The Very Long Fuse
(On Phish, Halloween, and tracing something back to its source)
Halloween is rich, fertile ground for crazy and big things. Phans know this, of course: Halloween (along with New Year’s Eve and the annual End-Of-Summer-Festival) represents one point in the three holy days of the Phish calendar. These are the moments when expectations rise and big things — no, Big Things happen, things like world premieres, pranks and gags, morning acoustic sets. Things like unannounced sets, stage antics, tricks and treats. This is where Garden parties, udderballs, giant flying hot dogs, time machines, cannonballs, gardens of infinite pleasantries, Clifford balls, and cheesecake become the stuff of legend. These are the moments when Phans break out in cold sweats in anticipation of telling their boss/partner/dogsitter/kids they need to go do this thing. This is where Phans make serious sacrifices in other parts of their lives to be There, wherever There happens to be that particular year. Because they know Big Things are going to happen.
So this is the backdrop to it all. In Fair Las Vegas, where we lay our scene.
Prologue: Steal Away
But first, let’s rewind one year.
In 2013, Phish made it clear that they had lost interest in their Halloween tradition of covering another band’s album front to back. While this move was initially met with mixed reviews from the phaithful, I think that people have come around to the fact that it is a quintessentially Phish thing to do: establish a pattern and expectation, and then just when people think they have it figured out, completely shatter it. If there’s one thing that Phish doesn’t like, it’s being held to an expectation. Even when the expectation is one of their own design.
I resisted it at first, I was dying to hear Houses of the Holy or Wake of the Flood, but I have come around, at least on a philosophical level. Revealing an entire set of previously unheard original music is simply not something that is done by rock bands, and that alone deserves appreciation. For most other acts, there are too many commercial pressures placed upon them to gamble with untested material on perhaps the biggest musical night of the year. Not so here: on the night when Big Things happen, and in the year that marked a certain significant temporal milestone, Phish squeezed out of the structure and expectation they created 19 years previously. In this move, the band was never more itself. Whether the quality of songwriting in the 2010's is on par with those written in the 1980's is beside the point: The year was 2013, we were all older and in different places in our lives (band included, band especially), the band had been making music for 30 years, and Phish was giving us front row seats to the newly minted products of their creative process. That’s a Big Thing, the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Do You Know What Happened Then?
For the second year in a row, the band used Halloween to offer our ears something original. Yes, technically speaking, this was an album at one point, or inspired by an album, but none of the music we heard (save the triggered samples) was from that album. What we heard was, once again, a set of original Phish compositions.
In creative writing classes you are sometimes given a writing prompt and told to just…go. So you free-write for a while, and the words you put down are sometimes only loosely based on that sentence or a picture or a quote. Sometimes the prompt is launched from quickly, and sends you flying through new territory. A blaze from one tiny spark. And when you put your pen down and survey the landscape you just walked through, you get an impression. A feeling. A general but unfocused idea of what you’re approximately dealing with. You can then go about picking through your work and selecting small nuggets to expand upon, to grow into fully fledged, developed ideas.
Sometimes the first stab at it hugs the prompt closely, sometimes it doesn’t. But nothing comes out fully formed. Finished pieces almost always require incessant and ruthless revision, honing, editing.
10/31/2013 gave us fully formed songs, compositions with intricately woven parts, lyrics, strong melody lines. We even learned that this album was largely a full band collaborative effort, adding to the gravity of what was created. 10/31/2014's original work didn’t have this sort of polish. What the band delivered to us was a series of first drafts, nascent and burgeoning ideas, seeds of what could later become fully realized songs.
It’s funny: if the band were to drop into any of the grooves we found in the Haunted House set organically, it would be a monumental occasion. A Best Ever sort of performance. an automatic Big Thing. But because these grooves were delivered to us in a premeditated sort of way, they may have lost some potency. Given the amount of time that Phish had to work through their ideas, and given the precedent they set in 2013 (not to mention their demonstrated ability to compose some very technical and sprawling stuff), the music Haunted House set sounded unfinished, raw, not quite fully formed, not ready for the biggest stage of the year.
Yes, there were parts of things that were put together quite well, some intricate hits on “Haunted House,” an interesting non-diatonic note in the melody of “Timber.” Each piece did conjure some of the feeling that one might get from its prompt. These things are not nothing, but these things are also not the deliberate tempo shift around the three minute mark of “Fuego,” or even the delicate major third resolution of the melody at the end of a line in “Winterqueen.” And none of it certainly was anything like those pillars of the Phish catalog we always refer back to.
