old dogs new tricks
5 moments from fall/winter 2013
- Twist, 1 November 2013. After one of those effortless 2013 key changes, Trey plays (something like) the verse melody from ‘Get Back’ over the band’s rolling soundscape, fractional beats bumping lightly like highway gravel — music in gentle transit — then after the fourth statement of the melody (around 9:06 on the SBD), he and Mike step off as one, in perfect synchrony, to start formulating this beloved multipart improvisation’s next movement. For the previous thirty seconds Mike had played only two upper-register notes, the moving moment settling deeply in. They’re so in tune, the four of them, that they escape the pull of this sweet transitional passage without a hint of tension or hesitation; the jam’s signature, those two-chord pickups, begin as a barely audible suggestion from Page’s Rhodes, and the other players don’t seem to fix on Page’s rhythm so much as spin a little closer to it, to each other, gliding frictionlessly into a new orbit around a new melodic shape. Trey’s tension-building lines still have the ‘Get Back’ shape, only slightly altered. No one piece of this 20-minute improvisation is unprecedented, but its unity and seamlessness are just extraordinary.
- Disease, 29 December 2013. Trey stumbles across the closing riff (around 19:10 on the SBD), first in the ‘wrong’ key in which they’ve been jamming for several minutes. Mike and Fish respond instantly. Only Page keeps them from returning to close out ‘Disease’; but you can tell he’s not just missing the cue, he’s being joyfully perverse. In fact, when Trey changes key to play that awesome ‘Disease’ guitar part As She Is Wrote, Page doubles down on the Hammond organ, simply suspending a happy-go-lucky D-major chord over the band’s triumphant A-major crescendo. They’re ready to touch down, but he wants to fly a minute more; you can practically hear their smiles. And when Page is good and ready, he gives the band — Trey’s band — permission to land by sweeping his hand across the Hammond. ‘Goddamn right.’ That sort of thing. Gotta love that guy.
- Twenty Years Later, 29 October 2013. The first two or three minutes of the jam are wholly static; after 7:00 on the SBD, Trey takes to his wah pedal and does his funky-bluesy thing for a while, kicking the elephant a bit. At about the 8:30 mark Fishman switches from his waves-against-shore ride/crash cymbal sound to a dragass hi-hat beat, which he keeps up at 9:20 when the improvised arrangement opens up to let Trey play a couple of lead lines. But still we’re going nowhere: Trey immediately starts in with the most basic of all fallback funk-scratch licks, Page does rhythm things on the Hammond, and Mike can barely seem to muster enthusiasm for a bass groove. The band slides to the relative major, half out of habit, and Fishman tries some cymbal variations, but this jam is dead in the water until Trey starts pushing the tempo in the twelfth minute; even then it takes a while for one of their richly-textured 2K13 rock-climax grooves to form, there’s so little momentum behind them. It’s the rare Phish jam that’s audibly, maddeningly halfhearted. The mercy killing comes a minute or so later, in the form of a melodic-minimalist ‘Piper’ with Trey doing more of the sparse echoey tricks he grew so fond of in October. Sometimes a long version of a previously ‘closed’ tune is just that, long. And nothing else.
- Tweezer > Golden Age, 20 October 2013. After 17+ minutes of Trey experimenting with his equipment while the rest of the band bashes gamely away, alternating between easygoing funk and sparsely pretty ambience and monstrous stomping martial noise — a weird symphonic beast of a ‘Tweezer’ that keeps hinting at greatness while never being quite exactly 100% good — the jam seems to wind down, and Mike gives the Applause signal (i.e. that laser-meatball sound that the crowd invariably, embarrassingly screams for) at 17:45. By the 19-minute mark it’s all over but the shouting. But it seems the band has one more thing to say before they push on from this hushed ambient realm, and as Trey begins an FX-drenched melodic statement in the 21st minute, Fishman’s subtle cymbal pulse crystallizes into a quiet not-quite-groove, hi-hat and high toms and rimshot clicks providing a frame for the other three players to slowly wrap and grow into, like searching carnivorous plants climbing the gates of the garden. When Trey begins ‘Golden Age’ at a tentative midtempo it’s like an emergent property of the transitional ambience rather than the usual invitation to clap your hands and say yeah, and 14 minutes later that tune returns to the darkness in a breathtakingly dark ambient breakdown. Having come through the Weird unscathed, they get silly: Trey’s opening ‘Piper’ lyrics slide through the mist without waiting for an instrumental build, and what comes next is one of the year’s great celebratory moments, drawing much of its power from the 40-minute suite that properly opens the set.
- Split, 23 October 2013. After a wonderfully promising beginning, with Page poking and prodding Trey over a long decrescendo to start his solo at the bottom of the bottom, Trey reaches for that pitch-bending pedal he loves so much. Over the next seven minutes the band swells like a blister — ugly and painful, a strange intrusive alien feeling where the body wants to be effortless, as it once was — then bursts apart, leaking out nastiness that’s no less unpleasant for being out in the open. It’s interesting that Trey took a much more conventional lead in the NYE ‘throwback’ version of the tune, after doubling down on his atonal perversity in the Reading ‘Split’ — evidence that, whatever the online ‘critics’ might say, he’s still experimenting and playing at a high level, even if the results are…well, hideous. This is a hideous piece of music. In a world that contains the transcendent SPAC ‘Split’ from last July, I’m not sure there’s any reason why you’d bother listening to this one. And yet…in its perverse antagonistic ugliness, in its willingness to send even first-time Phish concertgoers to the concession stands at setbreak with this ‘anti-solo’ lunacy still hammering their skulls, I actually admire Trey and the rest of the band for producing this ‘Split.’ There aren’t many bands who get together for nostalgic celebrations and then deliberately madden their fans with sonic derangement of this sort. It makes the recently-released Niagara Falls 95 version seem reassuringly familiar, even tame. And that was Phish at their youthful ‘peak,’ y’know. This is something else. Old dogs new tricks I’d say.
