Phish's A Live One 9781628929386, 9781501305177, 9781628929393

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A LIVE ONE

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: Bitches Brew by George Grella, Jr. Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Hi, How Are You by Benjamin Shapiro Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic´ Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod and many more …

A Live One

Walter Holland

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Walter Holland, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holland, Walter, author. A live one / Walter Holland. pages cm. – (33 1/3) Summary: “An in-depth study of Phish’s live album A Live One and its cultural significance” Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-62892-938-6 (paperback) 1. Phish (Musical group). Live one. I. Title. ML421.P565H65 2015 782.42166092'2–dc23 2015017824 ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2938-6 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2939-3 ePub: 978-1-6289-2940-9 Series: 33 13 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN

Track Listing

Disc One 1. “Bouncing Around the Room” (4:08) 2. “Stash” (12:31) 3. “Gumbo” (5:14) 4. “Montana” (2:04) 5. “You Enjoy Myself” (20:57) 6. “Chalk Dust Torture” (6:48) 7. “Slave to the Traffic Light” (10:46)

Disc Two 1. “Wilson” (5:07) 2. “Tweezer” (30:55) 3. “Simple” (4:53) 4. “Harry Hood” (15:11) 5. “The Squirming Coil” (12:30)

This book is dedicated to Prof. David Thorburn, my teacher, and to the memory of my friend Sinclair Jennings, Jr.

The resort to a dialectical algebra before finally coming to an emotional presentation of the nature of despair and its solution—which is to rest transparently in the energy which gave it rise—is an exhibition of patience, a making available at the level of reason … of what will ultimately contradict reason. (David Milch, The Idea of the Writer) When obtaining any magical result (including ‘failure’) always think of several explanations for it. These explanations should contain at least one each of the following types: i. An explanation based on the parameters of the magical system that you have been employing. ii. Strict materialism iii. Something exceptionally silly. (Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos)

Contents

Preparatory to Anything Else 1 You Can Feel Good 4 Quiet Rebels 13 The Method, Part 1 39 Average White Band 56 Finally the Punks Are Taking Acid 68 Long Time 81 Can’t This Wait ’til I’m Old 91 The Method, Part 2 104 Twenty Years Later 118 All of the Places and People Belong 130 Afterword 132 Selected Sources 133 Next Steps 135 Deepest Gratitude 136

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Preparatory To Anything Else

Phish are a guitar/piano rock quartet formed in Vermont in 1983. The four players (and a fifth who left early on) were in college at the time. By 1989, they were playing rock clubs and bars all over the northeast; in 1994, they reached Madison Square Garden. In 1996 a crowd of hundreds of dancing, drum-circling fans clashed with riot police in Morrison, CO (pop. 450), or vice versa, between shows at Red Rocks; the band was subsequently banned from the venue. In 2003, they made the cover of Rolling Stone. Phish have released more than a dozen studio albums and several times that many live albums, the latter mostly through their LivePhish organization. Their reputation rests on their concerts, which are taped and shared by fans with the band’s encouragement, and which feature extensive full-band improvisation. Their shows consist of a mix of originals and covers, drawn from a vast catalogue of hundreds of tunes. In 1994, the era documented on A Live One, they played from written setlists (different every night) with occasional spontaneous departures; in 1997 they abandoned setlists altogether. They almost never play the same song two  1 •

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nights in a row; during year-end holiday tours they’ll go four nights without a single repeat. In concert, secondset songs are often linked by improvised segues, which in 1994 would sometimes grow into song-length performances all on their own. For many fans, a run of lengthy improvisations connected by spontaneous segues is the ideal Phish performance—and of course you never know when such a thing might occur, which is a big reason so many of us see the band dozens or hundreds of times … Phish’s catalogue includes standard rock/pop singer-songwriter material, fully worked-out written compositions, solos over chord changes, and freeform “jamming”: open-ended group improvisation over loose/simple chords or scales, which often transforms or altogether abandons the songforms from which it emerges. At their peak of popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s they were arguably America’s biggest touring band, regularly drawing tens of thousands of fans to remote corners of the US for days-long festivals at which Phish were the only performers—and crucially doing so with next to no record label support, no hit singles, and an undesirable mainstream reputation as a self-indulgent punchline. After a triumphant overnight millennium show in the Everglades, Phish went on hiatus from October 2000 to December 31, 2002, then semi-triumphantly reunited for a year and a half, at which point the pressures of (in guitarist Trey Anastasio’s words) “owning a merchandise company,” alleviated partly through dangerous drug use at terrible cost to the music’s integrity, broke up the band—for good, as far as anyone knew—in August 2004.  2 •

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P reparatory T o A nything E lse

But after Anastasio bottomed out and sobered up, and bassist Mike Gordon and keyboardist Page McConnell spread their wings with successful solo projects, the band reunited in March 2009. Business being business, the mayor of Denver proclaimed Phish a “quintessential Colorado concert experience” and the band played four sold-out shows at Red Rocks in summer 2009. In 2013 they celebrated their thirtieth anniversary by debuting an entire album’s worth of original tunes all at once on Halloween. As I write, fans are gearing up for Summer Tour 2015. Phish’s first live album, the two-disc A Live One, went gold in November 1995, four months after its release. It was certified platinum by your friends and mine, the RIAA, two years later. As for me, the first rock concert I ever saw was the Phish show at Niagara Falls Convention Center on December 7, 1995.

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You Can Feel Good

Let’s talk about a moment for a moment. The version of “Harry Hood” on A Live One (ALO) runs fifteen minutes in length: two minutes of reggaetinged improv, four minutes of through-composed electric chamber rock, and a nine-minute collective improvisation (jam, in improv-rockspeak) on the chords D-A-G, which also underpin the first movement of the song proper. The lyrics are silly but memorable: e.g. a “Mr. Miner” is mentioned after a ferocious minor-key interlude. The “Hood” improv obeys the preacher’s dictum: Start low, go slow; get higher, catch on fire. At the outset, drummer Jon Fishman (the band’s namesake) provides a steady ride cymbal pulse like seafoam’s hiss, and the gentlest of hi-hat backbeats; Page McConnell’s electric piano chords are wisps of cloud, lingering only a moment. Bassist Mike “Cactus” Gordon mimics Fishman’s kick drum, providing the root of each chord in turn, D-A-G: enough to suggest the chord progression without dominating the sound. After a few seconds, guitarist/songwriter/bandleader Trey Anastasio enters with a lilting syncopated melody, Montego Bay by way of Vermont.  4 •

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Y ou C an F eel G ood

It’s very pretty. “Hood” is always pretty this way, at the start. They could do it all day. So could lots of other bands. That’s not the moment I mean. Things thicken. Gordon hangs on A♮ for a moment in the bass; without a D♮ to come back to, the root of the whole jam, tension creeps almost imperceptibly into the music. Then Gordon starts a new, simpler bassline, D and G and passage between, sweet and safe—a tiny cycle of tension-release within a span of several measures— but now it’s back to the original line and moving more quickly, with a C♯ thrown in, the melancholy melodic seventh, gently destabilizing—it’s a weak note, setting up a movement, not forcefully definitive. Not rawk. This is the matter of a couple of minutes. McConnell bounces new chords off the song’s basic D-A-G progression: E-minor, F♯-minor, B-minor for tense new colors, a long sustained D to arrest movement, let the moment settle … Fish’s backbeat is rimshots now, clipclop, but Anastasio lands on A—the dominant, halfway up the octave, registering as mild tension; it wants so badly to resolve to D, our home—so Fish (self-taught) starts perfect drumrolls like a marching band dweeb; Page suggests a phrase on his Rhodes, subtly altering the sound, and Trey instantly takes it up. Now his melody is tense hesitation (they all hesitate), now joyful surge forward (they all move with him, a hymn). Mike leaves the back half of a measure empty for the others to fill with sound, and Page and Trey instinctively provide complementary lines within those two beats, parts of an evolving whole, organs in a shared body …  5 •

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A LIVE ONE

If this talk seems at once geekily technical yet mystical in an earnest/maybe-syrupy way, consider the subject, of which the exact same can be said … Well, this isn’t the moment either. It’s unusually coherent improvisation on rich-for-rock harmonic materials, played skillfully with love and affection, but this isn’t yet the moment. We’re setting up what follows but we’re not there yet. The goal of the “Hood” jam, the game’s object (of course this is a game, it’s play), is for the quartet to arrive simultaneously at the closing vocals, the Hood Milk motto, “You can feel good about Hood”—and to do so wordlessly, using only cues and messages within the music itself. But here’s the catch: between “Thank you Mr. Hood” and “You can feel good,” anything goes. They can head as far out as they want, so long as they reach the finish line together. So now Trey’s guitar sound gets more expansive, his melodies more grand and stately as they go (“they go,” rather than “he goes,” is how it should feel); Cactus heavies up the bottom, improvising counterpoint, shifting weight within the groove; Page moves to piano, then Hammond organ, alters a keyboard voicing here or adds four bars of tension chords there; and Fishman builds steadily, a bar at a time over nine minutes, from brook’s babble to cataract crash, each bar subtly different from the previous but the pulse never wavering. There’s a lead voice, the guitar, but this isn’t a solo: they are coming to an improvised arrangement, coherent as any written passage, never again to be duplicated. Architecture in motion. Flocking. That’s the game.  6 •

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Here’s the moment: Ten minutes into the track, they’re soaring: ringing open-string guitar, piano fistfuls, tummy-rumbling bass moans, at least fifteen limbs bashing away at the drums. For sixty seconds the music is at a climax, big and loud. Rawk. We’re basically done—in five improvised minutes they’ve worked a fresh variation on the song structure and ramped up to the final vocals. Plenty of folks would follow a band around the country if what they did every night was the first eleven minutes of this “Hood,” and— —but they turn back. Sharing a destination but lacking a map, all four players instinctively pull up and halt the jam short of the finish. Drums and bass drop out, the road ends … and then a deranged blues-guitar thing happens, a goblin-drum thing, a bottom-string bass thing, a how-did-he-get-quite-there piano thing. The music, as the saying goes, is playing the band. From this point until the end of the track, anyone’d be proud to have written music so purely joyful and rich. It comes and goes in minutes, departing from the songform in order to fulfill that form. The term “leap of faith” seems appropriate. Maybe your heart speeds up a little here, to hear; maybe theirs did too on that night. That’s a nice thought, isn’t it? Hearts beating in shared time. Music is a technology for synchronizing the movement of animal bodies. And that there is the thing itself. (This stuff happens all the time, it’s how the species survives, but there it is on record if you like, 11:20 disc two track four A Live One released 1995 on Elektra. By all means take a listen.)  7 •

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A LIVE ONE

(you can feel ambivalent too) Maybe A Live One isn’t a great album. Hurts to say it. I’ve worn out several copies over twenty years and would love to have that One Perfect Phish Disc to turn on new fans—but as good as the individual performances on ALO are, it’s ultimately a good-not-great example of the live album, for a complex assortment of reasons. Because it samples from throughout Phish’s late-1994 shows,1 ALO lacks (for me) the flow of a single great concert, the continuous emergent experiential contour of a night at the theatre with the band that characterizes Live at the Apollo or Ella in Berlin. The restless, improvisatory nature of Phish’s ongoing project presents a rarer problem: within eighteen months of the album’s release, Phish were playing in a radically altered style that bore little resemblance to the manic roar of ALO. That’s (part of) the trouble with Phish: even a sprawling two-hour live album could only ever be a sampler, an advertisement, rather than a definitive account like Stop Making Sense or Live at Leeds … Worse for the album’s prospects as outreach, A Live One mostly advertised old product. The method stayed the same, but change itself was the method. Within a

 Phish’s management couldn’t secure the rights to sell recordings from all their fall 1994 venues, so the liner notes falsely claim the album was recorded at the “Clifford Ball.” The band later took that name for their summer 1996 festival in Plattsburgh, NY. 1

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couple of years ALO had become, in a sense, a relic of a lost time. The album also runs into a fandom-specific oversupply problem. When it came out, it was the highest-quality live Phish you could get: but even then, there was a ton more 1994 Phish circulating amongst fans—including excellent tapes straight from the soundboard. Because ALO briefly excerpts live shows that fans were already trading as audience recordings, it runs straight into the “Why this version of that song?” problem. The ALO “Stash” does reach an unusually intense climax, the half-hour “Tweezer” was immediately understood as a declaration of purpose for the band, but they’re not definitive renditions; they can’t be. A Live One was meant as a treat for hardcore fans who’d been asking “When are you gonna put out a live one?” for years, but we don’t generally go for compilations. The atomic unit of Phish fandom is the set or show or run of jams—not the track. “Pop” this isn’t. Plus there’s the matter of ALO’s structure: mannered miniatures and comic absurdities alternate with prog epics and abstract improvisations stretching for fifteen, twenty, even thirty minutes. Phish have a well-deserved reputation as a party band, but this is challenging music demanding close attention. It’s up to something complicated. And ALO is daunting. Even the more accessible first disc is enough to rock a casual listener back on her heels: the gorgeous chamber pop tune “Bouncing Around the Room,” with its Senegalese rhythm rings and romantic/aquatic imagery, tees up “Stash,” which subjects (basically) Mingus’s “Jump  9 •

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A LIVE ONE

Monk” to dementations more and less polite, through a schematic instrumental composition and pulverizing eight-minute tension/release improvisation. Then there’s the throwaway faux-funk of “Gumbo,” a mysterious two-minute ambient-psych-groove interlude called “Montana,” and the crown jewel of Anastasio’s songbook, the twenty-minute epic “You Enjoy Myself.” The genre/style catalogue concludes with “Chalk Dust Torture,” the guitar showcase whose chorus spawned a thousand yearbook quotes, and the stately, formal closer “Slave to the Traffic Light”—one long sevenminute crescendo to a tsunamic full-band arena-rock orgasm. The improvisation is relatively linear tension/ release work but the level of detail is very high. It’s all so exhaustingly precocious and showy (and long) that it might wear your ears out before you even reach disc two’s half-hour “Tweezer” jam … Then there’s genre. The pop lineage centers on singable melody, while rock signifies first as expressive electric noise; the static harmonies and private expressive mode of the blues are transformed in jazz through restless improvisatory motion. Phish, whose improvisations combine pop melodicism, rock noise, blues contours, and jazz elaboration, draw from those streams (and modern-classical experimentation, big band swing’s startling density, the complex kineticism of bluegrass …) without belonging to any of them. Phish’s brainy surrealism and flights of spontaneous invention are hard to prepare for. Yet even now, twenty years on, ALO has something rare and precious going for it: it doesn’t sound like anyone else. Oversized, perverse, requiring an unusual •

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amount of listener background knowledge: yes to all. Yet the improvisations it captures are genuinely unique, and it has spoken to thousands (millions?) of seekers over the last twenty years. Hearing your way into its musical language can take time, and maybe forgiveness. This book should help. ALO summarizes the results of a decade-long program of improvisatory experimentation, mathematical means to mystical ends. Phish’s singular approach to spontaneous group creativity, rather than any particular style or batch of songs, is the essence of their art. It’s the secret that compels fans to see the band dozens or hundreds of times. That esoteric private language is the reason new listeners often hear “noodling” where fans attuned to the group’s onstage dynamics swear they hear the voice of the deity. Here I’ve tried to encounter the weird beauty of Phish’s music on its own terms, and to describe what and how I hear in as rich a language as possible. Their music is polymorphous and perverse; this book is too, a bit. The poet says, “What is love? / One name for it is knowledge.” So this is a love letter.

Assumptions My imagined reader is an interested non-fan who’s heard of Phish but knows little of their music, without much experience listening to improvisation. I hope that hardcore fans will recognize the band, and themselves, in what follows. The music is its own best advertisement; I’ve tried, not always successfully, to resist my impulse to sell you •

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on Phish. But popular/critical opinions being what they are, I consider it an honor to play the role of witness for the defense.

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Quiet Rebels

Ninety-nine per cent of the people who played “prog rock” lost their songs to their egos … Musicians are simply channels to link the audience to the music and to each other. Genesis understood that always. I’m guessing that most of the people in this room have never listened to Selling England By the Pound. You cannot buy the greatest hits record and understand what I’m talking about. But there are so many people that I’m speaking for tonight who know exactly what I’m talking about … for those people that I’m talking about and for myself, this is our moment. And of course: Tony, Michael, Peter, Phil, and Steve, it’s yours. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the quiet rebels of Genesis into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. (Anastasio speech inducting Genesis into R&RHOF, 2010)

First, the Dead. The standard line on Phish pegs them as the “inheritors of the Grateful Dead’s improv-rock mantle,” usually with mentions of lysergic or noodling or patchouli thrown in to beef up word count. This narrative was fixed around •

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the time of A Live One, as Garcia faded and passed and the parasites infesting the Deadhead community went looking for another circus to join. It’s got nothing to do with the music itself. Check out the band bios in Rolling Stone (“the living, breathing, noodling embodiment of the term ‘jam band’”) and AllMusic (“During the early ’90s, Phish emerged as heirs to the Grateful Dead’s throne …”), and the jacket copy for Parke Puterbaugh’s Phish: The Biography: Vermont’s best-kept secret rose to national prominence in the nineties, when they became the most obvious heirs to the Grateful Dead’s legacy as onstage improvisers and touring Pied Pipers …

This stuff isn’t surprising; between the long second-set improvisations, jukebox-Americana catalogues, totemic guru/guitarists worshipped by fans, relentless touring, comparatively staid studio albums, and permissive drugand cassette-sharing fan cultures, it’s no wonder the “Dead 2.0” angle appeals to writers on a deadline. But it’s frustrating to those (not least the musicians!) who want to see Phish’s original work get a full fair hearing. We should give the Dead their due—in Anastasio’s words they’re “probably the greatest band in American history,” and they pioneered modes of rock performance and spectatorship that Phish and their fans inherited and extended—but Phish differ sharply from the Dead in musical style and (especially) improvisatory practice, in ways that go beyond a simple generation gap.