By and large, the Haunted House set accessed a fairly narrow set of musical conventions, and consequently, emotions. Given their prompts, and given their known ability to jump across genres and idioms with ease, one might expect the band to dig in with wild and unbounded creativity, conjuring vastly different textures and using the full palette of sound to weave together music with a wider range of emotions than they did. What came out, though, were collections of 8 or 16 bar ideas in largely the same tempo range, all in the same meter, all delivered in almost the same dynamic range, and most arranged in largely the same fashion: Brief melodic idea, band vamp, guitar solo, possibly a B section, big wash ending.
Triggered samples aside (something I hope Page decides to do away with completely), It all sounded decidedly Phishy, there was no mistaking that this band was behind it, and yes, it was an impressive feat. One of the greatest things about the Haunted House set was that they performed it more or less in the round, positioned in a circle, looking at each other, not facing out to a crowd. It was much more as if we were witnessing a private moment, something we’d find were we a fly on the wall in the Barn.
There were other really great things about it. Trey’s love of theater was apparent, and this scale of a stage production has perhaps never been rivaled at a Phish show. That must have been something. But given 2013's fully formed ideas, I couldn't help but note that 2014's offering was a collection of first drafts, of songlets not yet fully formed.
If there were a downside to the Wingsuit and the Haunted House sets, it is that Phish didn't ride their new creations very hard. The songs were shiny toys, not yet worn in tools, and were treated gingerly. This can’t be helped; it takes familiarity and use to really be able to develop telepathy. It happens every time a new song is taken for a spin: they need to make sure it will corner well before they can really throw the throttle back. The novelty of the moment was meaningful, and many would take that alone to be evidence of a Big Thing (a topic for another essay), but what was missing was the type II exploration that typifies 3.0, the sort of thing that keeps us all coming back for more.
In sum: we have two marquis sets filled with new, original music. Haunted House was definitely a more raw and unpolished Phish than Wingsuit. And therein may lie its significance. More on that later.
Segue: Canyons That Have Overflowed
3.0 is not about the traditional tension and release that characterized Phish’s ascent 1988–1996. This sort of musical movement, the in-song Type I stuff, becomes somewhat predictable after a time. If we’ve been to the top of Antelope Mountain (and what a magnificent mountain it is!) we can reasonably expect to find our way to the top of it again, even if the path taken is slightly different. If we know that there’s movement towards the revelation of a new musical costume every Halloween, we can expect that same movement every October. Phish does both of these things well, but after a time, I suppose it’s just not as interesting to try to do the same thing better. The supercharged buildup to Festival 8's Exile on Main Street set may have been the beginning of the end of this sort of movement.
3.0 hasn’t been about this. 3.o has been about doing different things. Phish 2008-present is about off-the-map exploration. This manifests in various ways: Toying around with song placement within a set or a show (Isn’t Mike’s Groove really supposed to be a second set thing?) using new songs for set openers and closers (did “Waiting All Night” really open this fall tour?), and enlisting the help of new songs to launch into the unknown (did “Carini” really become a go-to Type II jam platform?).
More importantly though, it manifests in the band’s approach to making music. There’s something notably different about 3.0, especially 2011-present: Their groupthink and their listening are incredible. There’s something that enables the band to much more easily drop off the edge of the map and patiently, together create something new. The years of training, the countless “Hey!” exercises and passing of themes around the circle, have paid off. Their paintbrush of choice in these moments is much more In A Silent Way than it is Apostrophe, and that might turn some people off, but that’s fine. Trey’s mantra for his ritual pre-show meditation is: It’s not about you. And he’s right.
Phish has largely traded the sharp angles and extreme conditions of high alpine mountaineering for the chance to poke about the lesser visited pools and canyons of their musical landscape. Now, it’s the steadier hand and the trained veteran’s eye that draws them to more closely examine and appreciate what younger practitioners might blow by on their way to the next extreme adventure. If donning another musical costume on Halloween is tearing furiously into Chalkdust (like, say, 8/8/1997), then playing a set of completely new music is dropping off the edges of what we know Chalkdust to be and navigating well off the map (like, say, 7/13/2014).
I think we know where the band’s collective head is at now.
Substituting Every Sound
The Wingsuit set, then, was itself a Type II move, on the macro level. It put a flag in the ground, saying: This is a turning point. That was as far as we were willing to go with that thing — we’re now doing this other thing. And this other thing is self-aware, self-referential. We are looking inwardly for inspiration; we are realizing that we already have everything we need. This is our reset.
And it feels good, because it feels good. It’s the sort of zen koan that only makes sense when you let go of trying to figure it out so hard. Sort of like a great jam.
