Elemental.
(First of all, read Zac’s lovely piece on Magnaball. OK then.)
I’ve hardly listened to Phish’s Summer 2015 Tour. Now, by ‘hardly listened’ I mean ‘only heard the second sets once or twice and the obvious “highlight” jams a half-dozen times’; we are obsessives, after all. But I’m not really in touch with the music this time around — everything I’ve heard has been great, but I had some initial misgivings (about Fish, about their singing voices, about certain directions in the jamming) and haven’t listened closely since Bend/Shoreline.
Part of the problem has been the difficulty in fitting this tour into a simple narrative.
The big story is Trey, of course, as we knew it would be. What effect did Trey’s six months of woodshedding have? In purely technical terms, they brought everything he wants to play back within arms’ (or fingers’) reach for the first time since the late 90s, which is a great blessing. (Imagine how he must feel right now, a 50-year-old playing at this level every night.) But his engagement with Garcia’s music, and the music that inspired him and the Dead, has also had a noticeable effect on Trey’s melodic sensibility. Since 2013, he’s been tending toward more emotionally direct, more singable lines; going to Jerry School accelerated that development, not only by filling Trey’s head with Jerry’s patented, impeccably phrased scalar runs and harmonic colour palette, but by re-exposing Trey to a collective improv model in which the guitarist stands subtly apart from the rest of the band as the expressive center of the proceedings. Because Trey is so committed to musical democracy in his ensemble playing, he’s still not taking endless Garcia-style discursive solos — good thing, too — but he’s unquestionably been the boss of the tour, and by melting his lead lines down to pure vocal melodies, he’s now able to command the room with fewer and fewer notes.
This has led to occasional sparseness in the ensemble, highlighting the other players’ contributions. It’s thrown a spotlight on Fish, who’s playing a little less subtly than in previous years, to my ears — but also just playing less. As I recall, in 2011 Fish seemed suddenly to quadruple his average drumming speed, showing off a ‘wall of drums’ style that added wonderful thickness and texture to the ensemble in that year of ‘storage’ jamming. But since moving over to his stripped-down kit, he’s dialed back the sheer velocity. He sounds more like a conventional rock drummer now, less like the weird savant who refused to play the same beat twice. It’s all to the good, but it’s taken my ears a little time to get used to.
The singing’s off. Has enough time passed that we can just say it and be done? Trey especially has lost a bit of his upper range, but the three frontline singers are all showing noticeable wear’n’tear on the pipes. Think of Page’s Heavy Rotation at Bend, or the way Page and Mike have been dropping down to lower harmony parts on songs like Light and Caspian. Maybe it’s monitor problems, maybe fatigue, illness, I dunno. But there it is.
Still, Mike and Page are playing at the same high level they reached earlier this decade, Mike especially.
The showcase jams and sets of early summer 2015 — assorted Tweezers, Diseases, Hoods, Gins, a monstrous KDF, etc. — are as good as the rest of the best of recent Phish, and I’m happy for them. But I’m not up to my neck in the music for some reason. That’s said, I know what a superb tour it’s been; it’s obvious. Everyone’s at full strength or close to it, including Trey himself. You only need to hear a handful of notes to know that!
the ball
I have listened a lot to most of Magnaball, though, and I’m sure I’ll spin it many more times in years to come. Magnaball brought the entire summer into focus for me. To my ears Phish are playing, right now, at a level they haven’t touched since mid-2003 — or maybe late 1999.
As usual, the big jams have drawn all the attention, and in this case, they’re also the most interesting of the weekend. Brian Brinkman (@sufferingjuke) said the Drive-In Jam sounded like a mix of IT’s Tower Jam and the Lemonwheel Ambient Set, which gets it just right: the Drive-In Set combines the patient fluidity of the Ambient Jam — which (hey remember?) builds steadily for a half-hour and then begins to oscillate steadily between feels — with the Tower Jam’s dreadful intensity and depth of immersion. The Drive-In Jam moves freely across meters, keys, and tempos (tempi?), but maintains depth, and never breaks its wee-hours mood. And it ends with a bizarre little Trey/Mike duet that sounds as if their duet before the Went Gin mated awkwardly with the twisted Sleeping Monkey from the Ball Square Jam. That this weirdo ending makes perfect sense is a sign of the Drive-In Jam’s impressive unity of (subconscious) conception.
The soundcheck’s a doozy too, recalling the ‘funky-bluesy’ Lemonwheel soundcheck, the once-shocking Bethel Waves, and the narcotically loose-limbed Victor Disc sessions. Indeed, the last movement of the Magnacheck has the hazy texture of a summer 2011 rhythm experiment. It doesn’t quite stand up to the otherworldly transmission of the Drive-In Set, but it’s 45 minutes of sustained creativity and nary a preconception or jangly nerve in sight.
Still, my favourite jam of the weekend, like many people’s — the jam that made me wanna write this in the first place — is Saturday’s set-closing Tweezer > Caspian pairing. (I bet it’s Mike’s favourite too: I’ve never heard him go to town on his fightbell like he does in the final minutes of Caspian.)
