How many people out there can remember exactly the time they first heard a band? There are few moments of clarity from my life. I remember hearing that Ronald Reagan had been shot even though I was only about 8. I remember coming home from middle school one day, and seeing the Challenger had exploded and watching the footage for hours. (I had been to space camp when I was kid) And I remember being in my first apartment back in 1992 when my friend Wayne Johnson came over one day with a tape in his hand.
All he said was “You have got to hear this. This boy can tickle some ivories” He put in a copy of Lawnboy, Phish’s second album and played for me “My Sweet One”, a country sounding song with nice piano solo in the middle. Even sitting here writing this, I can play that solo in my head from memory. Of course it morphs through all the live versions over the years. That one friend on that one day changed the way I listened to music and in ways, changed my life.
It started out slowly. I went to the CD store, and bought Rift. I choose it simply because it had the most music on it, I think about 70 minutes worth. Since I was only 19 at the time, every dollar per minute of music mattered. I fell in love with this album. I can’t tell you how many times I must have listened to it before I went out and started buying up all the studio albums available at the time. I can remember playing Phish at the little community theatre I was working at back then over the main sound system many a day while I was alone and building or painting a set.
My first favorite Phish song was Ester from their first album. There was something so intriguing about these guys. Their lyrics tended to be complete nonsense… I mean if you sing along to the CD in the car in front of your friends they look at you like your nuts kind of nonsense. But Ester seemed to have some evil little story in the background. I’m not sure that even to this day I know what it is, but what Phish made me do, was start listening to the emotional story they played behind the lyrics.
I began to realize how they used their instruments as the storytellers, and the words to the songs were just trance like glimpses of the dream behind the song. I began to think about music on a new level. I had never heard any pop type rock band do anything like this before. “Dinner and a Movie” is a great example of this early type of Phish music. The only lyrics in the whole damn song are “Let’s go out to dinner and see a movie”, and they are sung over and over again throughout the song. But when you really listen to the music, you realize it’s a song about the “Date from Hell” It starts off bouncy and happy. The couple meets. They even put some dinner plate and restaurant sound effects in the background. When you get to the guitar solo, the couple is sitting at the table eating, and Trey plays a line in repetition that I swear is the girl yacking and yacking away about a bunch of shit the guy doesn’t want to hear at all. You can almost hear her saying something like “First I’ll get my nails done and we’ll go and see my mother… and so on as the guitar strains playing the part of the voice of the nagging woman. Then as the song moves to the movie portion of the evening, it gets more intense. The singing becomes more frantic and desperate. You hear the audience ewww and awww in the background as the guy is realizing more and more than he will never ever call this girl again. It almost ends in a crescendo of hate.
What band had ever dared to try this new type of music before? Sure guys like Floyd had done terrific concept albums, but they told the story with the words. The music was just an accompaniment. Here was a group of young guys that were very talented musicians. They had all gone to music school at some point in their lives. They were striving to do something totally different. They tried to convey stories and emotions using nothing but the music.
“Slave to the traffic Light” is another good example. As the song begins, the driver hits the gas pedal, and is propelled forward. Just as he starts getting up to a good speed… blam… the light changes and he has to hit the breaks. This happens a few times simulating driving through the city. The lyrics punctuate the story a bit with lines like “See the city, see the zoo, traffic light wont let me through.” By the end of the song the driver finally gets out of the city, and out on a long open highway and begins to just settle in… hit the cruise control…turn the radio on… and drive.
Now at this time in my life, I still hadn’t seen Phish play live. I had no idea that when they got onstage they were able to perform note for note very complicated passages they had written and used on the studio albums I had heard, but then I realized an entire new level about them as performers. These boys could JAM!!! Not only would they attempt any style of music, but they would take any song and make it 20 or 30 minutes long if they wanted to. They would weave in and out of music and songs, and sometime just not stop playing for entire set.
For my first Phish show, I had bought two tickets. Now of course, I asked my friend Wayne to come with me, since he had turned me onto them in the first place. He was to drive up from Georgia Southern and meet me that day… which he never did… a source of antogonizism for me to use on him to this day. So I ended up going by myself. I had just turned 21, so I was in line for a beer when I heard “Fee” strike up inside the Atlanta Civic Center. I abandoned the beer line, thinking the music was the most important part. I could get a beer at the set break. When I look at the set list, I don’t really remember many of the songs I heard. Many of them were not on any album of theirs. I do remember thinking that “Sample in a Jar” had something to do with a jar full of weed as I watched it live, but to this day, I’m still not sure what that song is about. I do know, that I left knowing that it wouldn’t be the last time I went to see this band.
After that show, I began to realize the sheer volume of songs these guys knew and played. Way more than your typical band that toured with about 30 songs. These Phish guys knew literally hundreds of songs, and were constantly learning more. I started buying up bootleg live CD’s wherever I could find them. Sometimes paying almost 40 bucks for a single disk. I fell in love with how Phish would never the play the “Jam” portion of the songs the same way twice. No solo was ever the same. No song length was ever same. Sometimes it could be 4 minutes, sometimes 20, and other times the song would appear two of three times throughout the evening melding in and out of other songs.
