16 December 1989, Burlington
‘I have no subtitle and I must review’
A one-set benefit show of which only a single quiet, hissy recording apparently remains. This is not yet the Most Important Band in America, though they do share DNA with that band. They sound like young guys. At this point they’d been playing for six years, and in late ‘89 they were finishing up their busiest year yet — 83 shows (30 more than in ‘88), most of them weekend gigs. (They’d played their epochal ‘Ian’s Farm’ show six months prior: a set of story-songs and Gamehendge tunes, a packed second set of ‘jam tunes’ and crowd favourites, and a third set full of covers and context-free jams — a template for later festival shows, actually.) It’s weird for me to think of Phish working steadily throughout the year, taking gigs whenever they became available rather than being a Touring Event; by the time this music entered my life in 1994, they were already touring 120+ nights a year.
There’s plenty of improv at this show, but it plays a different role here than it would just a couple of years later: a bit less serious, more genre-antagonistic, (crucially) much less groovy. And less ‘jammy’ in a way, disinclined to wander freely in search of something. They are doing something to the music, and maybe moreso to the audience, in these early shows.
While improvisation is central to their music, it’s not the whole show, never has been, was never supposed to be — indeed, if Anastasio’s songwriting has a ‘purpose,’ it’s to experiment with integrating improvisation and composition in a variety of forms and timescales. To put it another way: Trey’s work with Ernie Stires on big-band forms goes deep, and it’s not about ‘jamming,’ not entirely or even primarily so…
The longest single track on this recording is Lizards. Imagine if they pulled that stuff today.
This Bag is singleminded, almost naive in its approach. They start the jam fooling around with Bag’s groove (ahem), criscrossing chromatic lines which destabilize the harmony (when everyone plays chromatic lines out of phase, the chords get lost. That’s the game: lost and found). Trey eventually leads the band back into the progression (around 4:40 on my mp3) and they climb quickly to the big finish. Trey alternates his usual big anthemic melodies with high-spirited bluesy riffing and dissonant tension-building turnarounds. The usual Bag of tricks (ahem) in other words, impressively intelligent but without the narrative thrust that characterizes their best stuff. (For contrast I grabbed the next Bag in my iTunes, 10/13/91, which appears in the context of a complete Gamahendge narration; it’s a more smoothly proficient performance, much groovier and more colourful and — for lack of a better word — theatrical. It has less of the science fair about it.)
Mike’s > H2 > Groove is one of those easy-to-grasp high-contrast maneuvers that were so important to Phish’s early reputation — they’re easy to blurb, if that makes sense. Mike’s Song is a pulverizing minor-key rocker, Weekapaug is a frantic sprint all in primary colours; putting I Am Hydrogen between them is a perverse move that obeys venerable rules of longform construction but defies rock’s relentless libidinal (il)logic. It’s minor example of Phish antagonizing genre — putting on hair-band drag, then perversely confounding expenctations with a sincerely beautiful two-minute instrumental lullaby. Hydrogen is a lovely little interlude, and what I like best about it, I think, is that Phish play it straight — Trey has always seemed to love that kind of gentle rhythm (cf. Dirt, Winterqueen, Sleep, Glide II) and they never laugh at the tune, they just softly sing a sweet song and then get on with the next thing (Weekapaug, which barely has a form at all).
When I was young and thought it was important to sell the band to my friends (rather than to complete strangers, by (e.g.) writing several books about Phish) I used to talk about stuff like Mike’s > H2 > Groove. ‘It’s like, they’ll rock you but then they can also do this other like pseudoclassical thing, it’s amazing…’ I used to think it was important that Phish amaze people. Well — you don’t need to prep a new listener for that. If they’re really there, the good thing will go.
In any case, Mike’s > H2 > Groove is an attention-grabbing element of the music partly because it’s so easy to identify what’s unusual about it. As opposed to, say, the difference between two beautiful ‘Type I’ versions of Hood or a handful of ‘standard’ versions of Tweezer — differences of shading and degree which are easily glossed over when jam-chasing fans talk about ‘best XYZ ever.’ (The best versions of Phish’s big jam tunes almost invariably involve formal deviations from the norm. The Albany YEM’s silent jam, the Palace Tweezer’s 6/8 climax…we tend to quickly canonize Phish’s improvisations when they go someplace that’s quickly named and tagged. As ‘creative,’ I guess, or maybe ‘improvisational’ — a term with a peculiar and awkward meaning in our fandom. Like fetishists of a certain stripe, we like ‘em long and bent, otherwise we hardly remeber they’ve happened.)
I enjoy early Phish but don’t have any great interest in hearing it more than once in a while; these songs are woven into who (I think) I am but their genre is actually something specific I don’t particularly care for — back then they had more in common with, say, They Might Be Giants or even Ween (prodigiously genre-hopping comic savants with a superb live show), and of course with Zappa (fundamentally decent collagists/ironists/experimentalists with a deeply sympathetic and generous melodic sense, working hard, somewhat antagonistically, to integrate longform improvisation and through-composed ensemble parts of face-melting intricacy) than with the band whose ‘mantle’ they’d supposedly be claiming in a couple of years. You know the one.
That said, the pleasures of this music are many and manifold: the easy virtuosity of Golgi, the unprepossessing blues of In a Hole (wish they’d bring this one back!), their infectious pleasure in driving a thoroughly conventional Mike’s Groove at speed into an embankment, the way Trey follows his gorgeous harmonics early in Curtain with a cheeky slide up the fretboard before he starts up his rhythmic chops to move the tune forward…
Critics have always loved ‘genius’ without always having a clear sense of what it is — that’s part of why the Trey Fetish (like the Jerry Fetish) has been so strong amongst Phish-watchers. (Yes, he obviously is one, whatever the word means. He has superpowers.) But Phish’s genius is collective: through their inspirational commitment to radical listening, they afford one another space for deep, transformative creativity — a philosophy (maybe ‘spirituality’ is a better word? if it weren’t ridiculous) of improvisation at every level of their shared creative endeavour.
I think that commitment has been the driving element of their collaboration since the very start. It’s the reason that, though their style has changed dramatically over the years, something deeper, some (ahem) ‘X factor,’ is just as present in those early recordings as it is in last night’s show at Randall’s.
That powerful sense of fellowship and trust — and the shared idea that, by working unjustifiably hard to make something so precise and intricate as this music, they can create a space for free play of unprecedented complexity — well, you can hear that stuff if you listen for it. I bet you do. I bet you get the same smile I’ve got right now.
RATING: BREAD stars out of PURPLE
