Jams Jar
Here are some notes toward one of several secret histories of Phish.
Waves > What’s the Use? (Super Ball IX, 2011)
This performance runs (anti)parallel to the infamously narcotic IT Waves from eight years prior, which melded a nine-minute performance of Waves per se and a gorgeous, nightmarish 11-minute piece of ambient sonic sculpture.The Super Ball Waves would be a fine but forgettable rendition without its own freely improvised ambient coda, which runs as long as the song itself, all rich solid primary colours and that wonderful sense of timelessness common to so many of Phish’s festival sets. In the final moments, something uncanny presses in, a new dark, and Phish’s post-industrial take on Morning Dew starts up. It’s not a huge performance, nothing you’d put on a Super Deluxe Top Jams Like Ever list, but it drifts like mist across the soundfield, effortless, yearning, before angry guitar noise overwhelms the young musical organism to announce the apocalypse. As usual, WTU is less song than sonic realm — a dark place where other songs die off — and a reminder of the extraordinary emotional (not to mention musical, professional) range this band now has. For another band to slide from the polytonal frenzy of Light through Waves’ yearning to the metallic deathscape of What’s the Use would feel like a parlour trick, but Phish have spent the last 30 years teaching their audiences how to hear this kind of emotional journey. To take it at face value.
Light (Tahoe 2011)
Since July 31 it’s been relegated to the status of ‘The Other Tahoe Jam,’ but remember, two summers ago this experimental performance was a harbinger of too-long-in-coming dark doom, the craziest version of a song that hadn’t exactly been sitting around twiddling its thumbs. As fans fall over themselves to praise the all-around mastery and deepening intensity of Phish’s 2012-13 peak, this kind of single-minded jam — midnight machine madness at the sound lab — recedes in collective memory. The ‘storage shed’ jamming of 2011, which the Tahoe Light exemplifies, is something of a stylistic outlier compared to the band’s overall movement toward coherent provisional forms and ever-fluid, welcoming harmonic structure. But for a while there, it seemed like maybe this would be the next new thing. I wouldn’t have minded; we’d all have lost our minds, but no one would’ve minded. Here they deploy every single sonic tool and trick at their disposal in the space of seventeen Weird minutes to create…what, exactly? A terror. They’re such nice boys. It’s nice to remember what it sounds like when they let their hair down.
Harry Hood (Jones Beach 2009)
I always forget that this one exists. To me it’s always been one of the great missed opportunities in Phish’s recent performance history: 14 minutes of sublime improvisation marred, or at any rate followed alas, by a series of inexplicable choices by Trey — weird detuned blues riffs, then a last-minute bitonal excursion that audibly throws off the band’s momentum. Was he planning a segue? receiving a precognitive vision of some antagonistically polytonal 2011-12 version of Light? Either way, neither band nor fans were quite sure what was happening in those final couple of minutes, and everyone ended up kinda limping across the finish line. But the ambient passage at the heart of this rendition is perfection, the contour of the original D-major Hood jam faintly audible amidst a nebula of sound. (Am I mixing metaphors all over the place tonight? Well, it’s late. I’m tired.) Like the 22-minute Disease that kicked off the final Hampton reunion set that March, this gorgeous, otherworldly Hood indicated that while the band was setting aside the bad habits that made their 2003-04 improvisations so monotonous, they intended to draw some new conclusions from their 1999-2004 sonic experiments. The early 2009 explorations began a new course of ongoing work that would come to fruition in summer 2011, in a ‘storage shed’ in New York.