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Q uiet R ebels

Paradise Phish played their first gig in 1983, shortly after Anastasio’s nineteenth birthday. What kind of musical world did they come out of? In particular, what was their informal musical education like? Here’s one answer. Since 1994, Phish have covered seven complete albums during their semiannual three-set Halloween extravaganzas (and another, unannounced, on November 2, 1998).1 Here they are: 1. The Beatles, The Beatles (1968) 2. The Who, Quadrophenia (1973) 3. Talking Heads, Remain in Light (1980) 4. Velvet Underground, Loaded (1970) 5. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon (1973) 6. Rolling Stones, Exile on Main St. (1972) 7. Little Feat, Waiting for Columbus (1978) 8. Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House (1964) From my vantage, “The Seventies” function in pop memory mostly as the long hangover of “The Sixties,” not least because of who writes history. But for fans of visionary music, especially longform improvisation, the far-from-equilibrium self-organization of the 70s might be even more exciting than the 60s’ entropic tumult. The too easy consensus narrative—coarsely, “punk and hip-hop saved America(n music) from a half-decade of  After hearing that their post-Halloween show in Utah was undersold, Phish learned the entire album the day of the show, and nailed it that night. 1

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bloated excess,” in which the counterculture (not those gross hippies) has to rescue the norms from mainstream “slickness”—doesn’t fully account for the flowering of innovative music during that weird decade, particularly improvised music. The early/mid-1970s were a sort of strange peak era for improv: the only postwar moment when the best technicians and most forward-thinking experimentalists were playing the sexiest, wildest, angriest, craziest, spaciest, druggiest, most spiritually intense, most complex music around, and selling records in the process. And “excess” was a necessary precondition for the best stuff of the era. There was Miles, of course, who simultaneously invented and perfected a form of psychedelic jazz-rock fusion at the turn of the decade and kept playing outer-limits rock ‘n’ roll with a jazz vocabulary until his 1975 hiatus. But other players took his electroacoustic discoveries even further—indeed, a lot of guys graduated from Miles’s groups to their own seminal bands. Between 1970 and 1973, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi group (maybe the best jazz band of the 70s) laid down three albums’ worth of cosmic Free-funk lunacy and experimental proto-electronica, built around Herbie’s ingeniously simple melodies. They pushed the boundaries of jazz but couldn’t sell tickets—too far out—so Herbie broke up the band and formed the megapopular Headhunters, putting out more accessible jazz-funk of extraordinary harmonic sophistication and potency. (Best album and album title: Thrust, with its cover art of grandly Afro’ed Herbie flying a spaceship over a candy-purple Machu Picchu.) Cobham and McLaughlin, Corea, Weather Report with Shorter/ •

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Zawinul/Vitous, Tony Williams everywhere, Gary Bartz, Eddie Henderson, Alice Coltrane, Bennie Maupin, Julian Priester, Horacee Arnold … they inherited open musical borders, and went beyond pioneer efforts to take up residence in new nations. The fusion era offered new kinds of music that earnestly combined rock’s sexual threat, post-bop harmonic complexity, druggy psych weirdness, esoteric spirituality, virtuosic improvisation, and the propulsive rhythm language of funk. Electric sound and rock/funk rhythms offered new axes of freedom and somatic spell components for improvisers; extended solos and jazz harmony gave rockers new ways to create and resolve tension; Eastern modes and devotional songs gave new curvatures to the playing/listening experience. Hybrid identity met with purity of (spiritual, cosmic, erotic) intent. The fusionistas were something more interesting than pioneers: dual citizens. Cosmopolitans. In the early 70s, you could head to a rock venue and see Miles lead his electric band featuring jazz heavies— DeJohnette, Corea, Holland, Jarrett—alternating between pulverizing hard rock and bizarro psychedelic atmospherics, transforming grooves according to subtle cues from their leader. And (as in April 1970, thanks Bill Graham) they might share a bill with the oddity that was Live/Dead-era Grateful Dead, who’d routinely play hourlong suites that encompassed the cosmic modal languor of “Dark Star,” the pastoral folk-rock of “St. Stephen,” odd-meter rhythm workouts like “The Eleven,” and half-hour blues-filth raps by their blotto “keyboardist” Pigpen. Or you could catch Zappa and the Mothers playing virtuosic hybrid music •

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that integrated jazz improv into fiendishly complicated modern-classical orchestration with a deep command of blues and rock/R&B language. Meanwhile Santana and McLaughlin pursued other Miles-inspired fusion projects, combining blues-guitar rock fundamentals with Latin grooves, flamenco and Carnatic form and technique, and virtuosic improvisation. Weather Report started up with spare post-Brew jazz psychedelia but would soon pursue Zawinul’s theater-synth impulses to the top of the charts. Across the sea, groups like Soft Machine, King Crimson, and Can explored new, highly electric atmospheric conditions for group improvisation, hitting on new sounds that were neither jazz nor rock nor “neoclassical” but guiltlessly obeyed impulses native to each genre. Phish’s project extends that tradition: improvisation that speaks in several tongues in order to sound like something that doesn’t yet exist. Their sound has roots in outsized 70s rock—Genesis, Yes, Floyd, Zeppelin, the usual touchstones—as well as basic jazz-rock fusion, but Phish have other, less obvious spiritual antecedents: the trans-blues internationalism of Yusef Lateef, say, or Ornette’s extended experiments in spontaneous form (like his 1972 harmolodic orchestral work Skies of America and 1971’s galacto-psych-jazz masterpiece Science Fiction). The mid-70s Jarrett/Motian/Haden/Redman quartet’s beautifully raucous mix of Free experimentation and easygoing pastoral groove foreshadows Phish’s benign formal antagonisms, not to mention their democratic spirit and catholic genre-sense; and Jarrett’s hourlong solo piano improvisations, like the megaselling 1975 Köln Concert, prefigure the emergent assembly logic of Phish’s •

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partly improvised second-set songlists, which A Live One doesn’t try to replicate. Patchouli jazz, rock concerti, virtuosic blues, orchestral primitivism, pansexual occult electronica, shy prog, cartoon rock (complete with commercials): music that could only exist after the great cultural hull-breaches of “The Sixties,” but before the informational density of popular music plunged in the era of Johnny Rotten and the Walkman. Led Zeppelin and Crimson King and Hot Rats and Bitches Brew and Tommy and David Bowie (Space Oddity) landed in 1969, and, vital as they are, part of their great value is the way they open up space for music that takes such world-mixing for granted, adding a certain intimate madness to their feeling of shared possibility: Zep IV, Lark’s Tongues, Jesus Christ Superstar, Quadrophenia, Station to Station, Another Green World, Close to the Edge, Low, On the Corner, Sextant, Agharta, Elevator Over the Hill, What’s Going On, the whole indigestible mountain of 70s Zappa … to call these grand statements decadent is no insult. It fell to others to see how fast and loud and minimal and angry rock could go; these folks wanted space to play. They wanted to fit their paracosms inside. Which is a generous, brave act—as brave as yelling “I am an Antichrist,” I think, and harder work to boot. Anastasio’s undergrad thesis at Goddard College was a rock opera, The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, complete with narration and written underscore, set in a fairy-tale land called “Gamehendge.” The band has performed it in its entirety five times. It had its debut at a bar in Burlington, VT on a Saturday night in March 1988. Try to imagine what that night must’ve been like. •

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Fusion Phish are a fusion band; I use the term to refer to their relationship to existing genres—syncretic, hybridizing—rather than any particular genre. Part of what’s always made Phish so hard to categorize, and for a lot of listeners hard to like, is their wiggly-weird relationship to genre and style. Today, twenty years after A Live One, they’ve settled into their own genre; that wasn’t yet true in 1994–95, though the early signs were there … In coarse terms, fusion and jazz-rock are mutant strains of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll, respectively, which spring from the electrification of jazz (and its ambivalent adoption of rock’s straight-eighth rhythms and simple harmonies, plus funk’s revelatory downbeat) and the near-simultaneous importation of jazz’s extended harmony, virtuosity, and stretched-out improvisations into rock. “Fusion” is a bit of a dirty word today, calling to mind slick synth-jazz groups and (horrors) smooth jazz—funk/rock gestures without those genres’ anarchic/sexual energy, serious players selling out for a little of that masscult cash. Critical distaste for “fusion” is partly pseudosophistication, partly justifiable dislike of a lot of bad music. But if you see fusion not as style but as process, or environment—as a permissive imaginative stance or practice by which genres/styles coexist in all their idiosyncrasy; in chemical terms, solution rather than mixture—then the musicultural history of the 70s and 80s, their “excess,” reads a bit differently. For one thing, smooth jazz and its hopelessly square synth-cheese cousins aren’t “fusion” at all; they fall squarely and safely within established genre/style lines. Meanwhile •

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the spiritual connection between, say, Sgt. Pepper’s and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (or Pat Metheny’s suburban prog-jazz American Garage and Miles’s innercity groove sorcery On the Corner), their common presumption of hybridity, outweighs their stylistic differences. They sound so different but relate similarly to their raw materials. A shared energy comes through these artworks, linking them into something like a shared world. Mythos, if you like. Which is one reason I began this chapter by warding away the Dead. When they got together in 1965 the ideas of “psychedelia” and “folk music” mattered in themselves; they and their audience couldn’t yet take genre/style multiplicity for granted. Hence incoherence. By the 80s, the Dead had their own unnamable musical language of which psych-rock and folk had ceased to be readily identifiable discrete elements. That was the world Anastasio and Phish inherited, where “jam band” could be its own coherent idea, and fusion could mean an assumption of hybridity rather than a stylistic recipe.

Re: Chops Of course, there are other essential differences between the two groups. Crucially, Phish are a virtuosic band— they’re infamous, even resented, for their chops. There’s a wonderful emergent complexity to the Dead’s protean ensemble playing, with its somewhat ramshackle backporch quality, but Phish’s compositions are on another level of complication entirely, and their improvisations have a coherence and singleness of purpose that the Dead seldom attained. The Dead’s music reflected their •

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embrace of synchronicity; they often sounded like a happy accident, the world’s greatest pickin’ party. You could hear them discovering the music as they went. But for all its spontaneity, the music on A Live One sounds anything but accidental. Coherence, even during openended improvisation, is the watchword. You can blind someone with a tiny little two-dollar laser pointer, y’know—because its waves of light are completely in sync with one another. A big enough light bulb blinds like the sun, but sufficiently coherent light becomes a blade. That’s why critics’ carping about the band’s “reliance on chops” makes no sense to fans. Their chops are necessary, but they’re far from the point. Tellingly, Anastasio has mentioned in interviews that he’s drawn more inspiration from Garcia’s charisma—his control over the crowd—than from his guitar technique. He’s expressed the same admiration for bandleaders like Springsteen and Zappa, commander-in-chief types … Which explains Anastasio’s effusive praise for fastidious studio work like Rufus Wainwright’s Poses and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, which on the surface couldn’t sound more different from Trey’s own music. He and his bandmates are trying to match those albums’ level of precision and complexity—and to do so entirely on the spur of the moment, in front of an audience.

Postpunkish Phish formed at the tail end of the postpunk moment—a second fusion era that took punk musiculture (rather than blues-rock, jazz, or classical forms/cultures) as its starting point, jettisoned punk’s dead-end austerity in •

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favor of conceptualist experimentation, and headed off to parts unknown: goth, disco-punk, New Wave, new kinds of psychedelia … This moment (not quite “movement”) gives us Talking Heads, Joy Division, Devo, The Police, The B-52s: art music with punk’s artlessness in its DNA. And its experimental populism was a major tributary for 80s/90s “alternative” music. In 1982/83, three groups formed who would, in a less horrible world, have been fellow travelers: They Might Be Giants, The Flaming Lips, and Phish. Improbably, all three groups are still around—for, I think, the same reasons. They don’t sound much alike, though they’re all great live bands that at times sound like virtuosic kids’ music. (One influential rock critic called TMBG “exuberantly annoying” and the Lips “hopelessly ridiculous.”) But they share an experimental hybridizing impulse, a willingness to pursue private impulses to a state of creative-associative delirium, taking pure pleasure in pure nonsense. Their music is generally apolitical, but their casual boundary crossings and tripped-out nerdisms imply an earnest utopianism. They’re intimate monumentalists and intuitive conceptualists, freely mixing logic and dream-logic, inventing games for themselves the way kids do. Their albums and shows create entire worlds for (group)minds to play in without projecting an aura of Significance. And their anti-academic (indeed, anti-movement) unschool naturally adopts surrealism as the necessary mode of being in a VCR/MTV/mechanical-reproduction kinda world … the surrealism of the channel changer, the caffeinated waking dreamer. •

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Listen past the enormous differences in sound: here are three groups freely combining the confrontational strangeness of postpunk, the paracosmic transport of 70s album rock, an instinct for community-building, and unfashionable dedication to their private visions. I hear their virtuosic explorations (of pop form, sonic color, improvised movement) as authentically emotional but characteristically strange gestures from idea guys— which is what you get too from Selling England by the Pound, Sextant, The Inner Mounting Flame, and plenty of other strong fusion work. That quality, of Big Feelings from Big Brains disinclined to hide their smarts, does indeed get called “annoying” and “ridiculous.” Thoughts out of season often are.

Surrealironies: The “White Tape” and Junta Phish’s first proper album was 1989’s Junta, a cassetteonly independent release mixing theatrical story-songs, prog comedy, cheeky genre spoofs, and collective improvisation; Elektra’s CD reissue adds two crowd-haranguing live cuts and “Union Federal,” a twenty-five-minute snippet of a ritualistic hallucinogenic practice-room improvisation called “the Oh Kee Pah ceremony” (after a scene in the 1970 movie A Man Called Horse, about which we’ll say nothing).2 Junta established Phish as generously virtuosic surrealists, obviously influenced by Zappa’s  In those days, Phish’d lock themselves in a room, take drugs, and play in the dark for hours. Since then the band’s live improv experiments have often sought to replicate the Oh Kee Pah ceremony’s dreamlike occult atmosphere—cf. the 1996 “flatbed truck jam” and 2

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transclassical ambitions and experimental/art-rock’s committed mode/mood swings on the one hand, and the simple pleasure of that old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll on the other. There’s a lot of Pat Metheny in Anastasio’s clean long tones, smooth melodic lines, and easy way with both extended harmony and pastoral diatonicity; plenty of Brian May-ish midrange sound as well, and the young man has clearly studied his Jimmy Page too. Not to mention his Jerry Garcia. Prog gets mixed into postpunk, or vice versa; there are even a couple of funk interludes, not yet credible qua funk but divertingly groovy. And the design of the long tunes makes other key influences clear: the grandiose theatrics of early Genesis, Yes’s whiplash-inducing structural ironies, and the buttoned-up King Crimson, in both their early symphonic-attack-druids form and their twitchy New Wave math-wrestling variant. Every song on the album is equally committed to private perversity and universality: avant- but unguarded, they work hard to (mostly) make things easy for the listener. But not only easy. “Divided Sky” features ritual chanting and a palindromic instrumental passage incorporating “Mary Had a Little Lamb”; “Esther” is a rock opera in (nine-minute) miniature; “David Bowie” establishes the frenetic theme-and-modulations template for A Live One’s more combative “Stash.” Mike Gordon’s contribution, “Contact,” ingeniously transforms from a romper-room singalong about rubber tires to goofball sex-funk and back via a surprisingly moving 2011 “storage shed jam,” not coincidentally undertaken at the band’s self-produced all-weekend festivals … •

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automotive-romance metaphor. It’s fun music, but part of the fun is that it never sits still, can’t. It does get tiring. Junta’s lyrics are silly—fluffballs, murderous dolls, a tribute to Bowie’s fortieth birthday—but the music is still something to behold: a hyperintelligent, turbocharged mix of postpunk manic energy, ostentatious pseudoclassical virtuosity, ironic genre play of exhaustive reach and exhausting ambition, and absurdist humor of the midnite-movie weirdo variety. Junta was half the template for Phish’s decade that culminated in A Live One … … and the “White Tape,” their 1986 demo cassette, was the other half. Where Junta represents the band’s first try at making a proper album, the “White Tape” is a weird outsider mélange that nearly coheres despite itself. It’s largely solo work smooshed together into something that makes the kind of sense that’s … not. Its arc goes something like this: messy joke blues about bachelors degree > found-sound collage > gorgeous lullabylike guitar instrumental > overdubbed a cappella “instrumental” > country-rock showtune > guitar/chanting mini > fully-orchestrated “Slave” w/ROCK MAJESTY jam > found-sound collage > sweet guitar mini > machine-noise collage > demented noise collage/skit about nitrous oxide > Spanish/countrytinged guitar mini > prog freakout > jazzy tune about dog turds > 4-minute noise collage w/adorable girl’s voice telling bad jokes plus James Bond sdtrk loops > fully-orchestrated “Antelope” w/additional (minorkey) MAJESTY > 3-minute “radio advertisement” for Gordon’s mom’s paintings > cock-rock instrumental •

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(“Letter to Jimmy Page”) > a song called “Fuck Your Face” about an angry guitar that “knows how to scream.”

A finicky irresponsibility unites the work. The “White Tape” is Beefheart to Junta’s weaponized-ironic Zappa— id to the latter’s ego, elbow to the ribs instead of a knife. Between the two you have everything that went into Phish’s early music: unprepossessing surrealism, absurdist mimicry, studio-tech experiments, sweetnatured rural eccentricity, addled suburban impulsivity, untutored groove, pop classicism, catchy melodies spiked with young adult self-consciousness … Binding it all together is a thoroughgoing embrace of accident and interpersonal chemistry and spontaneous creativity, of improvisation as a path through the thicket of bad ideas and questionable taste, leading to unself-conscious joy. It’s serious music that doesn’t take itself at all seriously. So: right from the start, Phish announced a good natured but unapologetic syncretic project, geeky in style but devotional in purpose, which perhaps foolishly aimed for the head as a path to the heart. They accepted their source musics as they were, and did their best to honor their idiosyncrasies and encounter them in purely personal terms, in keeping with an expansively American musical vision. This catholic approach gave their early music a certain lack of shapeliness—but you can hear, even in the “White Tape,” a band unusually accepting of their musical identity. And Junta and the “White Tape” prefigure ALO’s project of defining and depicting an entire musical universe.

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The new weird America Despite the differences in their dispositions, Anastasio’s largest creative debt might be to Zappa, one of rock’s great satirist-mimics and guitarists and an ambitious longform composer who maintained a strong connection to blues, doo-wop, 50s/60s jazz, and avant-garde classical and “art music.” Zappa’s regularly called “contemptuous” and “condescending” by critics—a charge that could never be leveled at Trey or Phish—but I don’t hear Zappa’s refusal to concede to pop-rock’s easier satisfactions simply as disdain for his source material. For part of his audience, maybe. (For his critics, definitely. Justifiably.) But there’s an intrinsic generosity in virtuosic performance. Zappa related to his cultural moment through his art: that moment was complicated, and so was he; so the art was complicated. Simple enough. Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia” was one of Phish’s best-loved early covers—an almost-radio-friendly threeminute prog tune off Hot Rats full of sly harmonies, deft orchestration, and a Broadway guy’s command of narrative development. Like a number of Anastasio’s long tunes, it sounds like the overture to a rock opera. It’s inexplicable. Zappa is a perfect example of an influential artist working at the peak of his craft without getting famous for it (of his one hundred albums, four have gone gold), because it’s hard to sum up what exactly he was working so hard for. His accomplishment, in any case, is clear: an increase in rock’s bandwidth. Zappa’s experimental mix of neoclassical orchestration, jazz/blues improv, movingtarget countercultural politics, and (crucially) idiomatic •

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rock ‘n’ roll directly inspired Sgt.  Pepper’s among other great works. His fusion art engaged directly with pop, but on his terms. Which links him to other experimental domain-mixing acts of his era: Mingus’s primordial avant-Ellingtonia, the Beatles’ own combination of 1950s blues-rock with indigenous English folk and music-hall strains, the tape-loop boys in their sound labs, jazz-rock baccalaureates “elevating” pop, cats in dashikis blowing polychords over bass drones … For the members of Phish, born between 1963 and 1965, the foundations of rock, pop, and jazz shifted dramatically throughout their childhoods—the Beatles went psych while Fishman was still in diapers (if he ever wore diapers), Bitches Brew dropped before they could cross the street by themselves, and Lark’s Tongues in Aspic and Headhunters hit right around elementary school graduation. Imagine coming home after your first kiss at summer camp and flipping the radio between tracks from 2112, Songs in the Key of Life, and Frampton Comes Alive! It’d surely leave a mark. (It certainly left a mark on Phish: their hedonistic 1999 six-disc live album is called Hampton Comes Alive.) Rock opened up in the late 1960s to welcome jazz elements: longform improvisation, extended harmonies, and complex arrangements. Meanwhile “proper” jazz spent the decade getting pushed in several directions simultaneously, all to the good. Modal jazz pared away bop’s complication, making room for new harmonic approaches including pure texture/color and impressionistic effects; Ornette’s bands showed you could build a coherent improvised arrangement down from the lead voice’s melody, rather than up from fixed harmonic •

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material, and break hearts doing it; other Free and avantgarde players introduced new ways of addressing form, letting the emergent intensity curve of group improv structure the entire performance without conceding to conventional musical logic; African rhythms and Asian harmonies pushed writers and players to look for improvisatory solutions beyond the trusty ii-V. As 60s jazz grew more polymorphous (and perverse), it found common ground with the music that was replacing it in the popular (read: youth) imagination. Et voilà: jazz-rock, jazz-funk, soul-jazz, psych-jazz, the whole “kozmigroov” thing …3 But pop favors singable simplicity. Pop critics too. Punk and hip-hop offered low information-density alternatives to the “self-indulgence” of 70s rock/pop, and won the mindshare battle for complicated reasons (e.g. portable tape players and open-air headphones made the sonic simplicity of early hip-hop inevitable; punk’s easy reproducibility conferred evolutionary advantage over virtuosic prog and jazz). Both punk and hip-hop related oppositionally to mainline culture, which was no small part of their attraction for music buyers, who get younger ever year. And as the story goes, the musiculture those musics displaced and replaced was a decadent, stagnant one; nobody sounds that sad to see it gone.  Re: “kozmigroov”: nothing in the whole universe, absolutely nothing, is worse than seeing amazing music by black bands given a dumb name by white nerds on a listserv. Still, having a one-word label for “the spiritual-psych-soul-jazz-funk nexus of the 60s/70s” is pretty handy. 3

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Mid-seventies fusion has fewer cheerleaders than the heavily mythologized Sixties. There’s a growing library about the electronic-music family tree, but the popular imagination relates ambivalently to psychedelic/ progressive/fusion musics, not to mention instrumental virtuosity. (Why isn’t Sun Ra’s face on the trillion dollar bill?) But I wasn’t there, and (so?) I see it as a golden age: the last moment at which our brainiest music was also our most viscerally exciting. “Decadent” sophistication, sure, but also unbounded experimentation, sited at the inflection point before the Walkman and MTV fundamentally changed the cultural meaning of music, of monumentality … That’s the time to which Phish’s music hearkens back. And here’s the place: Vermont in the mid-80s, the Northern Kingdom, a tide pool of burnout freaks4 and left-of-normal DIY types a short drive from the ongoing nervous breakdown that was/is the megalopolis. The banks of an underground tributary where bug-eyed large-brained creatures wash up and begin awkwardly to mate and to populate, or invent, the next world. To me, Phish are High Weirdness.