Phish took chances. They bared themselves musically naked every night. Always trying to do something better. Always trying to push the limits. Sometimes they would just play a bunch of noise… banging on their instruments with no tonal quality… just because they could. Other times they would play so quiet, that everyone in the venue had to be quiet in order to be able to hear, and if someone was being loud, you would actually hear another person tell them to shut up.
For the phan, it was all about the music. Every note. Whether sober, high or tripping, everyone was concentrated on one thing… “What will they do tonight?” We have all seen a band on tour that you knew started the tour with one set list, and played it the same way, note for note every night for the whole length of the tour. Sometimes even playing it note for note like it was played on the studio album. What makes Phish intoxicating is they leave the phans wondering things like “Which song will they play first tonight?” In the parking lot beforehand, everyone would make guesses about the shows. Some based it on looking at the set lists for recent shows, and trying to figure out what songs they hadn’t played in the last few days, that they may try to include. Other people just walked around the lots hoping and praying that tonight would be the night they get to see that one song they have always loved. That was the best part. We never knew. We had to just experience it.
It’s this aspect of Phish that compelled thousands of people to travel across the country every summer to see several shows in several cites, or even to see every single show. My sister put a whole summer tour worth of tickets on her Discover card one year, and saw the country driving her car around. Picking up passengers and dropping them off along the way. My parents were worried when she was about to head out. I tried to explain to her that Phish fans are some of the most wonderful people in the world, and that my little sister would most likely be safer traveling the country with them, then she would be in downtown Atlanta at a gas station late at night. She survived the tour, by the way.
My greatest year for live shows was 1996. I saw five that year. I was living in Colorado at the time, and a group of us got tickets to four nights in a row at Red Rocks in August. I remember thinking the first night was the best Phish show I had ever seen. Then the second night was the best show I had ever seen. Then the third night was so unbelievable I didn’t think it could ever get better. After three days in a row, totally immersed in Phish and phans I was already getting tired. If you have never been to Red Rocks for a show, please go. The sound in that place is amazing. The fourth night was then again, without a doubt, the best Phish show I had ever seen. In four nights, the boys never repeated a song, and somehow managed to get better with each performance. They played 79 different songs over those four days. It made coming home to the eviction notice on our door seem not so important. So what? I had just been floored both mentally and emotionally.
Then on Halloween in ’96, I saw the Phish show that changed my life, and the way I played music from that point on. I had heard CD’s and tapes of their previous Halloween shows. They had done note for note versions of the “White Album”, “Quadrophenia” “Dark Side of the Moon” We had just moved back to Atlanta (see eviction above) just before this show, and tickets were already sold out. So me and my buddy actually paid 100 bucks each for our tickets. They turned out to be great seats in the first row of the balcony, so we had the best view of all the people in costumes on the lower level. Does anyone remember the big Elvis?
We received a playbill on the way in saying that Phish would be playing an album neither me or my friend had ever heard before. The Talking Heads “Remain in Light” We recognized one song title, “Once in a Lifetime”. The first set was good. After the Red Rocks shows, it was hard to expect that kind of magic again, especially in the old Omni, with muffled sound and ugly ceilings. When they started the second set, the Talking Heads portion of the evening, I was enrapt. They walked on stage and started playing in a style I had never heard them do before. It was all very percussive, with Trey playing a lot of sharp, crisp, and short chord strokes as well as single note rhythms. Page was tickling on the keyboards in between lyrics for the first song. His hands were flying from keyboard to keyboard to play all the multiple parts he needed to fill in for the song. The first song was at a walking pace. It drove the beat into you and Trey began accentuating it with solo guitar work so bizarre and unlike anything he done before filled with effects and echos. The audience wasn’t sure what to make of what they were hearing. Phish began driving through the first three songs without a break in between. They had a horn section up with them playing choppy percussive lines over the songs. By the time they ended the third song, they took a little break, to talk with each other. You hear the drummer let out a big sigh of relief and scream with joy. (In reading other accounts of this night, I have learned that the band had never actually played the whole album through with the horns in practice, so they were rather worried when they started as to how it would go. By the time they reached the end of the third song, they were locked in, and knew nothing could go wrong)
“Same as it ever was” cannot be used to describe this set. When you listen to the Talking Heads version of the album, it starts off with a bang, and them the songs get slower and darker as the album comes to it’s end. Phish followed the feel of the record on stage. One by one the songs become more intense as the pace slowed. By the time the last song ended, the room was filled with a cacophony of noise. The speakers behind us began blaring signals from TV and radio. The lights dimmed and the stage was filled with performers acting as slaves. Someone had a bullhorn and was shouting to everyone that it was “time to get to work” Trey used a mic stand to rub the strings of his guitar on while the other members of the bands began beating on their instruments with whatever they could find. Page played eerie chords that sent chills down my back. One by one the stage began to empty of the slaves and slave masters and the band and the noise began to fade out. No one knew what to do at first. Do we clap? Do we cheer? What the hell was that we all just saw? Slowly the roar of appreciation for something no one had ever seen before or would ever see again began to come from the crowd. Little did we know what the third set had in store for us.
