You Had To Be There

8/16/96, Plattsburgh, NY, Plattsburgh Air Force Base

SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, Bathtub Gin, Ya Mar, AC/DC Bag > Esther > Divided Sky, Halley's Comet > David Bowie

SET 2: Split Open and Melt, Sparkle > Free, The Squirming Coil, Waste, Talk, Train Song, Strange Design, Hello My Baby, Mike's Song -> Simple -> Contact > Weekapaug Groove

SET 3: Makisupa Policeman > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Down with Disease -> NICU, Life on Mars? > Harry Hood -> Jam

ENCORE: Amazing Grace

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Here we are on the 25th anniversary of one of the most holy Phish dates, and I’m about to commit heresy. The Clifford Ball is undoubtedly a landmark milestone in Phish history, and if I may be so bold, of American music history as well, given its surprising influence on an entire lucrative wing of the 21st century live music industry. It’s pretty much impossible to oversell what a miraculous operation it was, and how incredible it felt to Phish and their fans. I’ll flirt with that hyperbolic line tomorrow. For today, I’m here to talk about the music of The Clifford Ball, and how it’s just...okay.

All right, that’s not the hottest take in the world, and I imagine most rankings of the Greatest Phish Festivals of All Time probably slot the first one somewhere in the middle. But every time I revisit the Clifford Ball tapes — apart from the two semi-official sets I covered yesterday — I find myself mildly disappointed. That’s definitely in part due to the massive reputation of the weekend in Plattsburgh, a true nexus of Phish energy for their peak decade. Yet stripped of all other context, I always expect something more from the six sets the band played for their largest-ever crowd of 70-some-thousand, and usually leave feeling as ungratified as the closing Harpua. 

Whether you’re listening to a stream or watching the DVD, it’s apparent that the band is jazzed as fuck about how well their festival experiment worked out. The Clifford Ball documentary captures them absolutely agog at the scale of the event as they roll in on the 15th, and every bit of Trey banter over the two nights on stage is overjoyed and thankful. But somehow, those emotions don’t really affect the music much, producing flickers here and there but never really creating that Big Moment that could only have happened in the temporary, magical bubble of a Phish fest. 

Festival Phish is definitely a term that fans toss around, but when they do, they have in mind a performance like the Went Gin or one of the many Big Cypress marathons. There’s a freedom and explosiveness to that sound that comes from Phish being in total control of their environment — there’s no venue staff telling them when to start or how late they can play, and the remote location weeds out any casual fans or neophytes that might need to be gently introduced to what the band does. If ever there was a safe space for them to be as experimental and self-indulgent as they want to be, the Phish festival was it. 

Yet at the Clifford Ball, that hall pass apparently hasn’t sunk in yet. There’s nothing that’s bad — it’s no Coventry — but there’s also nothing exemplary, no song performances in the best-of-all-time conversation. I’m not even sure there’s more than a handful of songs here that turn in their best version of the year so far, and if you’ve been following along, it’s not like that’s particularly stiff competition.

Sets are weirdly paced: the first set on 8/16 strings multiple openers together, while the second and third sets on 8/17 have more endings than The Return of the King. The first night’s momentum gets tripped up in the middle by the acoustic mini-set, as ballsy a move as it is in front of their largest crowd ever. There seems to be a hard cap on how dark or heavy the music gets all weekend, so as to not harsh the mellow vibes on site. Bowie, Melt, Mike’s, Maze, Tweezer – all are downright gentle compared to some of the earlier summer versions, never mind last fall/winter. 

Paradoxically for such a massive crowd, the most stirring moments are the quietest. My Clifford Ball highlights are the first night’s Hood and the second night’s Reba and Slave, all three of which flutter down to near-silence before taking exceedingly patient paths to their peak (complete with literal fireworks, in the case of Hood). It’s only in these segments that you can hear some of the relaxed late-night magic of the soundcheck or the Flatbed Jam seeping through; elsewhere, they feel almost too overstimulated by the surroundings to slow down and get subtle.

That also prevents them from getting too weird, an essential part of the Phish experience that’s conspicuously missing from their big party. The third set of 8/16 comes closest, with a strange, jazzy Makisupa outro, a 2001 that almost breaks free of its chains, and another great Disease. But that’s about it. It’s almost as though Phish used this career milestone to try and create the definitive version of every song they played...but definitive is different from distinctive, and nothing from the Clifford Ball meets that standard.

$25!!!

It’s worth comparing The Clifford Ball to NYE ‘95, its closest competition for the narrative role of Phish’s First Peak. The festival crushes Madison Square Garden in terms of attendance, and the intangibles — the opportunity to momentarily live in an immersive world created expressly for Phish fans — cannot be matched. But judged entirely on the music that was played, it’s a blowout win for NYE ‘95. I’d argue that’s because 12/31/95, while it plants the flag at the summit of Phish’s slow climb to success, also immediately looks to the future of the band, relentlessly pushing forward. Musically, the Clifford Ball is more of a (completely justified!) celebration of the past and the present, and because of that, you just had to be there.