 Like, say, “Nancy,” the gender-nonconforming shut-in genius who wrote the soulfully bizarre “Halley’s Comet” and the just plain bizarre “I Didn’t Know,” two tunes Phish adopted in the 80s and still play today. 4

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Thumb the road alone One crucial fact about Phish is that since their 1992–3 H.O.R.D.E. festival5 days, you can count the times they’ve had an opening act on the fingers of one great big hand. Since leaving Burlington, Phish’ve never really had a cohort, and musicultural isolation has had a weirdening effect on them. They’re lucky not to have to speak for both a decade and a vanishing counterculture, as the Dead were forced to do; but you have to know that, as exciting as the ongoing Phish circus has been for us fans, as joyful and good as the band and their mobile universe are at heart, that kind of disconnection can get lonely. Or at least it’s been that way for me. I came to Phish for the weirdness and stayed for the visions. Maybe isolation is the cost of the former and a precondition for the latter. It’s felt that way, at times. The summer I first heard A Live One, I read the Principia Discordia and Usenet for the first time. Much of my adult life has been spent coming to terms with the worlds they opened up. The Principia, a sendup of religious tracts dealing with the Goddess of Chaos (hail Eris), is one of the keystone creative works of the 60s, its influence far outstripping its readership. The book doesn’t oscillate between humor and profundity, it finds wisdom funny. The Principia is a very 60s work, uncynically swept up by   ==Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere: Blues Traveler, Flecktones, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews Band—second-wave “jam bands,” then loosely affiliated. Phish bailed after a handful of shows to tour with actual existing shaman Carlos Santana. 5

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ideas like “Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST.” It’s like a tiny mimeographed Whole Mind Catalogue. A bunch of its jokes are terrible, but they’re usually something more, too: asked about its purpose in life, the Sacred Chao says “MU” (groan), enlightening none of the assembled because they don’t speak Chinese (groan). But then a footnote adds: “‘MU’ is the Chinese ideogram for NO-THING.” Now that’s funny; I don’t care whether it’s true. That arc—philosophical humor shading imperceptibly into humor-philosophy, “earnest irony” as maybe the meaning of wisdom—is the Principia all over. I perceive that same arc in Phish’s music, in a darker hue.

Ranters, crowd-puzzlers If you know about Discordianism, you probably also know about the Church of the SubGenius, another spoof religion that kicked off in 1979 and reached peak visibility in the 90s, when paranoid millenarian cults were (understandably) on the nation’s mind. Whereas Discordianism is a thoughtful riff on druggy Eastern mystical spirituality, Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond’s “devivalist” Church is a fractured media spoof—all blared ad slogans, scatological eschatology, UFOlogist paranoia, naked contempt for the “norms,” and TV-culture mania. Instead of the goddess Eris Discordia, who likes hot dogs and good honest sex, the SubGenius icon is the cartoon face of Bob Dobbs, a hairslick pipe-smoking salesman straight out of Leave It to Beaver. The Church’s line of descent runs through MAD Magazine and Zappa: brainy outsiders turning inward, with frazzled neurosis their •

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decidedly un-groovy “authentic” state. Cult, not religion; bitter parody, not gentle satire: different drugs, different mood, different (lonelier) America to be disconnected from. (Not that there isn’t a complex continuity between the two strains, of course. Here’s Ken Kesey eulogizing Bill Graham onstage with the Dead, Halloween 1991: “We ain’t many … in any given situation there’s always gonna be more dumb people than smart people, we ain’t many …” And Trey Anastasio playing Kesey offstage after he and the Pranksters did a seventeen-minute rap about “Bozos,” 14 August 1997: “See what happens if you take too much acid, thirty years later?” One of the best nights of my life, that show—though I confess that I didn’t know who Kesey was at the time.) In the 80s and early 90s, Phish were to the Dead (maybe to “The Sixties”) as the Book of the SubGenius is to the Principia Discordia: a compulsively ironizing, basement-dwelling, self-consciously Weird descendent specimen so frotzed and fast-moving that they were addictively easy to like, but difficult to love, though they got there in the end: punk where their forerunners were folk, adolescently sexual where the old guys were casually erotic. Listen to one of Ivan Stang’s “Hour of Slack” radio/ cassette rants, then check out “Icculus” and “Sanity” on Junta—or any of the found-sound tracks on the “White Tape.” Think too of Byrne/Eno’s “field recordings” of radio preachers, which they worked directly into Bush of Ghosts and which helped inspire Remain in Light—a favorite album of Trey’s in college. Now skip to 3:43 on the ALO “Tweezer,” or Trey’s hectoring cry of “Can you still have fun?” on “Wilson.” Garcia was typecast as •

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shaman to meet fan demand, but Trey’s discomfort in that role has always been clear … Stang’s wonderful 1988 catalogue High Weirdness by Mail maps out a disreputable, disturbing, endlessly creative underground culture existing just a self-addressed stamped envelope away from respectable society: flatearthers, Trilateral Commission conspiracists, tape collage artists, ranters of every political/paranoid stripe, UFO contactees, advocates for causes from drug legalization to various opt-in apocalypses … freaks staving off atomization with private expressive rituals in hope of some connection. Stang’s blackly cynical book is tinged with melancholy. Its tour of the mail-order underground evokes an America that’s now all but gone—one where regional subcultures existed in total isolation, contact with other weirdos was free of distancing digital mediation, and mad geniuses and kooks worked tirelessly to try to turn their paracosms, their private universes, into “outsider” art—in the hope of transforming the rapidly imploding macrocosm before it was too late. My experience of ALO-era Phish fandom, a loosely connected network of folks sharing bubble mailers full of visionary live music lovingly preserved by amateur taperarchivists, was a tantalizing glimpse of the High Weirdness: esoteric language, mystical imagery, utopian communitarianism; groovy Best Coast heads exchanging memetic DNA with frazzled snowbound Easterners via Usenet telegraphy, saying “chord progression” and meaning “secret message” (or do I have that backwards?) … It felt and still feels, to me, like initiation into a somewhat ramshackle mystery cult—whose sigil is the audiocassette. •

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The age of sound An oddity: ALO, deliberate throwback to the expansive live double LPs of the 70s, never came out on vinyl. For a brief turn-of-the-millennium moment, before cheap hard drives and broadband altered the landscape, compact discs replaced both cassettes and floppy disks as our primary physical channel for digital data. ALO was released during that moment—and other than the live snippets on Hoist and Junta, ALO was most fans’ only live Phish on disc for years. CDs are a terrible choice for complete Phish shows, which divide into two sets, but often don’t fit onto two CDs—especially the early seventy-four-minute discs. Needless to say, a medium that can’t handle an eighty-five-minute second set just won’t do. Back then we traded cassette tapes, ninety-minute Maxell XL-II preferred, just like the Deadheads taught us. (There was even a mailorder business, Terrapin Tapes, catering exclusively to connected heads. I’d order tapes by the box.) So there was a certain novelty value, for fans, in having two “sets” of high-quality Discman-ready Phish in 1995, despite the medium’s constraints. The faith spreads through holy texts. Tape trading was essential to pre-broadband/mp3 Phish culture. Some kind soul (Charlie in San Francisco? Ellis “of Lemuria”?) would offer to dub four shows off his list in exchange for blanks & postage and you’d pass on the favor sometime down the line; or when Mom sprang for a nice dual-well tape deck (thanks Mom) you’d join a tape tree and spin DAUD-2s of the February ’97 Amsterdam gig (that “Disease” reprise out of “Taste,” amen) for five other •

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folks with cheaper decks … Our experience of the music was bound up in the ritual of sharing it with strangers, at the shows and through the mail. Cassettes are cheap plastic and fragile tape; their flimsiness seemed oddly, perfectly suited to the precious musical accidents they carried. Vinyl lasts ages. CDs are made by and for robots. Mp3s aren’t even real. A Live One samples an inscrutable whole: field recordings of a mystery rite from another time.

So Our subject is a strange musichemical phenomenon that began to take shape at the interface of two very different fusion eras: high-flown abstraction and “here comes everybody” countercultural energy bonded to a personal compositional vision within the perfect vessel for spontaneous collective creativity, improvised music. Freedom flight through deep structure. From my perspective, ALO says less about mid-90s’ “alternative” music than it does about the marginal cultural traditions that inform it, which are alive and everywhere today, if you listen for them. Having said all this, while the darkly comic High Weirdness and the (para)cosmic intimations of the band’s predecessors are deeply intertwined with Phish’s music and meaning for me, I don’t expect that stuff to have the same impact on you. How could it? But. Chapter Three focuses on musical mechanics, presenting an “annotated listen” to a single track on A Live One. And I want this private context to echo in the •

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background of that material. I hope you’ll hear what I’m hearing, and pretend with me that within the music—a thermodynamic irrelevance, I admit—all this is somehow at stake, in play.

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The quality of energy is what makes music powerful … If you see a band who’s working on this thing, and they’re all willing to be ignorant of it, even though their heads are very together—every second they’re willing themselves to be ignorant of exactly what it is that’s coming next … then that’s something to see. (Keith Jarrett interview, Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue)

“Stash” consists of a composed instrumental opening, some singing, a lengthy instrumental bridge, some more singing, and a seven-minute collective improvisation on a sequence of four chords. Its lyrics are nonsense. The melody is … calypso classical? At least at first. The most important thing to know about the song before we continue is that “Stash” is not a five-minute tune followed by soloing over chords—it’s a composition whose length varies from performance to performance, and whose longest section happens to be improvised. The jam fulfills the bargain struck by the written music. It’s all part of the form.

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0:00 Guitar tag to begin, unison rhythm hits to mark tempo and synchronize watches. We’ll hear the tag again at the end, twelve-ish minutes from now. It’s like a clever virgin’s version of a Carlos Santana tune. Then sinuous guitar melody, Latinate cheek over (basically) the chords to Charles Mingus’s “Jump Monk.” The basic four-chord sequence is patterned after Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” moving through the “circle of fourths”: the first chord (D-minor) tells us where home is, the second displaces our ear a little, then we move partway toward resolution with the third chord, a fourth away; then again (another partial resolution) with that tantalizing last chord of the sequence; finally we return home to D-minor at the beginning of the next phrase, via one last resolving fourth. Every time we hit that big downbeat, we’ll be returning to “harmonic home,” so to speak. We’re in a minor key, creeping about but not brooding. The sound’s a little dark, but Anastasio’s guitar melody has a kids’ music feel—the audience clapping at the 30-second mark heightens the easy/uneasy feeling. Coming off the album opener, the unabashedly pretty Senegalese-inspired “Bouncing Around the Room,” we’re right away getting a message: stay alert, it’s about to get complicated. And keep a sense of humor. All four players have a certain amount of interpretive freedom in their parts, but note that the drummer (who for years literally refused to play the same beat twice in a jam) sticks to a simple written line while the bass and piano occupy standard rock-quartet roles: •

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root-downbeat1 bass, keyboard chord colors. It can be disconcerting to hear something like chamber music in a rock club full of pot smoke, but the arrangement clearly comes from someone who speaks native rock language.

1:38 The lyrics are by Anastasio and his childhood best friend Tom Marshall, who took turns penning a line at a time. No doubt this was great harmless fun for them. But Phish’s lyrics remain a major obstacle for many new listeners. They are extremely fun to yell out along with the band at a concert, but many are literally insignificant, almost (or very) childish. That’s by design. At first it’s hard to square Trey’s avowed aspiration to onstage “nakedness” with Phish’s silly wordplay—but Anastasio and Marshall weren’t trying and failing to write confessional lyrics here. Marshall (sole lyricist on many classic Phish songs) seldom writes directly confessional verse; there’s always a conceit, a distancing irony or fantasy or metaphor vying for his/our attention. Tom words the way Trey musics: intuitively, ironizing the form, often unconventionally satisfying. Mood and melody first. Sometimes mood overgoes meaning (as on “The Squirming Coil”), sometimes the conceit works strongly all the way through, as on the 1993 concept album Rift, Phish’s most emotionally direct early-90s work. But the goofiness is methodical.  (i.e. hitting the “root” or bottom of the chord on the downbeat, grounding the music) 1

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Anastasio and his bandmates seek, and often achieve, total nakedness in their improvisations. That’s the emotional payoff. But since their written music and lyrics require so much buy-in, and their gameplay and head games are neverending, many listeners never make it to the deep stuff. Yet irresponsible play is essential to Phish’s musical workings. What the words to “Stash” have, instead of meaning, is music. The less cluttered lines share the main melody’s syncopated hop; the wordless chanting of the “dread beast” before the long instrumental bridge exactly replicates the potent imaginative intensity of playing D&D late at night in a carpeted basement, and unfailingly sweeps the crowd up into a frenzy; the echoing outro vocals have a strangely haunting quality. The words to songs like “Stash” function as a fifth instrument, or sixth if you count Chris Kuroda’s lighting rig, and there’s no reason to take them literally. They’re working on you just the same. They speak (nonsense) to me.

1:59 About that wordless chanting: it serves a crucial purpose in the overall design of the song. After the frantic run through the vocals, squeezing a thousand words into a handful of measures (and ducking to fit into a single octave), we burst free in both time and space—the same old verse chords now escape into what feels like the first long sustained notes of the entire song. Band and audience bellow in unison. McConnell’s sustained Hammond organ chords are comforting after all that picking plucking tinkling and tapping. As with so many •

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Phish tunes, the entire construction of “Stash” is all about tension/release cycles of varying lengths; here we let off the head of steam that’s built up through the tense instrumental intro and vocals, the whole room sounding like a commercial for a jungle-themed children’s fruit snack. But it’s a trick. We’re being set up. The verse/chanting chords move (roughly) around the circle of fourths from E-minor to A7 toward D-minor. Trained or not, Western or not, your ear will by now have settled on D as “home,” so you’ll know instinctively whenever the band gets back there: collective attunement. They chant twice, the count divides neatly into fours as rock ‘n’ roll should, then 1 2 3 4 5 6 waaaaaaiiiiit a minute …

2:17 Wrong-footing listener and dancer alike, the second chant is missing its final two bars; we never make it back to D-minor. Instead we switch suddenly to a section in A-minor, “tonicizing” A, making it the new center of our hearing, and if you don’t know chords then just listen again to how inconclusive that transition is. The underlying rhythmic foundation falls away too; what was slow easy four-beat meter is viciously murdered in front of us and suddenly this is going on: ●●

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less solid and comfortable, like a child singing murder songs in a playground Anastasio plays 2-1/2 bar phrases with a kind of minor-blues feel, still suggesting the original meter so at least some of the audience keeps itself together … … but Fish crashes five-eighth figures against that, landing hard on the least friendly offbeat in the bar, getting through four of his eyeball-whirling phrases for one of Anastasio’s, and since he’s playing odd time against the even time of the piano/bass they keep falling out of phase and snapping back. You’ve done drugs, right? If you haven’t, kids, this is what “drugs” is like. The song’s called “Stash” for heaven’s sake.

Like many of Anastasio’s instrumental compositions, “Coil” for instance, this instrumental passage feels more complicated than it is—there’s a lot going on at once, but in broad terms the band plays a simple pattern, first in one key, then another (by way of a modulation or key change, relocating the center). Tiny tension/release cycles: each time through the melody, they scatter—overlapping rhythms—then gather, hitting the downbeat with a literal crash. At a slightly longer timescale, the crazymaking series of modulations and rhythmic elaborations and complications eventually leads us back to … nice friendly D-minor and the original theme in its home key, which feels strongly like resolution and indeed fulfillment, even if (like most listeners) you completely lose track of what key you’re actually in during the bridge. The pleasure of losing track is the point (for listeners) of this instrumental side trip: this is a tension-building •

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portion of a “Stash”-length cycle. Arriving home at the next verse will release the tension. The pleasure for the players is something else— keeping track—but as we embark upon the improvisation their pleasure and ours align, because our situation is then the same: the band doesn’t know what comes next, either. Not to say they don’t have tools handy.

Hey For a couple of years in the early/mid-90s, the band regularly performed of a set of rehearsal-room improvisatory exercises for hours at a time, designed to improve their listening and realtime collaboration skills. One such exercise sped up their mimicry, the improviser’s low-hanging fruit: the four players (drummer included) would try to exactly imitate one another’s melodies, each of them taking turns leading. In another exercise, the band would slowly build two- or four-bar patterns in which each player was forbidden from playing at the same time as the others. To prevent onstage fighting about tempo, they would practice playing single notes, with one player arbitrarily altering the tempo and the other three immediately following him. (Result, after one week of exercises: no more onstage fighting about tempo.) In the most extraordinary exercise, one musician would play a repeating pattern; the second would join in with harmony, or counterpoint, or commentary. Then the third when he was ready, and the fourth. The four players could keep altering their own lines until the •

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pattern had solidified. As soon as one musician felt that his bandmates had settled on their lines, he would say “Hey” aloud, with the goal of having all four players say “Hey” at the same instant.2 Those experiments made this “Stash” possible.

4:17 After the lyrics, the template. Seed the ear. The “maybe so, maybe not” passage notifies the listener, “Here is our raw material.” The musicians’ game is to become a single moving chord. A flock. Macroorganism. Four chords serve as skeleton for the composition’s final movement, an improvisation of indeterminate length with a fixed destination: the “maybe so, maybe not” reprise. First Anastasio chords along with the lyrically and melodically ambivalent backing vocals from Gordon and McConnell, then he starts to improvise embellishments up top. It’s not quite a “solo,” though. Certainly it’s not a conventional discursive solo3 line with constrained semi-improvised accompaniment down below. In fact Anastasio’s playing a unique mix of lead and rhythm guitar here, with his solo line alternately breaking into free melodic flight and feeding back into  At a 2004 Everyone Orchestra show, Fishman walked through this “Hey” exercise, and noted that when Phish were practicing regularly, they could consistently say “Hey” in perfect unison. 3  I use “discursive solo” in this book to mean “solo statement w/ ensemble accompaniment, in which soloist’s ‘personal expression’ is main/sole focus of audience attention,” e.g. a typical guitar solo. 2

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the moving rhythmic/harmonic assemblage, conducting from within …

5:41 … so here we go, a noticeable character-change in the music as vocals fade out and we shift to the jam itself. The template chords seem to fall away too—where did B♭ go?—in favor of a series of two- and four-chord alternations still in D-minor but “centered” on A. We’re reminded of what we want (resolution to D) but are denied fulfillment for several minutes. In a superb 2011 Believer interview, Trey talked glowingly about his teacher Ted Dunbar’s System of Tonal Convergence for Improvisers, Composers and Arrangers. That book maps out the many ways that the notes of a given scale can converge on a destination chord, i.e. the dozens of “tension chords” and scales a soloist can employ which seem to want to unwind and resolve to the original harmony of a song. Here’s Anastasio: There are only three chords in music, period. Minor, major, and dominant. A dominant chord wants to go somewhere because it has a tritone in it.4 A G dominant chord [G-B-D-F] wants to go to C. That principle is physics. That’s not something that was assigned to music by theorists. … [Dunbar et al.] came up with twentyeight scales … basically substitutions for that dominant  A “tritone” is an unstable musical interval (a perfect fifth minus a half-step) that begs for resolution in classical music but is often allowed to stand on its own in jazz harmony. 4

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chord. The music is still simple: Major is happy. Minor is sad. Dominant is tense. That’s all there is.