If 2013's Wingsuit set represented the most distant point of the swing of Phish’s creative pendulum, the point at which things changed direction and for the briefest of moments things were completely still and filled with potential energy, then we witnessed an acknowledgement of the mass’s return with set II of 12/31/13. Their “Bar Gig” prank was hardly a prank, but one of the most naked, honest moments Phish has ever put themselves in. It was a shedding of bells and whistles, a paring down of what didn’t matter, a return to Home. It was a reminder of that which is most central and basic about the music they make. Before 99.8% of the people in the audience at Madison Square Freaking Garden had even heard of Phish, those four guys were hauling their own gear, xeroxing their own posters, negotiating their own cut of the Door like every other gigging band in America. But more importantly, those four guys were engaged in a very serious pursuit of creation. They’d literally lock themselves in a room together, and as best they could, attempt to channel something, hoping to position themselves in such a way that it all might line up for the briefest of moments and have a Big Thing happen.
What came out all those years ago, at least what they let us hear, is met with mixed reviews. Critically speaking, I can’t imagine what may be said about it that would hold any currency. Commercially speaking, forget it. The important thing here, though, is improvisation, and the belief in Grace from Within. These two key ingredients were being baked into Phish’s recipe from the very beginning. These two things seem to be the way that this band has most easily made Big Things happen.
The Course That My Tread Has Already Traversed
Two points do not yet make a trend, of course, but based on Halloween 2013 and 2014, I sense a movement backwards. And by this, I don’t mean that Phish is regressing. I mean that the pendulum is swinging back, that the band is returning to its source.
That Phish left behind a tradition of imitating their heroes, a tradition that carried them through the most exciting and dramatic moments of their ascension, says something important. That they chose original work to take its place says even more, and makes me unspeakably happy. And a lot of other people too: we who have spent embarrassing amounts of money, time, miles, and Maxell XL-II’s on this band are never more engaged with them than when we are able to witness an act of artistic creation. An authentic moment, a sound that something that no other band on Earth could ever hope to make.
The fine polish of the Wingsuit set was absolutely a revelation, but it was one that the band had been toiling away on for some time behind closed doors. We bore witness to the final product. The rough draft of the Haunted House set was probalby more gutsy from the band’s perspective, in that they used the highest pressure moment and biggest stage of the year to reveal works-in-progress. We perhaps have never witnessed so much raw material so closely, and certainly not in such a concentration.
If this is a trend, where does it lead us?
I hope - I sincerely hope - it eventually leads us back to the source of where all these songs came from in the first place, the moment of absolute creativity that pre-exists even the roughest drafts of grooves and nascent song ideas. The band used to call it the Oh Kee Pah Ceremony; in the general vernacular I’d just call it a Jam.
We’ve been lucky enough to witness glimmers of this at very special times in the band’s more public era: the IT tower set, the flatbed truck jam, moments of wonder in the swamps of Florida at the turn of the millennium, and (perhaps above all else) the Lemonwheel ambient set all represent Phish engaged its most pure act of creation: starting with an absolutely blank canvas, and creating something in the moment that could never be reproduced, and that will never exist again. We chase this band across the country and around the world for moments where they drop into such a place. (6/14/2000 comes to mind, and because they released it officially, I think the band would agree.) As the band is seemingly more ready to put those moments on center stage, I have my fingers crossed that future Halloweens move more towards moments of pure, untethered improvisation. Letting us in on this part of the process, really and truly pulling the curtain back, is one of the most precious things the band could do.
The photo up top is of the Sculpture Building at Goddard College (as best I can figure), where Phish played their first Halloween gig in 1986. No costumes, no big pranks, just some friends on guest vocals and the debut of Bowie. How things have changed.
I imagine Phish trailing a string or wire behind them for the past 30 years, a filament that connects 10/31/1986 to 10/31/2013, and everything in between. I imagine that on Halloween in their 30th year, the band lit that string ablaze. Now a very long fuse, I imagine it smoldering, retracing its path, incinerating that which wasn’t worth keeping, and lighting aglow that which was. And I can only imagine what may happen as it continues to burn, crawling slowly back towards its source, backlighting the band that inexorably has kept moving.
And so: Phish continues to occupy its own center of gravity, and has used its biggest stages to demonstrate that to us. This has never been a band who relied on production value and one-upsmanship; this is a band who’s succeeded beyond all expectation because of their dedicated musical and artistic ability. And tracing that back to its source has become their project.
You thought there was going to be a huge explosion. Didn’t you?