The ‘Elements’ Set (UIC 2011)
A symphony. An epiphany. The first six songs average ten minutes apiece(!), and that’s including the impeccably timed four-minute Dirt interlude. Every song offers some strange, wondrous turn: the startling i-IV-VIb-v-i break midway through the anthemic Sand opener; the maniacal post-Tahoe Light jam, with Trey fully integrating his polytonal solo style into the band’s oceanic roar; the ecstatic melancholy of Dirt to relieve Light’s eerie tension; not one but two titanic improvisatory sections in Waves, first a joyous peak, then its nightmarish mirror image, all distortion and feedback and wah-pedal lunacy from Trey. They segue effortlessly into Undermind going way too fast for that song’s usual syncopating goof-hop, but Trey’s spooky guitar sustains and freaky tone-split solo make the whole pagan ritual work perfectly. After Undermind’s final lyrics, the band presses on, digging as deep as they can, and a quickstep dance jam breaks down and rises up to the night’s (the year’s?) extraordinary high point: Trey’s pitch-bending guitar melody, Mike’s ringing upper-range bass spirals, Fish’s cymbal hiss and crash, and (at essence) Page’s wailing logic-proof cosmonaut synth line meet in a sci-fi pastoral climax that’s equal parts Flaming Lips and Aaron Copland. Steam is merely a massive outflowing of power and energy. Fire is only the rest of the fuel supply going madly up in…well. In flames, of course. Sand, Light, Dirt, Waves, Undermind, Steam, Fire. They reached something primal on this night, something about pure sound, pure song. It could only have come out of the out-sonic testbed of summer 2011. A single seamless hourlong suite. One of my favourite anythings. It dreams beneath the sea.
Split Open and Melt (Saratoga 2013)
And then this. The ‘Elements’ set in miniature. A master class in something not yet named. A preview of the 37-minute Tahoe Tweezer that would dominate fan conversation a month later. A series of harmonic, rhythmic, stylistic, metrical, and emotional variations of extraordinary variety and fluidity. It sounds nothing at all like the bloody-minded, punishing Splits of old, nor those drawn-out late-90s exercises in perverse groove. Split is to time signature what Stash is to key signature, but since 2010 it has functioned more like the reborn Carini — a dark, driving rock rhythm that sets up an endless variety of freewheeling harmonic/rhythmic variations, with Fish’s drums giving the other instruments permission to range freely across bar lines and other invisible barriers — of form, taste, sense…
This performance is a lesson in trust and freedom. It’s damned hard to count along with the band when Fish gets into his funny games on the drum kit; once he stops calling attention to that deranging extra half-beat with his cymbal crashes, the downbeat itself becomes fair game (hey didn’t the Dead have a whole thing about that…?), and the four musicians simply work out new forms as they go, democratically, with any player free to assert a new bar/phrase length by banging out the turnaround loud enough for the other three to get the hint. So you’ve got those rhythm shenanigans going on…and harrowing, antagonistic dissonance in the Old Style from the three tonal players, Trey and his goddamn digital whammy pedal not least among them…and a series of key changes so slick it’s like they consciously occur to the band after they happen…and a constant sense of being on the verge of emotional and harmonic collapse (into what?), like the major/minor phase change in the Albany 2009 Seven Below, or the first blessed exhalation in the Worcester 2012 Carini, or the eucatastrophe in the immortal Light from the Greek Theatre in 2010…
Meanwhile Trey is trying out a new solo style, Mike’s figuring out a new role in the band, Page finds nearly 20 minutes’ worth of new lunacy on the acoustic piano, and Fishman takes a series of comical solo drum breaks as they slip back into the Split groove — Fishman’s ‘Oh well, if you insist’ drum solos often feel like a master swordsman refusing to disgrace his beloved blade by cutting a sandwich with it. There’s so much going on in this single performance, and it’s all new — every moment of this jam feels like they’ve suddenly found themselves ten feet out past the cliff edge, and having learned from Wile E. Coyote they’re not gonna look down, and so by some idiot miracle they find themselves walking bravely, giddily on thin air. It’s as richly varied and accomplished as anything else they’ve played this year.
Of course they screw up the ending. Of course Trey plays a doofy pentatonic riff to close instead of the proper tag. Of course as Page promises to ‘be right back’ you can practically hear him smiling and shaking his head. That was the first set closer for heaven’s sake.
That’s where they are now. Out of the lab, past the storage shed, ‘sweating out the amphetamines and stinking of extinct herbs pulled from Finnish bogs,’ by way of the seafloor, here they are.