The heart of “Stash” is that simple movement between “tension land” (the chords that aren’t D-minor) and “release land” or harmonic home, the stuff that sounds “restful” to your ears after the tension chords. But the “Stash” jam gets to a level of complexity that typical discursive solo/accompaniment passages generally can’t: while Dunbar’s book aims to keep individual solo lines interesting, Anastasio and his bandmates apply Dunbar’s principles to the entire structure of the improvisation. The original form of the song/jam exerts a perceptual “gravity” and the band’s provisional forms generate more or less tension relative to it. (Or they leave the gravity well altogether, of course, as on the ALO “Tweezer.”) Instead of a soloist always converging on a baseline chord or scale—going from constructively “wrong” (tension) to consensually “right” (release)—we have the guitar playing dual structural/ornamental roles, and the improvisatory stakes, the variable rather than fixed elements, include not just the soloist’s improvised line but the rhythmic foundation and chord progression themselves. The principle is tension/release at every scale: note to note, bar to bar, through the improvisation, across the whole composition, extending even to structure of the show, the tour, the touring year.

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On improvisatory stakes Say we’re singing. You sing a melody and I join you. Simple and easy. But maybe you alter your phrasing, your intonation, but still sing the melody more or less as written. You now differ from our source material as, say, live Madonna differs from studio Madonna: subtly and unthreateningly. Now then, I stick with our original melody while you start improvising a countermelody. I promise to stay still while you move freely. Basic stuff: solo/accompaniment. It could sound terrible, but you’ll always have a home to return to if need be. Our “improvisatory stakes” are low. Now, what if I begin to alter my rhythms, but not my notes, beneath your improvisation? The harmony might change a little as a result, the pulse might quicken or slow. We’re still close to home, but getting freer. And if I start singing different notes altogether? Now the harmony might fundamentally alter—we’re still addressing the original song (same lyrics), but several of its components have changed. We’re spontaneously reorchestrating the tune. OK. But what if you improvise new lyrics? And in response, what if I do the same? Now what’s left of the original? A pulse, maybe, a rhythmic echo. Our vocal jam has departed from its source material; we’re into completely new musical territory. Which raises a question: how do we get back, if we want to go back? Here’s another question: what if there were four of us playing very fast and loud and extremely complicated rock music, and 5,000 people had paid twenty bucks •

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apiece to see us play, and none of us were making eye contact? How would we find each other again? How good would that feel?

8:55 Which brings us to this, the first plateau, a downbeat hit so satisfying it should come with a cigarette, after what feels like an hour of deranging arpeggios (the several notes of a chord played up or down) and games of “pass the tonal center” and fine-grained dynamic shifts so subtle and smoothly continuous you’d be forgiven for not even noticing they’ve taken two minutes to move from harried mezzo forte to ejaculatory forte wail … but this is only the fourth- or fifth-biggest climax in the whole jam, believe me, I’ve half-assedly counted. How do they know when to hit? A couple of ways: first, even if you’re dancing (or tripping) too hard to count, all four musicians are standing/sitting very still onstage and paying very close attention to both meter and hypermeter: i.e. the music subdivides into four-beat bars, four-bar phrases, and longer eight- or sixteen-bar arcs. And/so as the players approach each natural zero point of the standing wave, each restorative downbeat checkpoint, they’re alert for signals not just of temporary movement within the chord sequence but for structural cues: certain sustained tension notes from the guitar, low rising lines in the bass, particular “signal cymbals” from Fish. They’re doing this without visual signals, mind you—all this messages are transmitted by the music itself. And when do you send the signal? When, say, a given tension-generating element becomes unbearable: •

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approaching the eight-minute mark, Mike can only repeat those cheeky C-to-B♭ figures against Trey’s insistent A7 chord for so long before Trey has to give way, moving to a spot further up the fret board; and if Page wanna toss out falsely cheery II-IV cadences in passing because of the four of them he’s just the Sweetest, well, Trey and Mike have to make room, abandoning their emergent duet form, moving further on … And all the while Fishman, little troll in a muumuu and Rec Specs, keeps up his best imitation of the merciless conveyor belt from Modern Times as he patiently maneuvers from metronomic hi-hat to, well, ecstatically thrashing at every single piece of his kit like an actual troll. Together with “Bouncing Around the Room,” with its unchanging single-bar drum pattern, that makes thirteen minutes of dense ensemble play to start disc one before the drummer (y’know, the sometimes-naked acid freak who plays the vacuum cleaner) finally takes the brakes off and lets loose with some actual rawk—but only for a moment, before they settle into a new energy level, a new deeper pattern.

9:57 Another peak. Count with them from 9:24—four bars of single sustained note from the guitar, four bars of cohesive circling, four more of unraveling, then a teeth-gnashing two additional bars (making fourteen, an augmented blues cycle if you like) of nearchordless noise, the structure imploding, just to throw everyone … then we arrive and every downbeat is •

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louder and more aggressive than the last, eight bars of frenzy building to another peak. Watch how the guitar outlines the chord progression still playing that Jimmy Page lick from four minutes prior, Gordon returns to root-downbeat duty to drive home the lesson, so with guitar and bass responsible for delivering the harmonic/rhythmic information the piano and drums can thrash about some more (controlling how many axes of improvisatory freedom the music has at any given moment), then suddenly the most unexpected thing of all happens—

10:26 Tension/release: Mike and Page mock-sing the closing vocals and the whole band manages that trick that eludes almost all young (and plenty of old) musicians, namely getting quiet without slowing down or sacrificing intensity, then reconstructing the roar without falling apart. This is the first break in what’s been a monotonic increase in volume, density, and aggressiveness. Remember that the question of when, how, and how often—and indeed whether—to bring the song to climax is left open to the four musicians on the night. Vocals now, first haunting, then hysterical. In terms of the whole song’s odd sinusoidal coherence-curve we’re in a trough here, the form momentarily receding; but as long as that curve is continuous and the seams between sections don’t show, the crowd can slide across it with the players, and even the odd intrusion or decoherence will make emotional sense, so long as everyone’s accepted the premises of the work. •

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The harmony gets lost for a sec, unplanned but with purpose, hints of the dominant chord (A7 and variants/ extensions) at first in the guitar. This is generative dissonance: the last form before the fog is the dominant chord, with its natural directionality (in this context A7, as the dominant, leans hard toward the D-minor chord that grounds the whole song), so even when band and crowd start to make going-loudly-crazy sounds, the noise continues to “mean” A7, though of course it also means noise; this is a rock concert, after all. The implied tonality hyperextends like a bum knee and …

11:33 … snaps back into place for the final plateau, the crowd by this point perhaps wondering how much more of this they can take, and the musicians naturally fall into formation: guitar at the dominant, bass going ii-V to signal release, piano oscillating around a G-C♯ tritone,5 Fish’s drums providing a consistent tempo but speeding up the rhythmic “feel” each bar (just count the beats between the big drum hits).

11:53 Guitar plays “beast” bridge melody, Mike/Page sing  Every major scale contains only one unstable tritone. When you starting adding “out” or non-scale tones, thickening the harmonic material of the piece, you create additional tritones and semitones (half-steps)—intervals with strong harmonic implications, movementtendencies, related to their dissonance. 5

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outro vocals, bass firmly asserts root of each chord, straightforward hi-hat beneath. Home. The piano’s the only agitated ensemble element. The closing recapitulates the tune’s several source materials, binding the many parts into a whole. Final note at 12:15. No cymbal crash or applausemilking sustain; it just ends quietly, on a dime. The crowd bursts like a pinpricked balloon. Then track 3, “Gumbo,” modulates up a half-step (semitone) and slows to a cool midtempo drag, and you better believe this is the next movement of a longer form of which the multipart “Stash” is itself a single unified element.

Summary judgment You’re right to hear this “Stash” as somewhat schematic in approach. With the exception of a brief passage at 10:26 we’re charging uphill without a break for seven straight improvised minutes, and even that momentary relapse is meant to further intensify the climactic resolution(s). This isn’t the intuitive protean wandering of the Dead, nor the expressive sonic space of electric Miles, nor true Free improv where entropic collapse is part of the artist/listener contract—it’s strongly intentioned improvisation, even if the specific intention arose spontaneously on the night. With “Stash,” as with the other long tunes on ALO, Phish stake out a private idiom characterized by uniquely high improvisatory stakes. Because their ensemble movement between improvisatory episodes is unusually coherent, and the conventional “lead” player’s role is •

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architectural and coloristic rather than solo-expressive, the whole quartet can be playing these divergence/convergence games in realtime, all four players willfully playing against the form according to momentary impulses, knowing that there isn’t a single determining solo melody which the other three need to support. Driven by a goal, but not always at it—and unlike in purely Free playing, incoherent by default, these jams can’t lead to breakdown without feeling like a letdown. Hence “stakes.” There’s not much individual flash to anyone’s work here, only collective improvisatory impulse. Despite varying widely from night to night (Phish have played it live nearly 400 times since 1990), “Stash” is a composition with a coherent identity and a concrete purpose: a fixed set of musical problems to solve, whose solution varies from night to night within conventional expectations. The first eleven minutes of this track are the sound of a fist clenching, and at 11:04 it finally lets fly with a great big roundhouse to the—well, the “soul,” I guess. A metaphorical roundhouse. We’re nonviolent here. Do any of the band’s inspirations have a jam like this “Stash” in their catalogues? As precisely as the members of Phish can mimic the bands that influence them, this odd extended form—with the ensemble moving as “one big chord”6 through these harmonic and rhythmic loop-de-loops and jazz-math variations—belongs only to them. And it has a purpose. To borrow a wise fellow’s phrase, it’s one of several techniques of ecstasy employed throughout the album.  (the band’s oft-repeated phrase for their initial improvisatory goal of extending the written composition without soloing) 6

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There’s aspects of the Grateful Dead that I loved. There’s aspects of Boston that I loved! But that’s who I am … I am a child of the 70s, and that’s kind of the point, with people trying to … “Oh, I’m going to be the next Jimi Hendrix, I’m going to be the next Jerry Garcia.” You’re not! You’re twenty years younger, you didn’t grow up listening to Del McCroury, you didn’t grow up listening to blues … in eighth grade I was in New Jersey, going to the mall, and listening to what was on at the mall. And then I had to seek out some kind of depth. The suburban white kid is part of history whether you like it or not—part of American music history. We are, take it or leave it. (Anastasio, quoted in Todd Philips’s documentary film Bittersweet Motel) I feel like, if dorks ruled the world it would be a better place. (Anonymous fan, ibid.) That was so funky it was almost as good as James Brown on his worst night. (Anastasio describing a summer 1997 funk jam, ibid.) •

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I like to see you boogie My first show, Niagara Falls, December 1995. My first concert ever (!). First the visual: troll-drummer in a dress, bassist in purple vinyl trousers sporting “rock’s last shag,” balding piano geek with pinched tenor, and the bandleader—Jerry-level genius, I’d heard—rail-thin, rocking Zubaz pants and a baggy t-shirt. Colored lights swirled in time to the music.1 Air thick with weed and cigarette smoke. The band looked like A/V club troglodytes. Then the music: guilelessly nerdy (dumb?) lyrics of indeterminate irony level, parlor tricks like the “secret language” (specific phrases triggering band/ audience activity like off-key humming, falling down in place, yelling “d’oh”), ten-minute improvisations that sure sounded to me like fractured guitar solos because I couldn’t yet follow ensemble improv, “blues” cliché deployed for laughs, clunky “dance” grooves, two barbershop tunes(!), note-perfect bluegrass raveups, 70s glam-prog covers like Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” … … and then of course there were the fans. Needless to say, not everyone at the show matches the popular image. And even if they all did, that’s OK— dudebros and trustafarians are joy-deserving people too, and band and fans alike try to keep a sense of humor about it all. (One of Trey’s earliest Phish songs is the vengefully autobiographical “Prep School Hippie.”) There’s  Lighting director Chris Kuroda is the unheralded fifth member of the group; indeed, they used to make him come to band practice to learn the songs. His intoxicating light show is improvised every night along with the music, at times driving the musicians to new spaces and moods, and I can’t imagine the band’s shows without his art. 1

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nothing wrong with dancing like no one’s watching— it’s what college is for—and you can’t blame folks for dressing in hippie drag and letting their hair down. It feels really, really good. But it makes no difference whether the pop image of Phish or their fans is accurate or not. The punchlines have nothing to do with Phish and little to do with their fans. They reflect deeper anxieties.

Syncretismimicry Along with the “next Grateful Dead” and “self-indulgent noodling” labels, the line on Phish is that they’re unequivocally the whitest band in the world, cf. the “trustafarian” stereotype: what’s lamer than a white lacrosse player in dreads pulling his Lexus up to Great Woods for the Phish show? As a fan, you hear a lot of dumb namecalling along these lines—without anyone spelling out what “whitest” is supposed to mean. Applied to the band, it means both “having a largely white audience” and “inauthentic”—the former correct, the latter a tricky word on the best of days and all but useless when it comes to cultural inheritance. Phish are an often great, unfailingly correct cover band. They take a while to grow into covers, which invariably start out skillful and accurate but heavy with the weight of their source material. Phish’s full Halloween performances of Quadrophenia and Remain in Light got at what’s great about those albums, but not beyond—they’re tributes and celebrations, however pleasurable, rather than reinterpretations. Their barbershop and bluegrass tunes are enjoyable student work. Few Phish covers transform •

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their source material, except in the jamming. It’s a little strange that a band so free and fluent in its collective improvisation can be so fastidious when working with others’ material. Their ability to recreate other artists’ work onstage is rightly a point of pride, but it takes them a while to personalize their covers—though when they find an improvisatory route through someone else’s tune, they can steal it away, as with the Stones’ “Loving Cup.”2 Phish’s early originals shared this quality of selfconscious mimicry, long since overcome. The closest they come to “Latin” grooves, for instance, are the crossrhythms of “Taste,”3 the montuno break in the middle of “Punch You in the Eye,” and the calypso drumbeat to the Gamehendge track “The Lizards”; each has a whiff of the Gifted & Talented program about it, though the ingeniously constructed “Taste” soars beyond its inspirations. They have their Metheny-ish songs including “YEM” and “Coil,” their Zappa-esque comic prog tunes (“Reba,” “Dinner and a Movie,” the novelty4 “Buffalo Bill”) and their obligatory Beatles-y and Genesis-like songs. The best of this work is so strongly colored with the band’s personalities that it breathes on its own, but much of their catalogue, especially their early work, feels like a cook’s tour of musical genres.  Vocals are something of a problem: the members of Phish have charming, expressive, technically limited voices unsuited to tunes like TV on the Radio’s “Golden Age” or The Who’s “Drowned”—two songs the band otherwise crushes. 3  (the Billy Breathes version lacks the modal outro jam; the 12/30/97 version will melt your eyeballs) 4  “Buffalo Bill” is a bit of buggery-as-punchline juvenilia set to the catchiest singalong music imaginable. 2

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Half-digested source material: derivative appropriation. What’s whiter than that? But I don’t think “appropriation,” with its connotations of predation and stealing credit, quite catches the flavor of Phish’s doggedly DIY creative practice. Appropriators steal and exploit without ever getting caught up in the bliss of the material they’re stealing. That isn’t this. I think the word we want is syncretism—a weird term for the “whitest XYZ on earth,” but bear with me … The artists that inspire me tend to be syncretists: they take up cultural forms idiosyncratically, carelessly, for private reasons, and reform their practices around them without regard for coherence. (Underlying oneness …) They simply expect to find themselves in an Other’s work. With a tune like “Gumbo,” it’s easy to ding Anastasio for putting a “funky” Nawlins groove to Fishman’s rhythmic nonsense lyrics, throwing in that horn outro … it comes off as dress-up even to me, especially without a long improvisation within which to fully inhabit the material. But Anastasio wrote the tune as a surprise for Fish, who’d written the lyrics in a notebook, which Trey grabbed as a kind of challenge; the groove is already in the words— and in the band. No choice, really. This is willful naiveté as creative strategy. In the context of the band’s early development, as a group of four weird twentysomethings embracing psychotropic lunacy in every aspect of their lives,5 it makes no sense to approach the music as “responding to” a genre or  Trey and Fish especially have gotten a lot of creative mileage out of drugs. That said, the deleterious effects of stupid late-90s party drugs on both band and scene are covered at length in Puterbaugh’s biography. 5

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style; if there’s self-consciousness to the track, well, the band’s creative method is designed to overcome that, in performance. (Seek out a long late-90s “Gumbo” to hear the band reconceive their relationship to groove in realtime.) The style is captured en passant. “Gumbo” is innocent delirium, and if it’s clunky and a bit boring it’s not for lack of care or trying; Phish just weren’t very funky in 1994. There’s an hourlong 2004 VH1 special that follows Trey and Dave Matthews to Senegal to play with the extraordinary Afro-Cuban band Orchestra Baobab. Anastasio is manic for presumably pharmacological reasons, but he’s also more articulate than (drunk?) Matthews, not to mention a virtuosic perfectionist where Matthews is (only!) an intuitive savant. The video’s arc is standard: Anastasio and Matthews keep talking about how they absolutely don’t deserve to share a stage or screen with these masters, but music unites them, &c., &c., &c. The musicians’ joy in one another’s presence is palpable: while Baobab soundchecks, Anastasio leans over to Matthews in obvious shock and admiration and whispers, “This is the cleanest music I’ve ever heard in my life.” (It’s telling that Anastasio responds first to their precision.) Then Trey and Dave are “unexpectedly” asked during rehearsal to join Baobab onstage at a homecoming show in Senegal. Anastasio expresses sincere terror and humility, then offers three choices: an acoustic duet with Matthews, not playing at all (his preferred choice, it seems), or … “Bouncing Around the Room.” It may seem the height of arrogance to ask a great Senegalese band to play your goofy miniature at their concert—especially if you’re a prog-rocker from •

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Jersey and your tune borrows a Senegalese groove. But the following scene reveals something lovely about Anastasio: the instant they agree to play “Bouncing,” his expression shifts from Manic Prodigy to General Patton, and he strides to the center of the stage to walk the band through their parts in a manner anything but childlike (unless that child is maybe Ender Wiggin). By the time they get it together, he’s drenched in sweat, and he puts his guitar down to dance around to the band’s effortlessly tightening groove. And he looks like a baby universe being born—reminding me (for a variety of reasons, not least the appearance of the word “baby” in the previous clause) of David Lynch, who said his greatest happiness when making Eraserhead was the exhilaration he felt standing in the set of Mr.  and Mrs.  X’s apartment and realizing that what he had pictured in his mind had been exactly recreated. (Sean French, “The Heart of the Cavern”)

A hell of a lot of courageous art gets dismissed as “weirdness for its own sake.” But why else make art, if not for its own sake? The corny VH1 special reveals that Anastasio’s relationship to his source musics goes deep … He treats his musical forerunners with great reverence, while treating the music they’ve left to him with irreverence. You hear the same dynamic in Phish’s approach to covers: honor the past, then—when the jamming starts—spend your inheritance foolishly.

