I loved the potential of any given show to go off the deep end into weird new forms of rock music. He rebutted that there were plenty of indie and experimental bands that go straight to that zone all the time; if I liked when Phish sounded like Sonic Youth or the Velvet Underground, why not just go see any of the hundreds of bands they more directly influenced? I tried to articulate that these moments were more special to me with Phish because they could sprout from or lead into music that was whimsical or goofy, fist-pumpingly triumphant or heartbreakingly beautiful. 

This My Left Toe might do the best job of demonstrating that phenomenon. For the first half, it plays fairly close to the album version and how we’ve heard it so far this summer, with the band building to a mighty roar, layer by layer by layer of grinding noise. Around 7 minutes in, Trey sounds ready to go into Caspian, but pulls back, and Page switching to piano a couple minutes later dispels the onrushing storm clouds immediately into sunnier skies. The song spends the rest of its time building to a glorious Phish peak with no shame, all the aggressive discordance of the first part resolved into pure, earnest joy. God bless Tortoise, but they could never. 

That’s the promise of what I called “indiejam,” the ability to put deconstructive rock and unashamed musicality in close proximity and stir both heart and mind simultaneously. And as much as I’d hoped to find a band from the indie side to take the improvisational spirit of the best jambands and run with it into similar spaces, I’ve never found one that hit the same sweet spot as Phish did in 1999*. For a brief moment, all the seemingly clashing flavors of my personal musical taste found harmony, and it was golden.

* - Okay, maybe Yo La Tengo.