In between the second and third set, some dumbass from MARTA (the local bus and train system) came out to announce that anyone who came to the show by train would be left if they stayed after midnight for the third set. That the trains would no longer be running. I looked at my buddy, and we both decided we didn’t care. We would walk home, take a cab, find a way… there was no way we were going to leave before the show was done. (On a side note, that guy was a liar. The trains were running and took everyone back to their cars at the end of the night)
The third set, Phish came out and played their own music again, but in a way I had never heard them before. I believe in a way they had never played before. They incorporated the percussive feel they used for the second set into their own work, as they melded Phish with Talking Heads for a night. I remember vividly when they played “Maze” There was one section of music in the middle, where Page gets the spotlight. Trey walked over to Page and stood behind his keyboard. He was staring at him. It was like he was standing there saying to him “Come on!!! Play harder. Play faster. Play weirder then you have ever played before. I’m right here for you buddy, I won’t let you fall” And the music just got twisted, so full of energy that it stamped my brain with the moment. After Page finished, Trey took over and took the solo into a realm it had never been before for that song. As I left that night, and watched the hoards of people pile into the MARTA train, I knew I had just seen greatness. I knew I had again, just seen the best Phish show I had ever seen in my life.
After 1996, I got more into the working life. I wasn’t able to travel and see them like I wanted to. Phish themselves began to write songs with a little more funk in them. The tempos slowed down. They stopped writing the long complicated passages of their youth, and concentrated on being concise. Their songs were changing. I wasn’t often hearing the use of story telling with the music. There was one new song, “Talk”, with a simple bass line that is an account of Trey hanging out with his newborn. The single note repetitive bass line represents the baby’s ability to speak and understand. But mostly they were writing more normal songs with a good groove. Not that I am complaining. I loved the new stuff, too, just in a different way. They were still putting on good shows and experimenting on stage. I just wasn’t seeing them but once or twice a year.
But with the advances of the internet, I was able to download entire shows from anywhere in the country. Not the same of being in the audience, but still fulfilling. It had become a normal part of my yearly life. Every spring I would get antsy wondering when the new summer tour dates would come out. Every year I was first in line at a Publix out in the sticks where no Phish phans lived to get 5th row for the summer show. I would get excited about a month before show day, knowing I would soon be hanging out in the lot with all my friends known and unknown in celebration of life and music and fun. Some people need to see the ocean once a year. I needed to see Phish.
The news of the hiatus struck me hard. I could understand why. The last time I saw them before the break, they seemed to be snapping at each other on stage. I recall hearing Trey scream out that someone was playing in the wrong key during “My Sweet One”. Then he put Mike on the spot and told him to “ramble” some to the audience for a minute, which Mike tried to do, and looked rather uncomfortable. It was the first time I had seen them bicker on stage. And since I hadn’t been seeing too many shows a year, I don’t know how long it had been going on for. The next summer was empty. It just didn’t feel right. Same with 2002. When they came back, I thought “wheew, back on schedule again” I saw a great show in 2003 at Lakewood, and started thinking how great it was that I would be seeing them again in 2004. The boys were back!!! Then I saw the tour dates for this summer, and saw not only where they not playing in Atlanta, but they weren’t playing anywhere near it. I wrote them an email saying I was sad to see them not coming to Atlanta this year, and actually got a response from someone on their staff.
“Hi Shawn.
Thanks for contacting us regarding Phish playing down South. Since their hiatus, Phish is playing shorter, more condensed tours in order to keep from getting exhausted on the road. This unfortunately limits the number of cities they are able to play on one tour. I'll keep my fingers crossed as well that they'll play in your area sometime soon!
Take care,
Betty”
Then less than a week ago, Trey announces that after this summer tour, Phish will disband forever. I cried that morning, and then rushed to the ticketmaster website and bought two tickets for their 4 day festival in Vermont. I don’t care how much it costs. I will be there. I’m older now, and have credit cards. I wasn’t planning on being able to see them this year, but I feel now that I don’t have a choice.
So I’m writing this just to go down memory lane. I’ll post to my web site and maybe another phan will come across it someday. It will be hard to replace Phish. There are many jam bands in the wings that would love to take their audience. But Phish was different. They not only jammed, but they wrote complicated music with a variety of styles and time signatures. Combining Zappa with Weird Al at times, or P-Funk with the Beastie Boys, but mostly just by creating something from nothing, without the help of the media, based on nothing less than the power of their performances. I will be a phan for life. I love you guys. I will miss the lot. I will miss the band. Maybe someone will step up out there and take your place in the music scene. I can only hope that someday some friend will come over with a CD of some band I have not yet heard, and say something like “Hey man, you need to listen to this”.
Shawn Millar 05-30-04 |