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Seeking a loose grouping around “whiteness” What’s “Bouncing Around the Room” doing on A Live One? Of all the tracks it’s the one that differs least from its studio version, and it was only a momentary collegeradio mini-hit—what function is it serving here? For that matter, why are “Gumbo” (an almost-funky gag song) and “Montana” there too, other than the fact that ALO was their first release anywhere? Compared to Phish’s actual live shows, which combine jukebox-style first sets containing one or two longer improvisations with flowing, improv-heavy second sets, A Live One is a touch disjointed. This happens all the time with live albums—if they’re drawn from throughout an entire tour they’re going to vary energetically, sonically, emotionally from track to track, whereas on a given night the intensity/time curve of an individual tune can be overridden by the set-long flow. Live at the Apollo hits harder than Frampton Comes Alive! partly because JB’s album feels like a night (of sex) while Frampton’s feels like a simulated night (of not-sex). A Live One belongs more to the latter tradition: the first disc is a grab bag of intense jams on chord changes (“Stash,” “Chalk Dust,” “Slave”) and stylish miniatures (“Gumbo,” “Bouncing,” the fragment “Montana”), plus the self-consciously epic “YEM,” the archetypal Phish song and the one song that obviously had to go on the live album;6 disc two feels kind of like a second set, but (to me) lacks the ineffable continuity and flow that characterize Phish’s super-sized  The ALO “YEM” runs to twice the studio cut’s length, incorporating additional improvised movements. 6

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closing sets. A Live One resembles a Phish show, but a fan would know right away that it isn’t one. I think of “Bouncing,” “Gumbo,” and “Montana” as aspirational tracks in a sense, representing the band’s most direct-’til-then engagement with what Ethan Iverson calls the African-derived “academy of rhythm.” Those tracks connect to the odd moment during “Simple” when Anastasio follows the “we play bebop” lyric with, of all things, a cocky two-bar blues lick: behind ALO’s precocious neoclassicism and self-conscious genre play there’s another music taking form, which foregrounds rhythmic pulse and bodily pleasure. Yeah, “Gumbo” sounds like parody, “Simple” is a nice children’s tune, and if you didn’t know “Bouncing” was Afro-chamber-pop you’d be forgiven for thinking it was kids’ music too … nervy, self-conscious. At times giggly. But you can precisely know the speed of the thing or its position—not both. This music depicts a relationship in progress. A few months after ALO came out, Phish would start work on their most focused (and best) album, 47 minutes of rustic psychedelia called Billy Breathes— during which time Anastasio also released a free jazz album called Surrender to the Air he’d made in two days with guys like Bob Gullotti, Marc Ribot, Marshall Allen of Sun Ra’s Arkestra (a key Phish forerunner): hitters all, and the album’s a compelling listen, carefully shaped into a suite of several distinct, fully improvised movements. On Halloween 1996 Phish’d finally commit body and soul to their dance-pop (which is to say African (-American)) inheritance by covering Talking Heads’ •

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postpunk masterpiece of ironic/ecstatic Afroweird appropriation Remain in Light (“the world moves on a woman’s hips / the world moves and it swivels and bops”) in concert in Atlanta. Praise Jesus, though remember too that Talking Heads were white-on-white, and basically got it together funkwise by hiring the blackest imaginable backing band for the tour, Bernie Worrell himself on keys for heaven’s sake. In other words, Phish’s musical inheritance is complicated like everyone’s, and they respond to it in complicated ways, like everyone does. The Mwandishi group’s cosmic erotic odd-meter Afropsych fusion wouldn’t exist without Brubeck/Morello’s politely tentative metrical experiments on 1959’s Time Out; and Brubeck’s dramatic architectonic solos on, e.g. “Three to Get Ready” and “Blue Rondo a la Turk” suggest a complex approach to spontaneous arrangement that inspired black geniuses like Cecil Taylor … Phish seem to be pulled in every direction by conflicting impulses: to play “Bouncing Around the Room” in Senegal, say, or to get funky by covering not the Meters or Sly Stone but David Byrne, to do “jazz” things in a “rock” idiom, to layer a Metheny melody over a Latin drumbeat with lyrics about a demon heroin-metaphor doll, and to make a 30-minute acid-barroom-carnivalesque-ADHD-afflicted-boys’weird-adventure song the centerpiece of a disc otherwise taken up by music of open-hearted welcome. But the whole arc of Phish’s career and the mismatched-limbs quality of A Live One make perfect sense if you accept that these are all one impulse, manifesting one way one night and another way the next, or the next minute. •

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There’s an unfashionable idea for you: Phish’s almost certainly quixotic utopian belief in the moral necessity, not to mention the sheer untapped creative voltage, of radical democracy, onstage in the improvisatory moment and throughout the band/fan community and everywhere always.

“You’ll never get him out of Montana. He’s a digger.” So anyway why is “Montana” on A Live One? Why would this most fastidious of “jam bands” caulk this exhaustive, exhausting double LP with a context-free fragment of sex-canyon atmospherics that bears no resemblance at all to the song it emerged from? Well: “Montana” is short and the disc had room for it. And “Stash” into “YEM” would wear your ears out. Plus, hardcore fans would know, even then, that “Montana” came from sixteen minutes deep in the massive Bozeman “Tweezer”; esotericism is its own reward. (The track’s title caused consternation when the album came out— was it a brand new track? A secret gig? An outtake?) But funk’s rhythm language was in them even then— music to which the band, like every American band that ever existed, had a complicated relationship. “Whiteness” doesn’t cover it. I bet they worried about “Montana” less in 1995 than I did writing this in 2015. It just … came up. Funk, however inexpert it may have been at the time, was part of their identity—it’s a part of every American’s, first- or second-hand. Phish’s music is about time, process, movement. The style of “Montana” wasn’t yet a comfortable destination •

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for the band; but then, in evolution by natural selection there’s no such thing as “destination.” I imagine “Montana” is there, finally, for no reason more complicated than this: it sounded like them. It felt like who they were. We should consider the possibility that this is actually a sophisticated, complex motive for creative work; that it’s a syncretic impulse, guileless though the band couldn’t have heavier forebrains if they got them bronzed; and that this imaginative approach can be both self-conscious and un-, childlike and expert, like any other magical practice.

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By the end [of “Stagnation”], Genesis has constructed an entire world—an alternate reality that I could see in my head. That’s the power of the best music. (Trey’s Genesis speech) … [A Live One] is where they show off their base-building specialties, e.g. [from the album sticker] “a mind-blowing 35-minute version of ‘Tweezer’”—which is actually only 31, praise God, and guess what else they got wrong? (Robert Christgau, Village Voice “Turkey Shoot,” 28 November 1995)

Go ahead and put on the ALO “Tweezer” if you have it. If you don’t own the album, go buy it (it’s good) or download the track from phish.in or phishtracks.com—it’s from the 11/2/94 show in Bangor. It’s a half-hour long. This chapter’s shorter. The numbers will make sense in a couple of pages.

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Shock 1. Psychedelia: minds, not drugs. Magic: will, not spells. Writing: psychotropism, not information. Music: desire, not sound. Ideas: bonds, not atoms. 2. “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.” Substitute psychotropism (“mind-changing,” i.e. “learning”(!)) in general for drugs, and art for music, and you have a satisfactory account of the “creative” process. Remember that while psychotropism is at one level an electrochemical/ hormonal process, it needn’t be directly chemically controlled or stimulated. There are plenty of ways to change your mind. Listening to rock music, for one. Or to me. 3. Now: why would you do such a thing. 4. You wouldn’t call They Might Be Giants a “psychedelic” band. Weird yes, psych no. But taken as a whole, an album like Apollo 18 is a powerfully immersive experience of a coherent foreign consciousness. Plenty of art jolts you temporarily into a new state—a decidedly foreign expectation or stance. That’s art’s aim, really: to want (in) a new way. But to get you to a new world and then leave you there, to imbue you with an adopted time-sense and an unfamiliar way of feeling through space, that’s a special thing. Dangerous even. Though no one’s ever called TMBG or Phish “dangerous.” They’re the most benign thing in the world, right? Everybody says so. 5. Late-90s Phish, with its extended ambient/textural explorations and genetic-algorithmic minimalist •

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“cow funk” grooves,1 is ideal background music— perfect for writing to. The “Tweezer” on A Live One is impossible for me to work to, alas for this particular project. At roughly the 6:45 mark Anastasio antagonizes the form by waggling his tritone in everyone’s face, and McConnell (who seemed like such a nice boy!) echoes Trey’s line in the piano’s upper register. The drumbeat and bassline then break down the same way, and though the groove steadies itself a minute later, that intrusive moment of selfconsciousness and others like it keep me from “zoning out” to the music. That moment doesn’t come out “organically,” it’s not a continuous change from the track’s source groove. I share the music’s logic, listening as it tells me to, even subconsciously, where the action is; and then at 6:45, Anastasio antagonizes … something. The groove. The style. Us. 6. Phish have inspired several (mostly terrible) jambands. But I see their DNA in groups like Wilco and Animal Collective—bands with an interest in inducing/replicating certain mindstates, in building community through the music, and in achieving a sort of ecstasy that starts with heady analytical intellection. “Resort to dialectical algebra,” &c. 7. I thought about calling this book Rapture of the Nerds, but I don’t get to choose the title. Plus that one’s taken.  (“cow funk” being the gently deprecatory fan term for Phish’s sometimes ridiculous take on sexy dance music, “genetic-algorithmic” in the sense that it evolves toward robustness without any premade plan, according to a psychedelic-aesthetic fitness function) 1

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8. “Psychedelia” is a big tent. It seems impossible that Beefheart’s “Dachau Blues” could be intended for consumption by the same species as Dark Side of the Moon but it seems the Captain simply heard music that way. At times when listening to the Dead (whom I love), I hear a band every bit as happily lost in their music as the audience. Their music wasn’t an attempt on the listener’s inner life, like Zappa’s, nor an earnest attempt to communicate in an alien language like Beefheart’s. They tended toward protoplasm. Zappa’s smile never reached his eyes. 9. Phish split the difference, I think. They laugh with you, at themselves. Unimpressive by design. And then the skies open.

Persuade 10. Systemic imaginary: success in games like SimCity and Magic: The Gathering comes from “thinking like a system,” from shedding sentimental attachments to individual tokens/moves and instead ruthlessly optimizing resource flow. “German-style” tabletop games like Puerto Rico and Dominion have this quality too: the better you’re doing, the more you feel like you have direct access to the underlying mathematics of play. To the engine, you might say. 11. Improvisatory immersion is like that: programmatic consciousness shift. Becoming (part of) a larger mind. 12. Creative anticipation. The better you know the band’s •

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musical language and the more clearly you perceive the fields of force (harmonic, rhythmic, interpersonal, emotional, narrative) shot through the players and the playing, the more you might find yourself thinking you’re able to predict the band’s moves—or even cause them. OK yes that’s stoner logic, but when improvising musicians speak, they’re always saying it’s so: the audience is part of the improvisation in a way that goes beyond spectatorship. Unwittingly they (you) (we) begin to communicate desire through a tilt of the head, subtle shift in posture, furtive eye movements, noise that seems to come through rather than from you … the deeper you get, the more your own need is incorporated into the desire-map encoded in the music itself. The players really are listening to the movement of your body; your body really is preparing you to receive the next movement of/in/by/with the music. Dance is knowledge. 13. One meaning of the music is the acquisition of such knowledge. A benign change of mind, i.e. “psycho-” (ahem) “-tropism.” 14. Our narrativizing impulse shapes our listening. Even when conscious thought dissipates, we hear and listen for (ir)resolution: the deferred downbeat, the answering cadence, repetition, synthesis. Nature abhors a gradient; harmonic movement’s a compulsion. We perceive tension/release cycles at every scale. Our personalities are themselves stories and we try to remake the world in our image: that’s why it’s so hard to deal with music that behaves as badly as this version of “Tweezer.” It disorders our listening-selves. •

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15. Walter Murch tells Radiolab a story about cataloguing records at a radio station, listening to nothing but Gregorian chant all day for two weeks. Heading to the control booth he was confronted by a “cacophony,” an atonal noise nightmare. He howled: since when do we play this wild stuff?! The DJ held up the LP sleeve. It was Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. In two weeks Murch had lost the ability to process music we now think of as polite. 16. In this “Tweezer,” that process of self-reprogramming is less comprehensive but works much more quickly. The improvisatory past isn’t a binding contract, as it is with most programmed (composed) music. We may presume mutability, for a time. 17. And maybe part of the appeal of pop music is that it doesn’t have a past: in three minutes you won’t go far enough to forget where you came from. Duration is a big part of the psych-rock experience; or maybe I mean scope. How much world fits inside.

Ignite 18. Two nights before playing this “Tweezer,” Phish covered The Beatles (the “White Album”) in its entirety, as a musical Halloween costume. The Bangor show was their first concert since Halloween; that night’s “Tweezer” was one of the longest singlesong improvisations they’d ever played onstage. The song had only run to twenty-plus minutes once before; for the two-month period starting with this Bangor show, “Tweezer” jams would average •

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twenty minutes. In November 1994 the song would keep exploring new spaces, culminating in an extraordinarily cohesive forty-five-minute version in Bozeman, MT on the 28th. “Montana” is a two-minute fragment drawn from that performance. 19. Phish’s Fall 1994 tour—Maine to California, forty-six shows in two months—saw the band deliberately pushing certain improvisations out to extreme lengths. Many fan/collectors seek out long jams first (I sure did, when I was starting out). Three stages of understanding this behavior: (1) makes sense, more is better; (2) don’t be silly, more is just more; (3) aah, but for such impatient musicians as 1994 Phish it turns out that more inevitably means different. Far from the equilibrium of the songform, the band would instinctively self-organize into vignettes; and the genre or style of each improvisatory episode, its static identity, matters less to band and fans alike than the integrity (“authenticity”?) of the process that brings it about: the evolutionary logic. 20. Listen to how the repeated guitar figure at 7:46, which suggests no particular home key, is answered by smooth drums with no kickdrum on the downbeat—Fishman leaves bar-line demarcation to Page’s left hand, supports the emerging pattern without yet declaring a fixed identity. Gordon plays a dissonant upper-register bassline half a step off the guitar. Tension land. And when at 8:12 Trey suggests a key change, Mike and Page are ready with a simple stepwise movement to ratify the transformation. Release land. This is the new normal, and Trey immediately perturbs the ensemble •

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formation—major? minor?—with the others seeming to follow. Yet at 8:54 the two chording players (Page and Trey) collapse to Gordon’s bassline. And twenty seconds later it’s Fishman who adjourns the meeting by breaking down the simple four-by-four meter, with the guitar chasing him. 21. Charles Fort: “… if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” 22. On the same tour Phish also brought the Reverend Jeff Mosier of Aquarium Rescue Unit on the road for a week to tutor them in bluegrass, onstage and in the practice room. As their thoroughly modern electric music grew murkier and less reliant on information from the songs themselves, they earned degrees in a traditional acoustic form that prizes clarity and cohesion—not to mention the complex expressivity of human voice and breath. 23. Dates, ratings, rankings, and setlist compendia give Phish fans a narrative structure within which to make sense of the amorphous concert experience. The numbers are mileposts: they turn a mess into a map, making it easier to attend momentarily to a single piece of the whole. If you took them away, the map might look frighteningly like the thing (or the mind) the map is a map of … 24. The twenty-seventh minute of this “Tweezer” returns the band to blues-anthemic “classic rock” in A, after a journey through a variety of key signatures and modes. Eerily warped carnival music gives way •

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to a passage that sounds an awful lot like the intro to The Who’s “Sparks” (which Phish used to cover in those days), and once the home key of “Tweezer” is reasserted, the band lets loose. Homecomings are that way. You can sense what’s coming even before the “Tweezer” head (theme) reappears: the open-A guitar chord has an unmistakable sound. Immediately familiar. Yet several parts of the “Tweezer” jam touch on that A-major without sounding so satisfying—an earlier climax in the twentieth minute centers on A too, but sounds provisional, unfinished. So how do you know it’s over when A-blues is reasserted? Partly through overt cueing: Anastasio sustains those big chords at 28:40 so his bandmates know when to yank on the reins, and they count that trusty two/four/ eight-bar hypermeter together to make finding a shared downbeat easier. But there are subtle in-jokes happening too: during the climactic jam segment the band improvises on an emergent progression reminiscent of Anastasio’s three-minute “Tweezer Reprise”; then, as if phase-shifting from a structuredefying illogic to a referential logic, they recreate the form of the closing jam from “David Bowie,” one of their signature long improvisations from Junta. You know they’re/we’re leaving the dreamworld when the hypnagogic, “falling asleep” logics of the early jam—deformations, tritone insertions, wordless vocalizations, weirdening rhythmic pulse— surrender to (are mirrored by) a hypnopompic ascent into waking consciousness: rationality, denotation. 25. Rise and shine. 26. “Simple” follows “Tweezer” on ALO. Its lyrics •

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include “We’ve got it simple … cymbals are grand.” Anastasio relentlessly repeats what Fishman, in The Phish Book, calls the best of Trey’s “mighty arsenal of riffs.” The song is titled appropriately. 27. That track pairing is the musical equivalent of Trillian shutting down the Infinite Improbability Drive and telling Arthur and Ford, “We have normality. I repeat, we have normality … Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.” 28. It’s poisonous to think that dreaming produces “altered” states, rather than alternate ones. Not diminished: parallel. 29. Any music can take you away if it catches you at the right moment, but “psychedelia” tends/aims to simultaneously replace both your world and your self. The surroundings become stranger, and so do you. It has the quality that it can’t be “made sense of” in a state of conventional consciousness. Remember that the way to fly is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Usually all it takes is a well-timed distraction—to be “off in another world,” as the saying goes. 30. “Psych-rock”: boring genre, fascinating emergent property. An accident, not always happy. The sense of “unity” that good art seems to possess is unity of vision, maintained by constraining the problem space or method and freeing its results. The best stuff always gets away from you (your genre, style, plans, precedents). Lots and lots of interesting art gets dismissed as “pretentious” despite its makers’ earnest pursuit of a method whose outcome they have no way of knowing. Zappa, Crimson, Yes, (some) Floyd, •

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Genesis: work growing world-sized, pummeled for self-indulgence. What Bill Martin has called prog’s “popular avant-garde” made space for immersive longform music that not only spoke fluent rock ‘n’ roll but could carry on a conversation in other languages entirely. 31. But privileged bilingualism = pretension, everyone knows that. Phish are often called a pretentious band; I submit that sitting down and doing the damn work with no idea whether it’ll pay off is the exact opposite of pretension … and (for their first fifteenish years) Phish worked as hard at their craft as any musicians ever have, on behalf of a shared dream. 32. You can be taken to another planet by a single drummer. That’s deeply valuable in itself, and anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of musical transformation lives in an invisible hell. Virtuosity gives the artist (and so the audience) a wider list of planets to choose from. 33. None of this is to say this “Tweezer” is a good jam. I don’t know. Decide for yourself: do Page’s repeated use of beat→offbeat shifts to speed up the implied rhythm, or Fishman’s aggressive recurrence to an uptempo (almost bluegrassy) beat during noise passages, make the middle ten-ish minutes repetitious, coherent, simplistic, committed, repetitious, patient, intuitive, self-conscious, “narrative,” boring? Or several/all of those things? Is it disappointing to hear the band’s work as work, to notice the mechanisms of variation and elaboration? Or does that sort of thing deepen your personal engagement with the musicians? The jam moves from harmonic/ •

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rhythmic/dynamic complication to exultation over the half-hour; do you ever feel that way doing, say, the dishes? Jogging? In bed? At work? Can you recognize the isomorphism between those transformations of consciousness and this musical transformation as the point of the band’s entire project—indeed, as sufficient reason for making works of art as bulky as A Live One? Putting aside any question of taste or aesthetic judgment, can you entertain the idea that a sufficiently detailed honest rendering of someone else’s private paracosm is intrinsically valuable? And would you entertain too the possibility that psychotropism by touch, by shared movement, by the revelation of benign intention through acts of creative imagination—giving away your world—is one form that love takes?2 34. The grammar of comparative quality is hard to apply to experiments like the ALO “Tweezer”; fun rock ‘n’ roll isn’t the (whole) point. What the band set out to do here, I think, was fly until they ran out of gas, then crash into the sea if need be and hope the airbags worked. And they did; and they did. That experience is intrinsically valuable and meaningful. For all the shapes the music takes, the unifying feature of the whole half-hour of “Tweezer,” for me, is oscillation between terror at not knowing what the (group)mind is becoming, and joy in finding out. 35. When I submit to the dream-logic of this music I’m transformed. I believe that submission as such, by  Art is technology that, among other functions, extends the effective range of love and empathy. 2

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audience and players alike, is the essential element of this transformation. And I believe too that a spirit of generosity, of generative complexity—“making available at the level of reason … what will ultimately contradict reason”—can be discerned in the music, in the unusual circumstances of its making. I’m certain that the thousands of us who’ve been borne up by these performances have been responding to something that the music marks, which isn’t coterminous with the music itself, the sound on the disc. 36. The act of transformation is the work. The music is its echo.

