Animal House
10/13/94, Oxford, MS, “Grove Area Parking Lot”
Phish started as a college band. They thrived as a college band. And in some ways, they’ll always be a college band, as a good chunk of their fanbase chases the dragon of university days nostalgia on current tours. But this label is almost as confining and diminutive as their eternal status as heirs to the Grateful Dead. People who “grew out” of their Phish phase can use “college band” as their catch-all excuse, music they only tolerated because it was what the dudes with the best grass played in their dorm room. And it’s not too far a distance from “college band” to “party band,” a reputation that has at times backgrounded the music in favor of the scene, the drugs, and inattention.
To their credit, Phish never really bristled too much at this status. They’re self-aware enough to realize that they started in a dorm lounge, spent their early years in campus bars, and through most of the 90s booked tours that looked like an NCAA team’s schedule. From a business perspective, these were all wise decisions, grabbing their target audience as close to home as possible. But occasionally — and increasingly, as the 90s progress — the “college band” mantle would inevitably clash with the band’s higher artistic targets.
Take this show, the venue of which is described on Phish.com as simply “Grove Area Parking Lot, University of Mississippi.” For a band that would headline a sold-out Madison Square Garden in two and a half months, this is a humbling setting. The Grove may be known as the “Holy Grail of tailgating sites,” but that’s not exactly the ideal setting for a prog-improv band beginning to stretch its wings. Today, The Grove has a proper concert venue, but at the time the parking lot was literally a…parking lot, next to an all-girl dorm. The ticket stub reads “Presented by the Student Programming Board.” It’s as college as an environment can be (although, it was not, as Trey’s banter would indicate, Homecoming weekend — that was two weeks later in 1994).
Given these unglamorous details, the night goes about as well as you’d expect. From the AUD, it’s easy to hear how restless and distracted the crowd is: between-song cheers are scattered, the usual crowd responses are almost absent (I think 5 people do the “Stash” claps), and ambient chattiness threatens to drown out anything below full volume. The band gives it the, well, old college try, but their interest palpably wanes as the sets go on. The first set concludes with “Stash,” not your usual closer, and a choice with a strong hint of “let’s just wrap it up.” Set II seems to regress back to the earlier days strategy of genre shotgun blasts to try to catch the ears of the uninitiated: A bluegrass opener, a power ballad, an a cappella hymn, their latest novelty cover, a catchy sing-along…anything sticking?
They’re not completely blameless in the making of this dud. Playing the already-rare “All Things Reconsidered” as the third song of the show sounds like it loses the attention of any casual observers not familiar with the compositional acrobatics of a fugue or sly-wink variations on NPR theme music. Perhaps the improvisational highlight of the show is a perversely extended quiet jam in the middle of “Foam,” which competes in decibels with the dozens of conversations taking place around the taper. Singing both “Amazing Grace” and “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” in the same set — four tracks apart, even! — Is hilariously masochistic in front of a bunch of drunken Chads and Trixies. And for some reason, in a show that could actually benefit from the novelty of a short, hairy man in a dress playing a vacuum, they choose to skip the Fish segment, perhaps just to cut their losses and get on the bus to New Orleans.
It’s not a show anyone has in heavy rotation, but like 10/10/94, it’s an intriguing opportunity to see what happens to Phish when things aren’t going exactly their way. That time around, it was internal pressure to take Tweezer farther out, and a noble failure to stick such a high degree of difficulty dive. In Oxford, the adversary is external, and probably one of the last times until their Europe tours where they’re playing to an indifferent crowd. And to be frank, they blow it, falling into the perilous valley between a crowd-friendly show that would charm and win over new fans and a self-indulgent freakout for the diehards.
In retrospect, that’s actually a good thing. As recently as spring 94, they might have read the crowd and taken the first path — let’s call it the DMB option, just to pick three completely random letters of the alphabet. Their inclination in the fall, as the rest of this tour would tell us, was to take the other fork, to get more and more inside their heads, trust that enough people in the crowd cared to follow them, and to hell with the rest. Embracing the dual risk of alienating some population of the crowd and occasionally playing a show that just doesn’t work was an essential step for this stage of their career, and 10/13 catches them at the awkward transitional stage of that embrace, like two dudes deciding whether to hug or shake hands.
Despite this show’s sad trombone, Phish’s “college band” status likely enabled them to fully execute this leap. Carrying the reputation of “a good band to party to” around the country’s campuses is a pretty solid box office pull, and a useful front for them to keep filling up basketball and hockey arenas while their music got stranger and stranger. By the time word got around that riding out a 30-minute excursion through 16 different melodies and polyrhythms in Tweezer wasn’t exactly the mellowest vibe for a Friday night bash, they’d replaced enough curious onlookers with converts to coast on the shed/arena circuit. There are worse things to be than a “college band,” so long as you don’t let it define you.