That Caspian jam takes some interesting turns in its middle few minutes; after the usual Caspian form boils away, what’s left is an FX-laden rhythm oddity complete with Tweez tease, but instead of tossing off the reference and moving on, Trey and company build the next episode around the Tweezer riff without actually returning to the song, in some sort of recombinant musical DNA experiment. They’re still in the home key of Caspian, with a minor-blues rather than princely-major feel, but they’re so far from the original song emotionally that you’d never guess. They bring the jam to a rock-anthemic peak w/subtle I-IV colours, and — recapitulating a pretty common ‘3.0’ move — eventually they just hang on the IV, thinning the air and brightening the light. What follows is the most cathartic ‘hose’ jam of the weekend, the Went Gin of 2015. It contains next to no musical information, just a dead simple four-note descending line from Trey (who’s spoken, remember, about envying Herbie Hancock’s mix of ‘childlike’ melodies and sophisticated harmony) and Mike’s most extravagant display of synth-bass yet (ever?). Page hammers the keys, Fish thrashes the kit, Trey digitally redoubles his massive power chord, and they wring every single drop of teary-eyed wonder out of Caspian’s closing four minutes. It’s real Dick’s-2012 stuff, the Pumping of the Fist, the Banging of the Head, the Shaking of the Hips, only…
…there’s something new here, I swear, and by ‘new’ I mean very very old. They still sound like Phish, obviously, but this is some of the least obviously virtuosic stuff I’ve heard from them — not in a sloppy 46 Days kinda way, nor a zonked-out Amsterdam 96 kinda way, but in a (forgive me) Grateful Dead kinda way. Primal. Elemental. No pretense, just total ease and freedom of movement. Festival Phish is always something special, but this music hits me harder than anything they’ve played in a long time.
It’s utterly pure.
And when they count off Blaze On early in the next set after a Meatstick overture, something even more extraordinary happens: they maintain their level of clarity and empathy while playing at a much higher level of detail. Every gesture is responded to, every signal amplified — dig the sly harmonic gradient in Blaze On, the weird mysterioso opening to Possum (and Trey turning arsonist on his guitar solo!), the dextrous inner movement in Cities, and the way Light effortlessly transforms several times before gliding away on a groove reminiscent of the canonical Gorge, Greek, and Star Lake versions (which group this rendition vaults right into, I’d say). Even 555, heretofore not exactly the band’s Dark Star, turns into an atmospheric journey into the inner folds of Mike’s groove-brain. Wading in the Velvet Sea is something of a blunt instrument, emotionally speaking, which is why it hits so hard every time, and (as the handsome boys at @hfpod point out) it’s perfectly placed here, though on paper you’d think twice about a 555/Wading/Walls run, no? The whole band spends the whole third set in an elevated state without playing a single marquee jam — they just locate a principle of continuation, of coexistence, and glide together for 80 minutes. It’s not a triumphant 23-minute Gin or a Zep-touched Twist shuffle — nothing flashy — but the achievement of that third set is as impressive to me as anything else the band did last weekend.
that dangerous element
I’m as excited about Magnaball, after the fact, as I’ve been about any Phish show since Albany 2009 — and that show was important mainly for a single two-song sequence. Everything seems just right in the band’s improvisation right now: riotous energy, fluent detail, rich texture, lockstep rhythm, harmonic fluidity, and above all, the sense of gratitude and joy that’s characterized their post-Coventry music. (Think of Trey’s enormous thank-you list during I Didn’t Know — and the wonderfully moving Happy Birthday to his daughter Eliza.) Even when the music gets dark, and in fairness it rarely gets as dark as it used to even in the 90s, it still radiates serenity and acceptance. It turns out rock’n’roll won’t kill them, and we can all just go on living with that fact. Can you imagine?
The word ‘elemental’ came repeatedly to mind while listening to that Caspian jam this morning. Phish have always made complicated music, and they have a paradoxical reputation as hippie nerds — their compositions are Too Complicated for their own good, while their jamming is Shapeless Noodling. And we the fans happily accept piss in our ears, as you know. The reputation is wrong both ways, of course; Phish’s jamming is strikingly complex and their compositions are totally emotionally open. (My little 33–1/3 book, coming out in mid-October (pre-order now!), makes this argument at length, among others.) And the too-easy media line on Phish has never been more wrong than it is now. They’re more RAWK now than ever before, maybe ‘more themselves’ I mean, not in the loud’n’distorted sense but in their embrace of pure rhythm, ancient harmony, naked emotion. Deep time. And if their songs have never particularly encoded the thwarted adolescent sexual desire that is the motor of rock’n’roll As She Is Spoke, well, I’d submit to you that their improvisation has always spoken more fluently of desire than they’ve ever been given credit for.
I came to Phish for the comedy, the head games, the weirdo intellectualism of it all, but I stayed, like we all stayed, for the unexpected open-heartedness of their music, and just as much, of the community they’ve (we’ve!) built around the music. It’s love, y’know. Love can’t be faked, because it doesn’t involve words or even deeds, really. It’s a feeling communicated before and below the level of speech or sign, which is why music is such a perfect vessel for communicating it — improvisation most of all, because in the true improvisatory moment there’s no time for artifice. And now more than ever, Phish’s music speaks honestly and directly of love, and invites everyone to be a part of it.
Which brings me back to Trey in the woodshed this winter and spring, practicing scale patterns and singing songs that were age-old even when they were new. That was an act of singular devotion, as we saw in Santa Clara and Chicago; and such acts always permit, or insist upon, rebirth. You can’t help but be transformed utterly when you give so much of yourself. That’s a lesson every parent learns; and everyone who shares a project or purpose with trusted friends over decades; and everyone who devotes him- or herself to loving service in the name of something larger than any individual — all of which can be said of every member of this band. More and more, I’ve come to believe that that’s the point of this, that’s why this ride is worth taking. Not cosmic whatever-it-is, nothing esoteric, but rather something very small and pure that never ever runs out, something passed freely between friends and family and lovers, between strangers dancing in a field. That’s the element, what remains when the noise recedes. It’s no secret at all. ‘We want you to be happy,’ which is all well and good, but how?
The answer doesn’t come in words. Here, listen…