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Long Time

The essential Phish song, the one they’ve played most in concert—track five disc one of A Live One—is “You Enjoy Myself,” a multipart epic (in the old sense: a catalogue of forms) written in 1985. One minute of the song appeared on the band’s “White Tape” demo, arranged for overdubbed/processed a cappella voices, and the whole tune turned up on Junta a few years later, clean and clear, clocking in at less than ten minutes despite dragging the tempo a bit. In concert, “YEM” seldom runs less than twenty minutes, has stretched to forty, and is a characteristically Phishlike hybrid creature: both open-ended improvisatory vehicle and through-written goal-directed composition, demanding a high level of ensemble focus and attention to the extended form. Like “Stash” and “Slave” on ALO, “YEM” is an extended composition whose major portion is improvised; that improvisation is expected to support the form, to conserve momentum, while also floating free of the source material. With its seven improvised passages (movements?), “YEM” naturally varies more from version to version than “Slave,” in which the musicians primarily elaborate on •

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a chord progression, but less than “Stash,” in which the players work together to antagonize a “home” key and defer resolution indefinitely. But all three tracks invite the ensemble to improvise not just the timing of transitions but their rhythmic/melodic/harmonic content. I have to stress the complexity of the improvisatory task they’re undertaking here: building new provisional local forms within their jams, while combining multiple improvisations to construct large-scale forms, with a goal of “composing in the moment”—kind of a daffy way to go about the job of playing rock music for crowds of stoned college kids, frankly. You can hear these distinct but contiguous improvisatory episodes clearly on “Tweezer,” but the same dynamic is more subtly apparent in “YEM” and “Hood” and “Stash.” Compositions like “YEM” work the way Phish’s long improvisations do, partly because Anastasio’s early compositional process had an improvisatory, piecemeal character, and partly because much of their runtimes consist of jamming. Look at “YEM”’s structure: composed opening > ambient improv1 > piano solo on changes > transitional unison > bass solo > written (waltz) w/ embellishment > written (funk-rock) > solo guitar fills > repeat funk/guitar > unison crescendo > vocals/  This section, missing from the Junta version, starts at 1:18 on A Live One (a focused, representative “YEM” performance). Its “form” is nothing more than a destination chord; as long as they come back to G-major, the band can wander as far afield as they like. See the 11/2/98 version for a beautiful extended ambient voyage that serves as prelude to the band’s Dark Side of the Moon cover. 1

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funk (improv but w/patterned rhythmic movement) > keys solo (Trey/Mike on trampolines)2 > guitar-led jam crescendo > bass/drums duet > vocal jam.

The brief solos and the longer group improvisations are part of the architecture of the piece, just like the written passages. While the musicians work through one movement aware of what comes next, they’re free to go outside of its structure, to rearrange the tune at the most basic level—if the impulse strikes enough of the band members at once, they can even abandon “YEM” altogether. The version on A Live One is relatively contained despite its twenty-minute runtime; contours emerge spontaneously but the long line of the tune itself is preserved. There are precedents for this approach to longform construction; several jazz composers have turned improvisation into an architectural element, both brick and mortar, so to speak—Mingus maybe most successfully. But it’s one thing to link tunes into a medley, quite another for one player to decide in the middle of an improvisation that the emergent musical assemblage suggests another song entirely, and initiate a transition without telling the rest of the band, expecting them to respond instantly. That’s the mutability level of the long tracks on A Live One—and all four members of the band are empowered   At this point in the song, Mike and Trey do a synchronized trampoline dance, obviously. Mike signals turns with little bass figures: that’s why the crowd suddenly starts cheering at 8:37 and 8:53 in the ALO “YEM.” 2

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to make those changes, not just the guitarist. The ambient passage in “YEM” has no lead voice; the written transition into the piano solo begins by consensus, not signal; Trey’s lead line around 4:53 is improvised but isn’t a declarative solo (he’s a thickening agent, not an orator); the brief lyrics section basically goes “two-chord funk groove here” and the mood of the performance up to that point will guide Page’s Hammond organ solo at 8:18, which is of fixed length but variable character within the bounds of group convention; what follows is a jam with clear initial conditions but no plan. Gordon’s bass solo includes musical signals to cue the closing lyrics (listen close at the fifteen-minute mark), but in the ALO version there’s no hard boundary or fixed path between the full-band crescendo jam and the bass solo itself. Trey’s/Phish’s approach to multi-scale improvisation owes a debt to Pat Metheny, not surprisingly—his chart-topping American Garage (1979) serves as a kind of harmonic/melodic template for Trey’s welcoming post-rock Americana, but it’s also an example of a suite of tunes constructed out of goal-directed improvisations that have the unified feeling of full-band “jams” rather than solo features. (It even closes with a multipart epic called “The Epic.”)3 Jazz suites and extended compositions exist, of course, but they’re rare4—and extended works where improvisation is part of the compositional  (an example of white suburban kids’ practice of ambivalently appropriating the terms of their Western high-cultural inheritance—cf. Anastasio’s polite rant, quoted earlier) 4  (cf. fusion’s zenith/nadir, the great Carla Bley’s completely daft two-hour concept album Escalator Over the Hill) 3

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process, rather than an escape from the pressures of the written material, are something else. Nineteen-seventies fusion players like Metheny pushed jazz’s boundaries partly by treating their compositions as plans for coherent (electronic) soundscapes—then improvising toward that sonic ideal, collectively elaborating a given piece’s structure rather than showcasing the solo line in itself. The 70s also saw fully, freely improvised work like Keith Jarrett’s solo piano Köln Concert, more than an hour of continuous invention which flows freely between movements and moods, and which is so immersive precisely because it’s expansive—it’s the map of a nimble mind reacting to impulses which, simply by existing in time across more than an hour, take on a kind of narrative quality. While American Garage sounds purposeful even in its quieter moments, the Köln Concert seems like a series of happy accidents. (Though remember: “visions come to prepared spirits.”) The open format of Jarrett’s solo concerts in those days allowed (required) Jarrett to improvise not only “standard jazz” variations on a given section’s raw material, but coherent segues and relationships between sections. The movement logic from measure to measure and the emergent structural logic of the “spontaneous composition” as a whole come from the same place, and crucially feed back into each other while Jarrett plays. The work finds its purpose along the way (or doesn’t, and gets boring); the goal is spontaneous composition. Ensemble improv of that coherence, on that scale, is fiendishly difficult for obvious reasons. It’s also the basic approach of ALO-era Phish. It’s what all the work was for. •

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Overfamiliar fans sometimes skip over the band’s “Type I” jams (like the ALO “Stash” and “Chalkdust”: closed-circuit improvisations on fixed changes or modes which don’t abandon the songform)5 in favor of openended “psychedelic” journeys like the Bangor “Tweezer” on A Live One. But it’s the explicitly purpose-driven improvisations that form the bedrock of the band’s improvisatory method: the open-ended explorations take their power not least from the group’s tendency toward coherence, which develops in the “Type I” stuff. Those contained improvisations function partly as teaching tools, as “zones of proximal development” which scaffold the listener’s learning, not to mention the musicians’. There’s a reason the self-dissolving jams like the ALO “Tweezer” only ever happen in second sets—or on second discs. In these places we learn to wait.

The desire-map: Antici … The open-endedness of longform improvisation is, in itself, taxing for new listeners unaccustomed to performances that stretch to a quarter-hour and more—beyond the sheer physical endurance involved in maintaining a listening posture (or dancing!) for that long without a break, the intellectual labor is a real challenge too. And it’s not as if a jazz ear (never mind a taste for classical music or even prog rock) necessarily prepares you for the  The lines between “closed” and “open” improvisation have never been as clear as the simple I/II binary would suggest. Does the ALO “Stash” “break form,” for instance? 5

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specific mix of freedom and coherence that characterizes Phish’s jamming. Improvisation is always a departure, but there’s generally a home to refer and recur to; a thirtytwo-bar solo on changes isn’t generally meant to alter the overall ensemble formation. Most of us are used to soloists taking turns playing fixed-length choruses with continuous, consistent dynamics and pre-arranged harmonic materials—with the soloists referring to the underlying materials all through their spotlight time. Free improv makes no such guarantee. And lo and behold, the audience for that often sublime music is statistically indistinguishable from zero. The imaginative stance of someone listening to an improvisation in which every aspect of the music can vary—i.e. with these heightened improvisatory stakes—is necessarily different from the listening posture of her friend listening to a Taylor Swift song, or a Genesis song, or indeed any but the Freest jazz. Once the chord progression of a pop/rock tune is in your ear, you look forward to each local resolution: the open A-major chord in “I Wanna Be Sedated,” the D-major inhalation and F-major double-take under Jagger’s “if you try sometimes” lyric in “What You Want” (not for nothing does C-major release come with the words “You get what you need”), and the downbeats on “At Last,” Etta coming closer to spiritual-sexual ecstasy each time … Microstructures of desire emerge according to each song’s logic, and you lean forward looking for release that the song itself names and forms for you. Music programs us. The song’s the ruleset to a listening-game; and rules tell you what to do, what not to do, and (provisionally, irrationally) what to want … but in an open-ended, •

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open-form improvisation (like, say, the ALO “Tweezer”) those rules are constantly changing. Each instrument’s role in the ensemble, each chord’s place in the evolving progression if there even is one, each phrase’s relationship to the next; the tempo, key signature, rhythmic feel, style, genre, even whether or not what’s happening is “music” in a conventional sense: all these things are up for grabs during Phish’s improvisatory flights. To hear what’s going on, you have to accept, subconsciously really, that the relationship between tension and resolution, form and movement (premise and plot), won’t and indeed can’t conform to your expectations. You’re unentitled. In a radical sense quite different from what three-minute pop tunes have taught you is “normal,” this music really really isn’t about you.

… pation But then, “YEM” is also a pretty friendly tune. Anastasio is something of an ironist-absurdist in his songwriting and compositional approach; if you remember hearing the “Surprise Symphony” in fourthgrade music class, you’re familiar with a kind of musical gag that’s found all over Trey’s writing for Phish (less so in his non-Phish work). “Horn” (off Rift) begins in big ol’ rock ‘n’ roll E-major. But its heartbreaking instrumental section winds through a series of modulations before resolving blissfully to … E♭—then modulates up a context-free half-step, suddenly, to return to the song’s original key of E. “The Sloth” (from Gamehendge) starts in 9/8, oscillates between 5 and 6 through the verse, blends measures in 5, 6, and 7 during the instrumental •

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bridge, and gets filthy for a minute in semi-comforting 4/4 (w/out of phase drums), beneath lyrics about sliced nipples and Italian spaghetti (don’t ask). “Tweezer” interrupts its barroom rock for sixteen bars of atonal noise before getting back into the pornofunk as if nothing weird had happened—though to be fair, in the context of the Phish carnival, screaming about “Uncle Ebeneezer” in the middle of a straight-up midtempo dance groove barely counts as “weird” at all. Phish’s comedy—their earnest affirmative answer to Zappa’s question about humor in music—yanks some listeners out of the ongoing groove, the way the extra eighth note in the “Split Open and Melt” jam wrongfoots unwary dancers. But it’s methodical. They take their silliness seriously. There’s almost a didactic purpose to their music’s discontinuities: Phish strive for unity without necessarily offering the consolation of consistency. It might seem weird to talk about “flow” and “unity” with a band so perversely catholic in their interests and influences, but Phish’s brand of weirdness seems to stem from an untutored, earnestly surrealist impulse to maximize seemingly opposed quantities in the music6 in order to generate intense emotional effects. If you grant that such irreconcilable impulses can coexist beautifully, then you can grant the band a big enough canvas to play them out, so that the mathematical abstraction of “Split” can resolve, on the last track of   (planning/spontaneity, antagonism/welcome, lyricism/fuckery, opacity/clarity, complexity/simplicity—that last not actually an opposition, mind you, since “complexity” indicates depth rather than complication, but you know what I mean) 6

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Hoist, to the ethereal beauty of “Jerusalem City of Gold”; or the ALO “Hood” jam can crumple suddenly into a blues howl, only to return as joyful acclamation. Or so a live album that begins with a pop miniature and descends into a half-hour experiment in distention can get around, after all, to telling a sweet story. Exhale. Look at the arc of ALO’s second disc: schoolkids > schizocarnival > simplify > effervesce > “It got away, it got away” > solo piano deliquescence. Too much for one song. Over 68 minutes, though, through a procession of styles, there’s room for a deeper story, a story about time. Without all these frame shifts, comic and stylistic, the world of the music couldn’t support so many different life forms. Pop songs tend to be about the pleasures and prerogatives of youth. But those pass. The logic by which one moment turns into another needn’t be readily discoverable or sensible; life takes (or life is) time, which is both the chief logistical requirement and the hidden subject of the act of improvisation.

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A big part of digging improvised music is learning how to wait—for harmonic resolution, for inspiration, for a slow build or a complicated idea, for a moment or mood, for anything at all—and for that reason, among others, Phish have never quite been “youth music.” Rock and pop are about ego and sex, in large measure, and teenagers are made of those two things (they replace sugar and spice). Improv is about time; the relationship between improvised expression and the moment of its making is more fraught than the dynamics of preplanned performance. My sense is that Phish crowds are largely typical rock crowds agewise—loads of white college students/ twentysomethings blowing off steam, especially at weekend shows1—but hardcore Phish fandom, the  Ancient tour wisdom: Never miss a Sunday show. After the “Saturday night special,” played to (comparatively) casual concertgoers, the band always relaxes and digs deeper for the folks willing to be a little dazed on Monday morning. The same goes for gigs just before or after holiday/event shows, like the post-Halloween Pink Floyd cover and the canonical 12/30/97 and 12/30/93 shows. 1

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nerdy not-quite-hippie culture that surrounds the music and enriches its making, the culture to which the bandmembers themselves belong(ed), skews a little older. That goes beyond the enormous cost of following the band around on tour,2 I think. There’s something intrinsic to the music that demands not only heavy listening, but a kind of resigned engagement: tolerance for disappointment and deferral. In other words, the mere fact that spontaneous expression is taking place is sufficient to “fill” the moment—the music needn’t be well formed or correspond to a narrative/dramatic arc to be worthwhile and to fulfill the contract between player and listener. But because adolescent status-play demands that our music be, if not the best, then the most something-or-other (loudest darkest fastest realest blahblahblah), the posture of generosity and acceptance that jazz and other improvised musics demand is found less often in a youth audience weaned on three-minute pop tunes. The sixth track on A Live One is “Chalk Dust Torture,” the most good-natured teenage temper tantrum you ever did hear. The verses are standard “vocals as 5th instrument” Anastasio/Marshall stuff about a “distress tube”(?) and a berserker named Jezmund; but the refrain is one of Tom Marshall’s most direct and memorable lyrics. This is the closest Phish come to radio pop-rock: after the eerie a cappella fadeout of “YEM”—21 minutes front to back!—they count off their best-known singalong  You can tour on the cheap, but not with a kid or a heavy courseload. It sounds like a lot of work to me. 2

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(off their compulsively crowd-pleasing jukebox album A Picture of Nectar) at breakneck speed, surfing the UMich crowd’s delirious energy, and when the mid-song jam segment comes around, subtle dynamics are tossed right out the window, along with restraint, decorum, and any lingering forebrain activity. That’s precisely three minutes of pop-rock, if you’re counting, three minutes of improvised two-chord majesty, and a minute-long reprise to give ten thousand college kids one more chance to scream “Can’t I live while I’m young?” It’s pop-punk of a kind, though the virtuosic instrumental section, ALO’s closest thing to a pure guitar solo, possesses the formal cleanliness of a prog tune (each oddly metered tensionbuild has a mathematical precision to it, the hypermeter never breaking down even when the bar lines temporarily vanish). “Chalk Dust” is the easiest Phish tune to get ahold of: three chords and an attitude, with lyrics to match. Nearly every one of its 400+ live versions has hit its mark. They can do this stuff in their sleep. And like “Bouncing Around the Room,” “Simple,” and a couple of other tracks, it serves as a life preserver for casual listeners. You might say it’s the ideal “starter” live Phish track, differing from its studio incarnation in conventional ways (faster tempo, little fills and a bit of enthusiastic yelping between verses, long guitar solo that references the compact deliberate studio solo, &c.) and demanding little of the listener, especially compared to the preceding track. Perfect for folks who are new to the crowd—like me, back then. Phish still play “Chalk Dust,” twenty years later, and it’s one of their guaranteed energy-boosters. They •

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can’t “play the single” because they’ve never really had one; indeed, a number of fans used to groan when Trey called for crowd-pleasing short tunes like “Bouncing” and “Chalk Dust,”3 dismissing them as pop interludes between the more seeeeerious jams. The idea of a hit Phish single unnerves some fans; buying tickets is enough of a hassle already. But even a JadedVetTM can give it up for a tune that gets 70,000 people moving ecstatically to the simplest imaginable schoolhouse-rock beat. A friend of mine seeing her first Phish show at Great Woods in 20104 described the band’s jams, their gradual crescendos and ballistic climaxes, as “manipulative.” I objected at the time, but I know just what she meant: past a certain age, that louderfasteryeahmoreyeahOKnowburst! contour seems less sexy/compelling than intrusive or, yeah, manipulative. I dimly remember being a teenager, and I clearly remember thinking that the only thing better than one orgasm was two. But freshman year was two decades ago, and the quantity-over-quality libidinal model that makes perfect intuitive sense to creatures who think they’ll never die now strikes me as faintly ridiculous. And my response to Phish’s improvisation has changed too—as the music has. But its benevolent intent remains the same. In no small measure, the Phish concert experience— which, to be clear, is only hinted at “on tape”—is about a particular childlike, not to say childish, pleasure. Their  Recently “Chalk Dust” has become one of the band’s most reliable “jam vehicles,” regularly spawning far-reaching open-form improvisations. But historically it’s functioned as a quick jolt of energy. 4  I’m never ever going to call Great Woods the “Comcast Center.” 3

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commitment to silliness, almost as a moral imperative, keeps pretension at bay. Usually. Comic self-subversion is necessary when the music’s so grandiose. Many of Phish’s jokes are funny, but even the unfunny ones serve to destabilize the whole experience, as a genre-shift does. Their Halloween shows are about dressing in (musical) drag; their New Year’s Eve concerts revolve around an elaborate midnight prank. Laughter is an important part of the listening posture the work calls for, the shared band/fan worldview. It’d better be! Unfunny monumentalism isn’t humane; unfunny wisdom isn’t wisdom. Fooling around seems to be in Phish’s nature, but it’s definitely in the nature of their art. Which is why, at their 1990s peak, Phish could be both a niche interest and a major popular phenomenon all at once. Their stuff appeals not only to the prog dweebs and the hippies and the college kids looking for an easygoing good time on the grass (and/or on grass) on a Saturday night, but maybe most of all to a certain kind of teenager with a “weird” sense of humor, a taste for the suburban surreal, maybe prone to mistimed displays of intelligence, with a well-mannered curiosity about marginalia … The music invites that kid to share in the joke.

A thousand barefoot children “Rock ’n’ roll” and “swing” are words for how people move under the control of musics that go, almost coincidentally, by those same names. Rock is pop; it’s not just for its listener, it’s in her, a biological phenomenon rather than an acoustic one. “The world moves on a woman’s •

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hips” says David Byrne, and rock just puts world and hips together and watches what happens. It’s fun playing rock in the practice room,5 but really it’s for sharing. Everything good about the world is for sharing. But Phish welcome their fans into the music’s making to an unusual degree. A Live One includes just a bit of audience participation: the handclaps in “Stash” have entirely replaced Fish’s woodblock fills in what’s now the settled arrangement of the tune, though fans still can’t agree on the number or rhythm of the claps. The chanting in “Wilson” arose spontaneously during 1994 and reached a deafening climax on 12/30/94— the version included on A Live One. But the chanting actually echoes the band’s vocals on late-80s versions of the song, not exactly common knowledge in 1994. The Gamehendge tunes are the “mythology episodes” (to borrow an X-Files term) in the ongoing serial Phish narrative, rewarding esoteric fan knowledge. Deeper: in the mid-90s, the band would occasionally toss beach balls into the crowd, and each musician would play the movement of one of the balls, leaving rhythmic decisions up to the crowd (the flock). They called it the “Big Ball Jam.” Years later, during the “Hood” jam at 1997’s Great Went festival, Trey called for lighting director Chris Kuroda to shut off the lights; the crowd responded with an impromptu collective visual improvisation, tossing hundreds of glowsticks to create their own  Asked in 2013 by Rolling Stone to identify career peaks and favorite moments, Anastasio listed, in all seriousness, (1) “right now,” (2) driving for three weeks in a van to Colorado in 1988, and (3) “… any band practice … as long as it’s just the four of us in the room.” 5

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light show—and the awestruck musicians joined in with an extraordinary improvisation of their own. Afterward, in tears, Trey implored the crowd, “Go get more of those things, man,” and now “glowstick wars” are a staple. In 1995, band and fans played two tour-long chess games, with crowdsourced fan moves made on a huge onstage board each setbreak. The band even left the first couple of Halloween “musical costumes” up to fan vote—and before assembling A Live One they polled rec.music. phish for track suggestions. Indeed, the 7/8/94 version of “Stash” was a fan suggestion. In the late 90s the democratic quality of Phish’s project increasingly extended to fan creativity. The Went’s “Hood” jam took place in the shadow of a massive structure consisting of fan artworks created at the site, with the band joining in the painting onstage, in pairs, during the jam out of “2001”6—and the weekend climaxed with the ceremonial burning of the sculpture during “Tweezer Reprise.” At the more relaxed 1998 summer festival Lemonwheel, the band opened a candlemaking booth near the concert field, collected nearly a thousand candles hand-dipped by fans, and lit their Saturday-midnight ambient set with those candles, playing (as event posters had promised) in a “ring of fire.” Even as Phish’s festival crowds grew to stadium proportions, there was a sense that the band, fans, and the whole Phish organization were one community—that we all

 (actually Deodato’s addictive funk arrangement of the C-major sunrise from Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” featured in the movie Being There) 6

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shared responsibility for the show/tour experience. The congregation is the church, after all. And of course, the band’s permissive audience taping policy—reserving a section of the floor for tapers’ mics and DAT decks, and encouraging the not-for-profit7 distribution of live show recordings—has been essential to their success. Without those millions of DAUD-28 recordings building awareness of their music, Phish wouldn’t’ve made it out of small theaters and cult status. This certainly encourages a feeling of fan stewardship. We keep the secret, we share the good news.

Our intent is all for your delight This community spirit begins with Phish’s own conception of their group identity. The band members have always been candid and grateful about the two-way energy flow between band and audience. In Trey’s 2004 Charlie Rose interview, he talks about a musical peak moment from the ALO era: We were at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago … playing “Divided Sky,” and we got down to this quiet part … I had my eyes closed, and I could feel the crowd … at that moment, in the middle of it, I started to see these   Fans use the word “bootleg” to refer solely to unofficial live recordings sold for profit, and look unkindly on this activity (which in the mp3 era is dead anyway). Live tapes for sharing are just “the tapes.” 8  Digital recording, AUDience source, 2 analog generations (i.e. mic > DAT > tape > tape). 7

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colors—(laughing) I’m not kidding—floating around the room, and I realized that … it was silent, but I could see what we were translating. And as soon as I could see them, I started improvising, but I didn’t play anything: I did everything in the course of improvisation except the actual notes. And as soon as I did it, the whole place erupted … At that moment I knew that it was truly bigger than me. (laughing) “It.”

A moment later, Anastasio speaks of a group of fans who saw every show for years, always dancing in the same spot, but who didn’t turn up again after the band first reunited in 2003–4: When the hiatus happened, they came to one of my solo shows, and I had this strange interaction with this woman who I don’t know, but who I really know, more than she even knows how much I know her, because I watched her for years … Throughout [the 2004 breakup], I wondered what they thought … I have this deep-held belief that they think it’s right. I really want to believe that. Because they were so connected … they just must think it’s right. I want to bump into them in the street and say, “Me too.”

Any live performance creates an energetic feedback loop between performer and audience; improvised music, in which what happens next depends in no small part on the audience’s experience of (and response to) what’s happening right now, seems to’ve been invented for the purpose. And because Phish have always explicitly credited the audience’s work within the music—thought •

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and spoken about the band/fan macroorganism rather than an audience of consumers—that feedback loop is even tighter and more intense than normal, because everyone knows that’s why we’re there. Everyone has a job to do. Which is why Phish’s fans have a contradictory reputation as: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

picky heedless forgiving demanding infamously critical infamously uncritical

… and why a sweet little style experiment and a singalong with actual literal grade-school lyrics have pride of place on ALO’s two discs. “Bouncing” is one of Phish’s best-known tunes, not to mention a lovely lyrical encapsulation of the musical experience to come (“I awoke, faintly bouncing ’round the room …”); “Wilson” is basically 3-2-1-BLASTOFF in musical form, with the audience as both countdown and rocketfuel. It’s tempting to think “Oh, gotta get the audience singing along” and not think anymore about that choice of opening tracks, but I’d argue there’s more to it in the case of A Live One. What these tracks represent for ALO’s arc is something more akin to tuning up the ensemble; the room and everyone in it are really the instrument. The complexity of Phish’s improvisatory methods—signal cymbals, rhythm tag, fluid meter within consensually evolving hypermeter, chord sequences collapsing and  100 •

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reconstituting in realtime—is interesting in itself for folks who care about such things, but when you’re dancing in the fields, something paradoxical occurs: Phish are “all about the music” to an unusual degree, but they’re also unusually self-conscious about the ritual nature of their show, its function as extramusical uplift, its varied psychotropic effects. After all, these are the guys who’d interrupt howling rock jams to play “The Vibration of Life,” a fixed-frequency monotone pulse made by detuned guitar strings which they jokingly insisted “came from God.” Players, stage, floor, crowd, room, lights: all become instruments. The band can only do so much. In ancient times it was believed that stage plays didn’t simply represent mythical narratives, they enacted them— the players incarnated gods and heroes, so that the stories actually happened there on the sacred stage. In the field of game studies, the social/imaginative contract between players, the binding fiction, the “consecrated spot” of unconstrained possibility, is called (after Huizinga) the magic circle. You make one by putting your hands together …

This has all been wonderful There’s an interesting book to be written about the evolution of Phish fandom, its contradictions. It originated in a thoroughly marginal halfway-hippie 80s subculture but has always had a complicated, somewhat antagonistic relationship with its obvious inspiration, the Deadheads. Phish fans flocked to the Internet early— rec.music.phish was among the first music-fan Usenet  101 •

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newsgroups—and maintained extraordinarily vibrant nationwide taping and trading networks in the 90s, yet the fandom maintains a back-to-the-grasslands (-withour-iPhone-chargers) feel. After Garcia’s death, Phish fandom absorbed a portion of the Deadheads’ traveling beer&bong circus, and to a certain extent their media role, experiencing major growing pains, which fed back damagingly into the band’s own scene. The tribe is marked by complex tensions: between the rapidly aging fandom’s economic/cultural homogeneity and its aspirational come-one-come-all openness, between fans insisting on the essential superiority of their personal era/perception of Phish, between ideas of who we are and what we’re for. And there’s the fascinating phenomenon of a community reconstituting itself after not one but two dispersals and reunions. Like the Deadheads, Phish’s fanbase coalesced around a particular place and time—but unlike the first Deadheads, with their shrewdly chosen birthdates and politically relevant adolescent preoccupations, the early “phans” don’t have a nostalgic rock press lining up to mythologize their early-90s East Coast tie-dyed college life. Someone should tell their story at length. I can’t. My fandom occludes my sense of the fandom, if that makes sense, and anyway I have no deep connection to the touring life, which is essential to the story of this particular tribe. That said … The summer after Phish’s triumphant March 2009 reunion, I caught a handful of shows. I was 30, recently married, disconnected from the scene for years. And every time I walked onto the lot, ambling down Shakedown  102 •

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Street with its food/glassware/homespun vendors, past rows of leased sedans blasting treasured tapes with beery frat dweebs hanging out the back and unformed souls dancing lightfooted lost in widening circles and the air thick with sweet smoke—OK I’ll stop—look, every single time I’ve seen this band, from that first incomprehensible night in Niagara Falls to standing stock-still eyes closed weeping lost and free from earth during the “Hood” jam at Great Woods last summer, I’ve been blessed with the absolute certainty that if I needed help, if I needed nearly anything on earth, anyone at the show who could offer help would do so. I’m merely stating a fact when I say that the fans are part of the music as much as it’s part of us. And when we can stop bickering for a minute about whether Fall ’97 was a better tour than Fall ’94,9 we know (because the music knows) just enough to be grateful for that fact.

 Only a fool compares kisses: as long as you mean it, every kiss is just exactly perfect. 9

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The two discs of A Live One, structured something like the first (jukebox) and second (extended improv) sets of a show, climax with similar tunes. “Slave to the Traffic Light,” a brief composition with jokey lyrics and a long, stately A-G-D-E crescendo jam segment, rounds out the first disc. Meanwhile, my beloved “Harry Hood,” which combines singalong vocals, a multi-movement instrumental somewhat in the “Coil” mode, and a sprightly D-A-G jam that moves from Carib lilt to a kind of genial roar, is the penultimate track on disc two. (Closing track “The Squirming Coil,” with its images of departure and haunting, tentative closing jam, serves as an encore rather than the big finish.) The written portions of both “Hood” and “Slave” take sudden turns right before their improvisations kick in, with nasty minor-mode guitar flareups relieved, respectively, by sweet vocals (“thank you Mr. Miner and thank you Mr. Hood”) and gentle forgiveness from Page’s Rhodes keyboard. “Hood” has a more extensive written body than “Slave,” but for fans, the songs exist primarily as jam frameworks. The two jams serve as twin emotional peaks for the  104 •

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album: the almost didactic monotonic arc of “Slave” pairs with the hormonal wail of “Chalk Dust” to complete the first disc’s movement from ostentatious complexity to unself-conscious catharsis; “Hood” joins “Simple” to dissipate the dark carnivalesque attack-math of “Tweezer.” The parallels between the two discs, and between ALO and Anastasio’s fastidious mid-90s setlist construction, reveal the deep structure and careful planning behind the album—which is the up-front investment that lets band and fans leave so much to chance in the moment of improvisation. But despite their shared structure and methods, “Slave” and “Hood” couldn’t be more different in their emotional arcs, their bar-to-bar transformations, their narrative logics. Among other things, the “Hood” jam transforms partway through from a purely linear progression with melodic guitar leads into a complexly satisfying ensemble creation. Meanwhile the “Slave” jam proceeds with an inexorable martial pulse and somehow combines the ambient-textural work of “Montana” with the sedimentary build of “Stash” and the ejaculatory release of “Chalk Dust.” I keep saying that these two tracks are produced by a “unified method,” by which I mean that the band approaches them in the same spirit, using the same basic tools, with quite different results. Both tunes build from sparse pianissimo to stadium-filling climax; Anastasio starts in a more architectural/rhythm role on both tracks, shifting to extended discursive lines as the tunes approach their peaks; as in “Stash,” Fishman and McConnell get wilder as the tracks progress, while Gordon ratifies the emergent ensemble movement by moving to resounding  105 •

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root-downbeat hits as climax approaches.1 They don’t actually sound alike, but they share a shape—a sense of purpose.

Initial conditions Both “Hood” and “Slave” begin by evoking distant genres: the former’s parodic “reggae”-ish opening, the latter’s cute little upstroke guitar. Our guard is down; it’s hard to know what genre the music belongs to, beyond maybe “weird Americana,” and both tunes open with grooves soon to be abandoned. Tension/release (we’ve heard this before) but at the scale of the composition rather than the bar or phrase or section. But “Hood” is more melodic than “Slave”—the latter is driven by little guitar figures and its slow-moving rock harmony, without a melodic throughline.

Vocals Nothing so simple as a “refrain” for these art-rock tunes, but both feature iconic vocals. “Slaaaaave to the traffic light” signifies nicely in a composition that can’t move in any one direction for more than a few seconds without needing to stop abruptly. Meanwhile the “Hood” lyrics are gnomic outbursts spaced minutes apart, climaxing with (of all things) the Hood Dairy motto, “You can  The sexualized language’s no accident; not for nothing do I talk elsewhere about the ‘desire-map’ or ‘libidinal economy’ of temporal art, or the ejaculatory quality of Anastasio’s solo climaxes. 1

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feel good about Hood,” neatly tying together so many elements of the band’s cosmology: absurd evocations of New England childhood, media-saturated irony, suburban absurdism. Both tunes feature “anthemic” lyrics; though they were written in living rooms, the young Anastasio instinctively set them to stadium-filling lines. Two of Anastasio’s deepest impulses are on display here: go weird and (not “but”) go big. He’s always had that tendency as a songwriter, taking strange input like friends’ improvised contributions (Steve “Dude of Life” Pollak, a fixture at early Phish shows, contributed the lyrics to the “White Tape” version of “Slave”), or found sounds/words as on “Hood,” and building a complicated edifice around it.

Mr. & Mrs. Miner Both “Hood” and “Slave” make their way into spacious major-chord jams only after aggressive minor-mode guitar intrusions (2:34 in “Slave,” 4:53 in “Hood”). The “Hood” lyrics even call attention to the sudden modeshift (“Thank you Mr. Miner”). The two passages share a role in the songs’ emotional arcs: they’re destabilizing confrontations that must be survived in order to achieve serenity, which is the goal of each song’s jam, though its feels different in each case when it does come. The opening of “Slave” oscillates between A and G chords, then steps slowly through the A-G-D-E form that templates the jam segment. There’s a subtly implied blues sound in that movement—you could play an A-blues over the chords and it’d make sense. The  107 •

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wailing pre-jam guitar break is basically minor-blues riffing in E with a Zeppelinesque C-major chord for increased scope—and then Page cuts through the noise with his comforting breaks which mirror the opening riff, bringing the composed section full circle. The guitar break fakes dominance and finality (what could be bossier, more manly, than a big ol’ E-blues guitar wail?) before quieting, resolving. There’s a deep order at work. The “Mr. Miner” section of “Hood” plays a similar trick with the song’s harmonic materials. The “Hood” jam is on D-A-G; the odd-time section that brings the written tune to its ecstatic peak is in A, as is the guilelessly cheery passage right afterward. A nice upbeat open-string ringing chord, that A-major, y’know? But then (4:49) we get too much of a good thing: a series of movements by fourths, A-D-G-C-F (the first F chord since the “reggae” bit), exactly the kind of microresolution we know to want, but four of those is at least one too many for comfort. And then the ugliest jump of all, from F-major to B-minor—a chord that’s perfectly at home as the relative minor of “Hood”’s home key (D-major) but which seems to come out of goddamn nowhere here: a typical Anastasio trick. There’s a sickmaking Bm-F oscillation (there’s your tritone again), then a sudden bit of eerie chanting—“Thank you Mr. Miner”—and now a modulation, further out to sea, C♯m-G (still a tritone but now a decontextualized one), more chanting, another modulation to E♭m-A … of course you don’t hear that A-major chord as “home” anymore, it’s the sound of the song’s stomach turning …  108 •

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… and then, instead of more of this weird chanting, come three-part harmony vocals, E-major to A-major, that A chord now transformed to function as pure I-IV resolution; even the words sweeten too: “Thank you Mr. Hoooooooooood …” And one last resolving move, from A to D-major. Home again, our first return to D in several minutes. Just as in “Slave,” we relax into the jam on the same chords that drove the initial composition—with another joke hidden in the lyrics, the song’s progression proper began with a sung command: “Go.” The words that sound the same (go/good/Hood) set sweetly amidst welcoming major chords, the others (Harry/ lights/thank/Miner) climb out of minor chords and unwholesome sounds.

Improv opening Each jam opens with one player laying out while the other three establish an emotional tenor and highlighting the crucial constant element of each improvisation: the nightlit texture and steady pulse of “Slave,” the syncopated skip and cascading chordal movement of “Hood”—compare Mike’s bass moves at the outset of the “Hood” jam, easing through Page’s shimmering Rhodes curtain, to his “Slave” line, similarly syncopated but serving textural, not melodic, purpose. The big blocky “Slave” chords have none of the playfulness of “Hood,” and because all four “Hood” ensemble parts are in constant free motion, crossing and circling and temporarily lining up in odd ways, that tune’s simple  109 •

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diatonic2 harmony comes off as comparatively flexible. (For instance, Gordon’s characteristic, gently perverse E♭ stands out noticeably against Anastasio/McConnell’s E-major chord four minutes into “Slave”; it rests in the ear rather than flowing on by.) The band members’ individual lines now begin to circle around one another, which doesn’t seem like a great way to get anywhere new. And yet the center moves.

Movement logic The opening “movement” of the “Slave” jam rolls and crests at about the 5:48 mark, when Fishman begins a steady eight-beat on the ride cymbal. At this point, the entire band is functioning as a rhythm section. Pay attention to McConnell: he hits the A-major chord hard every time, right on the downbeat, freeing Anastasio from that responsibility and paving the way for discursive guitar soloing around 7:34, but every four bars McConnell plays a little more freely, with greater density, until he brings the jam to a new level by getting out of the way of Anastasio’s soaring upper-register melodic leads (e.g. listen to the song’s first big peak, around 8:15). The peak of the jam will be marked by an increase of clarity and intensity, of  == what you get by sticking to the white keys on the piano: the notes of a major scale. Nearly any combination of those seven notes sounds good, or at least understandable, compared to the extended harmonies of jazz and popular song of the early twentieth century—or the major/ minor combinations of classical music. 2

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mutual resonance, not just volume—a lesson the band had internalized even before they studied barbershop singing in the early 90s. Meanwhile Anastasio holds back from solo flight, letting the band reach a slow boil. Fish, Page, and Cactus push against Anastasio’s inexorable march time, then when the song goes pop (8:15 departure time), there’s a total frame shift, each player snapping back into his customary rock role for a moment to make the climax as clear as possible. Any four musicians could play the “louder every four bars” game, but generating stark contrasts means paying attention to both the other guys’ bar-to-bar signaling and the ineffable quality of the jam’s movement. “Hood” develops according to the same rules but with different parameters. Anastasio’s early guitar keeps receding into the ensemble rather than stepping out; he’s part of the deepening groove, only incidentally the “melodic lead.” The D-A-G progression smooths out to something like D-{dominant substitutions per Dunbar}-G, expanding and contracting to make room for more or less harmonic color, but Gordon insists on a slightly tense tritone to finish each two-bar phrase: D (the root, home) to A (the fifth, tense) to exhalation at G (the fourth), then to C♯—that last note desiring to bend upward to resolve into D, sticking out thumbsore until a cresting crash-cymbal wave clears away the building tension just before 7:30, at which point the entire band shifts to affirmative playing, a little firmer, a little louder, a little closer to the waterfall rush that is the jam’s planned destination. One player will move to offbeats for a moment, another will play the four beats square,  111 •

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interlocking like zippers’ teeth. It’s in jams like “Hood” that their endless work on “Hey” exercises bear fruit. Listen to the emergent groove after 8:03: Gordon’s descending bass figure, which he’s been teasing the whole time (and which foreshadows the jam’s climax six minutes from now), signals transition into a new space. He repeats the figure several times; its content is preset but its timing is an improvised response to Anastasio shifting from textural midrange arpeggios to an upper-register arc. McConnell responds to the same stimulus, swinging between long color chords and quicker “upstroke” hits (short enough to feel not hear, not to be parsed for harmony), and Fishman’s rimshots signal he’s onboard for a lateral move too. The groove that coalesces by 8:08— within five seconds, mind you—is built on Gordon’s tumbling bass figure, but in response to his bandmates’ rhythmic formation (almost a ska flavor to it, hmm?) he lets that line dissolve into offbeat rhythm hits. They aren’t rejecting one another’s inputs, they’re just incorporating them and moving on extremely quickly … By the time Fish’s snare drum rolls start around 8:40, the overall groove has gone through several iterations, “complete” unto themselves, but your (my) focus is on the empathetic logic of movement between them, the feeling of floating through a harmonic/rhythmic space without becoming attached to it, able to refer forward or back to fixed or remembered ideas: think of the different ways that bass figure is used throughout the jam, the different kinds of pressure it applies. This is Dunbar’s convergence theory applied not just to harmony but every other axis of movement within the music: the entire ensemble works to maintain cohesion  112 •

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while moving seamlessly from one musical region to another, with that movement emerging organically from the players’ internal message-passing. Rhythmic center, harmonic center, timbral center, emotional center, center of gravity … a new idea emerges, they converge on a provisional structure, and then they duck out of the way. It’s not really that they take turns being leader, either: there’s no center bird in a flock. Meaning the ensemble can be here and there at once—in two keys, at two speeds, with four points of rhythmic emphasis, threading eight melodic ideas—without falling apart, as long as their movements all refer to one another. None of the individual lines need be meaningful; they’re not even particularly “interesting” on their own. But the overall effect, their system, their world, is impossible. That’s how it feels to me, anyhow: being this free and this together, with this bandwidth, just isn’t possible. But there they are. A flock of birds.

Switchback “Slave” is a monotonic3 build to an anthemic climax—that shape has seldom varied throughout its long performance history—but “Hood” affords the band more freedom in terms of dynamics and density, which is to say they make that allowance themselves. Before 2014, it tended to circle prettily before building smoothly to climax, but the ALO “Hood” features an unexpected turnaround in its twelfth minute that nicely illustrates the generative  (== always moving in one direction, never turning back)

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tension between Anastasio’s compositional approach and the band’s freewheeling improvisation. Some fans see such moments as in a sense fulfilling the purpose of Phish’s jamming, but I don’t share the grammar of that claim. The purpose of improvisation is to improvise; that struggle engages us more deeply than any specific musical effect. The ALO version’s switchback—a hard turn in a different direction that still takes you up the mountain— follows a sustained tension-building exercise that runs through the track’s tenth minute. Unlike the ongoing tension/release work in “Stash,” which is all about a specific harmonic antagonism (hammering that dominant/ tension chord (A) in a jam that aches to resolve to harmonic home, D-minor) the “Hood” ramp-up passage embraces the D-A-G chord framework; the harmonic variations (dropping the A, substituting the hesitant Em7 chord for the more definitive G-major) are subtle and don’t threaten the form. Different tactics, then: arresting the backbeat pulse; hitting each phrase’s downbeat then letting the progression drift off;4 feedback swallowing the guitar line; trills at the fifth and sixth the only respite from a static bass drone; building frenzy from keys and drums (McConnell jumps from Rhodes to baby grand at 9:38, thinning the mix and crucially leaving lots of space for Fishman to go nuts while Anastasio sustains notes above them all, a covering canopy) … The “pure” D-A-G progression is grandly reasserted at 10:24, and at this point we should be ready to  Note the parallel to the volume swells and start/stop passages in “Tweezer” and “Coil”: tactics of synchronization. 4

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finish—after forty seconds of what the fans call “hose,”5 Anastasio hits what should be the last sixteen bars of the jam, soaring into his upper register while the others assert the jam’s “theme” (that cascading guitar/bass figure and unambiguous unison chords that mark the passage between wide-open jamming and the Big Finish). But something happens at 11:21 … instead of joining in the closing figure, Anastasio collapses to a single-note line, then an ambivalent open fifth in unison with McConnell on piano. Fishman and Gordon keep moving, and for a few seconds there’s an odd suspension of time: the band seems divided against itself, pulling back just before the moment of climax. From a fist-pumping fortissimo we move with remarkable smoothness, over just a few bars, to sneaky mezzo piano, and now it’s volume swells and minor-key piano rumble and unexpected high-speed blues riffs and insinuations from the bass and galloping floor toms, until minor-blues ticks over to rainbow/ unicorn-major diatonicity and we gallop to the ending. Does Anastasio play his highest-pitched note of the whole track during these last few seconds? He does. Do the drums drop out for a second only to return as some kind of “Sing Sing Sing” beast-march, winding up the entire band before finally detonating with the whole force of the entire album seemingly behind them? They do. It’s that kind of “so well-formed it could almost be  Santana’s metaphor: the music is the water, the audience is a garden of flowers, and the musicians are just the hose, conduit rather than creators, and the music has to pass through them unhindered, uncommented-upon, unconsciously. In Phish fandom it usually means “anthemic major-chord catharsis after a tension-building passage.” 5

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written” improvisation—as if “written-sounding” were the highest compliment you can give to spontaneous creativity.

Us and them The climax of this “Hood” was the first music I ever listened to eyes closed body still in solitary dark, a ritual I’d later carry out with Trane’s “Venus” and other sacred music. The rocket-ride to Trey’s final high E♭ is for me the sound of four people dissolving to be replaced by one of another creature entirely—if only for a moment. The birth of a groupmind, which might be James Merrill’s “incarnation and withdrawal of / A god.” But only recently did I think to ask why it happened that way that night. Maybe Anastasio decided the end of the jam had come too early; maybe he forgot to play the closing cascade and the rest of the band instantly adhered to his new line. Maybe McConnell’s piano and Anastasio’s guitar combined to send an override signal to the other two, triggering an orderly retreat. Maybe Trey/Page aren’t signaling retreat at all, their new line actually leaves the next move open, they’re both ready for the semicomposed closing and open to a countermove—think of how that must feel—and the switchback doesn’t kick off until Fishman stops the backbeat and Gordon leaves the root; maybe they’re the ones signaling for a holding pattern. Maybe Trey’s eight-bar sustained note just prior to the switchback left an unresolved tension that some of the players felt needed to dissipate. (And if that feeling did exist, it surely wouldn’t have risen to the  116 •

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level of (self-)consciousness; we’re talking autocatalysis, not project management.) Maybe some kid at her first Phish show, just visible out of the corner of Page’s eye, danced this weird moment into being. You think I’m being silly—I think that—but why not? The music isn’t only made onstage. This sort of turn is missing from the relatively linear jams on A Live One—“Stash,” “Chalk Dust,” “YEM,” “Slave”—jams known in the fandom as “Type I,” i.e. largely sticking to their initial harmonic/rhythmic structure. As an improvisatory maneuver it succeeds, deepening the impact of the jam’s closing yet maintaining order despite the collective decision to abandon form at the literal last minute. But the “message-passing system” that created it in the moment, the simultaneous four-way conversation, is the same from track to track, as long as everyone’s limber and light and listening hard. The extended journey of “Tweezer” could easily have happened in “Hood” or “Stash” (and plenty of versions of those songs have headed out to the astral plane over the decades). Being ready for such “extreme possibility” while carefully maintaining the jam’s coherence, that bisociative posture, is the heart of the method—band’s and fans’ alike, you might say. The musicians do their work, then you do yours: choosing to desire as the music does. Nothing mystical about it. Happens all the time.

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A first-time concertgoer seeing Phish in late 1995, knowing only ALO and not more recent shows, might’ve been a bit confused by the group’s sound. They were still playing tight modal tension/release jams over simple (though more complex than vanilla-rock) chord progressions, and the absurdist strain in their stage show was still alive and well, as evidenced by the ongoing band/fan chess match of Fall 95, but by ALO’s release in midsummer 1995 they’d integrated the results of initial experiments like the Bangor “Tweezer” into their overall approach. When I first saw them that December, they were regularly arriving organically at spaces that bore only faint resemblance to their source songs, and staying there, or at least maintaining a consistent mood through smooth iterative transformations. Improvisatory episodes were combining into longer story arcs. Unlike, say, ALO’s antic “Tweezer” and in-your-face “Stash,” Phish’s hyperextended 1995 jams revealed an ensemble with the patience to let emergent architectures settle in and establish a “new normal” for the group’s next steps. This accretive, evolutionary character allowed the band to start working on a vast canvas, and incidentally  118 •

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to fill ever-larger rooms, without losing structural and emotional integrity. This is a bigger deal than it might seem. It’s normal for a soloist to respond to the ensemble support and incorporate, say, a drum rhythm or bass interval into her discursive line. And tonight in a tiny gallery somewhere on earth, experimental improvisers will zigzag between sharply distinct improv episodes every three to five minutes according to an unguessable private logic, and soulpatch dudes who refer to CDs and mp3s as “records” will grin and bob their heads out of time to an inscrutable hidden pulse. Plenty of other groups have been as mobile as Phish in their improvisation, and still others have improvised as tightly—but by 1995 you could reasonably claim that no one had done both at once. It didn’t always work: A Live One neatly captures the laserlike coherence of Phish’s tension/release jams, but a couple of points in the “Tweezer” are dead ends. Phish’s 1995 work moved toward an ideal of radical presentness: absolute engagement with each accidental moment, even the awkward ones. But while admirable, that ideal isn’t unique to Phish, or even rare. What’s unique is that they also maintained their commitment to structural coherence. Prog density, punk energy, and hippie freedom—all the time. I hear this progression toward egoless copresence in the arc of A Live One—disc one (set one) kicks off with “Bouncing”/“Stash,” i.e. the “single” and a jam tune; the second frame duplicates this movement with a “Wilson”/“Tweezer” pairing, and if “Tweezer” isn’t as entirely successful on its own terms as “Stash,” it announces its intention, its improvisatory “genre,” just as quickly and clearly. “Stash” is the result of an experiment  119 •

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in maximizing cohesiveness for dramatic impact through a series of primarily (though not solely) harmonic perturbations, and “Tweezer” takes that logic a step further: the band varies every element of the song between improvisatory episodes, while rarely relinquishing control of the music to dissolve into ambient/noise interludes, which are low-hanging fruit for improvisers, so to speak. Having brought their tension/release jamming to a peak of single-minded focus, they open up “Tweezer” using the exact same tools—iterative rhythmic variation, fluid meter but consistent hypermeter, modal/“convergent” harmonies, transformations of timbre and color, and constantly pushing/pulling tempo, to name a few—to produce a very different kind of music. The instrumentation is the same, but “Stash” and “Tweezer” sound nothing alike, at least until the latter lurches toward a restoration of form in its final minutes, at which point the band begins to cohere around conventional rock ‘n’ roll satisfactions …

Next steps In 1997 Phish’s music underwent a stylistic transformation from bombastic, aggressive psych-rock to slyly insinuating cosmic funk; the Fall 1997 tour in particular is now considered a sublime career peak. To hear a show from that era after playing A Live One, you couldn’t be faulted for labeling them as two different bands—the transformation was that complete. Yet there’s a deep connection between A Live One and Phish’s late-century psychedelic dance music—the same iterative-accretive logic generates both the predatory  120 •

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mathematics of their early improv and the groove-first approach that’s been their template ever since. They’d followed their cover of The Beatles on Halloween ’94 with a best-yet run of experimental shows in November/December 1994, yielding nine of ALO’s twelve tracks. They played their first (excellent) Madison Square Garden gig on the 1994 New Year’s Eve run, debuted six originals and four covers at a Voters for Choice benefit in May 1995, then went on to play eighty shows over the next seven months, tightening and refining their improvisation. They started slowing their playing down a bit, letting the music open up, holding onto ideas a little longer—they couldn’t yet play convincing funk, but they’d gotten the cheeky swagger of arena rock ‘n’ roll down, and as a result, their 1995 improv was more convincingly dramatic/cathartic than ever before. In the middle of that year, A Live One came out, Garcia passed on (unrelatedly), and Phish stopped being the cherished secret of dorm-room weirdos all over the country; the music grew and changed to suit their new circumstances and performance venues. By December they were playing as if possessed; that month has always been seen as a peak era by fans.

Make a jazz noise here The band played a career-defining three-set show at the Garden on New Year’s Eve 1995, later released as a remastered soundboard recording. At that point they couldn’t get louder or more bombastic (cf. disc one of ALO …) so in 1996 they began seeking out new modes of expression. The previous year Anastasio had recorded Surrender  121 •

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to the Air; Anastasio plays through most of the album but is often hard to make out, prefiguring his retreat from onstage leadership in 1996–97. Surrender came out in 1996, followed by a couple of live dates with the ensemble. Anastasio summed up the experience thusly: After [the ALO “Tweezer”] I decided to get the endlessjam idea out of my system … The shows were everything you would expect, complete with some incredible ups and dreadful downs. It was like being naked. Afterward I remember walking back to my hotel and thinking, “Well, I don’t need to do that again.”1

For all that, it’s a surprisingly good album. 1996 also saw Phish traveling to Europe for the first time, playing small venues and starting to explore elements of their musical identity that were getting crowded out of their increasingly massive stage show. But a bigger breakthrough came, finally, in their studio work. In early 1996 Phish entered the studio with their engineer Jon Siket, hoping to create an album that actually matched their evolving musical vision—and perhaps to banish the memory of their too-slick 1994 studio album Hoist.2 (It’s no

 Quoted in Gehr’s The Phish Book.  I quite like parts of Hoist, actually. Dig on the car crash > heaven arc in that last track—an updated take on “Aftermath” from their “White Tape,” in turn prefiguring the band’s triumphant Halloween 2014 theatrical production. And “Lifeboy” is gorgeous. But overall Hoist feels like a good band trying to please the wrong people. 1 2

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coincidence that no songs from Hoist made it to the more personal A Live One.) Billy Breathes, released in October 1996, is probably the band’s best, warmest, most intimate studio work— “Billy” was Anastasio’s baby daughter, after all. Much credit goes to producer Steve Lillywhite, who expressed his intention to make a great “stoner album” and helped shape Billy’s sonics and arrangements. Before he arrived, though, the recording process began with an abortive, characteristically nerdy experiment in which band members took turns adding and subtracting individual notes and phrases in a musical collage called “The Blob”: dialectical algebra again. A couple minutes of this weird team-building exercise snuck into the middle of the hypnagogic five-song suite that closes the album, during the eerie interlude “Steep” (which darkly mirrors Trey’s aching acoustic/choral miniature “Swept Away”); Billy’s juxtaposition of experimental electronoise, earnest confession, rustic esotericism, and gently welcoming psychedelia colors their work even now. Good as the album was, live is where Phish live. Billy pointed toward an alternative identity, not just in style but in an almost spiritual sense: they could make music that was people-sized, without winking, parenthesizing, or flinching from what it dredged up. I hear intimations of this change on A Live One too: in the desperate yearning of the final “Hood” jam, the way “Coil” gives way to lullaby hush, and—yes—in the faintly ominous vista of “Montana.” But the mechanism wasn’t there yet; they still couldn’t get small without making smallness as such into a subject of interest. Something else needed to give.  123 •

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It swivels and bops The same month Billy came out (and I saw them play in Buffalo—my second concert, average Phish show, meaning it nearly destroyed me), Phish played another Halloween “costume” set, covering Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, the more accessible half of the Byrne/Eno collaboration that also produced the seminal My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a canonical example of High Weirdness on tape. Remain is a dense minimalist funk-rock party album that marries overheard snatches of underground and undercover American speech to Afrobeat’s relentless pulse, mixes in Eno’s heavy rockfuturist soundscapes and New Wave cool, and tops with a healthy dose of self-conscious art-school exoticism c. 1980, leavened (thank God) by an odd empathetic delicacy … In other words, it’s a boundary-crossing syncretic stew from a bunch of nervy intellectuals exploring without second-guessing, an experiment in lush minimalism, and a batch of great songs to boot—making it a perfect fit for our quartet of forebrain-heavy maximalist mimics facing a stylistic impasse. Plus, Trey knew it in and out: it was his “jamming along with the album” album in college. Still, accepting the album’s terms would be a genuinely new challenge for Phish. In retrospect, Phish’s post-Remain in Light shift toward minimalist groove, dream-logical continuity, and ambient textures is simply one more necessary turn in an ongoing project of self-refashioning. But at the time, the band’s 1996–7 transformation into a cerebral dancerock band came as a surprise to the fandom, even as it  124 •

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brought Phish and their fans closer in spirit and style to the premillennium neotribal/rave/electronica moment, placing them (us) closer to the center of American youth culture than we’d ever been (or will be again). We were super psyched, don’t get me wrong—the immediate result of the Talking Heads cover and subsequent funk experimentation was “somewhat groovier 1996 Phish,” which was a win for everyone—but no one listening to A Live One in 1995 could have predicted that its most forward-looking track was the context-free atmospheric phenomenon “Montana.” And there was actually some fan resistance to Phish’s embrace of dance grooves and “populist” music. I can understand that. Some (high) weirdness was unquestionably lost in the transition. And what kind of monster wants his favorite band to become (semi)popular, anyway?

Everything after After Billy Breathes and the group’s funk-first reconfiguration, Phish’s projects took on a new feeling: instead of trying to please everyone (as with A Live One, Hoist, and Trey’s fastidious setlist-writing), they gave up on anything but pleasing themselves, and as a result they came closer than they ever had or will again to actually pleasing everyone. For one thing, their studio work immediately loosened up: 1998’s Story of the Ghost is a dreamlike stew of halffinished fragments, subtly eerie sound effects, and some of the band’s most relaxed studio playing; its companion The Siket Disc is thirty-five minutes of weird ambientgroove studio outtakes from a freewheeling days-long  125 •

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studio jamming session. It’s a spiritual successor to Phish’s equally idiosyncratic mid-80s’ “White Tape” demo, but unlike its predecessor, which mostly blends individual contributions, Siket is entirely group-created. As a result, it’s their most enveloping studio creation. Farmhouse is a pleasant mess—half its songs are just glorified basslines—and the post-hiatus Round Room (guileless first-take performances) and Undermind (an exhausted down-the-middle rock record) are welcoming the way accidentally unlocked doors are. The live shows kept changing after Billy and Remain in Light as well, of course, as they abandoned setlists and self-critical headdesking and indeed every onstage imperative except pleasure. And for a moment they were an institution, even playing the world’s biggest “millennium” concert from midnight to sunrise on 1/1/00. Then drugs and inertia and the impossibility of topping that lifetime peak experience split the band up for a couple of years; they came back in 2003–04 but addiction and hedonism ruined them and they played a disastrous final festival in Vermont in 2004. They reunited in March 2009 at Hampton. It is good. They’re more focused since they came back … just not on anything that sells. Their 2009 reunion album Joy reunited Phish with Steve Lillywhite to good effect; it’s admirably untethered from contemporary fashion, and Anastasio’s songwriting is more direct and expressive than ever. It’s just not a great album despite all that. But Fuego (2014) finds a middle ground between their early prog stuff and their later textural-psych work, with their strongest batch of songs in a long long time, maybe ever—and while its sonic textures and producer Bob Ezrin connect it to 70s  126 •

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rock, Fuego’s somewhat theatrical story-songs owe as much to The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday and Anastasio’s Broadway sidelight (he was nominated for a Tony in 2013 for scoring the musical Hands on a Hardbody) as to Pink Floyd. It’s a very fine Phish album, containing a couple of the best songs of their lives, but “Phish album” has never been a recipe for commercial success. Indeed, Fuego represents a peak achievement for the band for two reasons. For one, they wrote several of the lyrics as a group, their first-ever attempt to do so, and based a few of the songs on onstage jams from previous years. It’s the most democratic studio work of their career. And on Halloween 2013 in Atlantic City, the band premiered Fuego all at once, playing an entire set of brand new tunes, “covering an album from the future” as part of their yearlong thirtieth anniversary celebration. That takes courage. Then, 365 days later in Vegas, in white tuxedos and ghoulish face paint, Phish put on a remarkable theatrical presentation (complete with narration and a team of zombie dancers) of Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House, the old Disney sound-effects album. Their performance incorporated the complete album audio along with sampled excerpts into a seventy-minute instrumental set—basically “composed jamming.” Defying almost every rock precedent, after thirty years, they remain creatively vital.

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the day it came out, but now its analog roar and antic anti-cool seem positively archaic. The band’s late sound relies heavily on digital effects; McConnell’s array of synths made a huge difference in 1997 but now Anastasio and especially Gordon also deploy complex FX rigs to tailor their sounds and thicken the ensemble arrangements in a live setting. And they don’t play with the old frenzy anymore. Dissolution, depression, divorce, and (near-)death’ll do that to you. I like how they’ve aged. A Live One has long had a terminal quality, to me—without meaning to, it concisely sets out the terms of a musical close-packing problem that their later explosive-minimalist improv authoritatively solved, and they’ve never gone back to their early combative style. Nowadays the borders between their improvisatory episodes are more porous, transitions more gentle, improvisations less inclined to wander aimlessly—beauty is the chief imperative in Phish’s late music, and novelty is all but set aside. There’s no didactic or antagonistic point, as there was in (say) the ALO “Stash” and “Tweezer,” which run long and loud and play tricks on the listener partly for the sake of extremity itself; that is, for a laugh. (Three minutes of Metal Machine Music is stupid. One hour of Metal Machine Music is hilarious.) Phish are less funny now. But stripped of its obligation to give pleasure—to justify the foolishness with Importance or Complication or just Scale or even boring old Allusion—their improvisation now testifies at every second to joy, which has little enough to do with pleasure or easy happiness. (You can be joyfully, rapturously sad, after all, and deep happiness is rarely “pleasurable.”) I  128 •

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hear the ALO “Hood” approaching this musical ideal, building to a peak of ecstatic happiness that’s colored throughout with something like melancholy. An adult emotion, it seems to me. For me, the experience of shared personal struggle— with ideas, form, feeling, self—is the deep purpose of (listening to) improvised music, and it comes through clear as day in the final moments of the ALO “Hood.” Music isn’t “for” story, but it tells them all the same, and that emergent contour, dark/light or trouble/flight or burden/bliss (tension/release, algebra/ecstasy, form/ freeform, solid/plasma), threads through all of Phish’s music. Wordless testimony. Joy’s a bit boring to talk about (unlike pleasure) but it’s everything. A Live One sits right at the phaseborder between one life of these musicians and another. Whatever the music “contains,” whether or not it’s good or great or 33-1/3-able by whatever aesthetic standard you’ve got, this music, by its own willingness to transform—to bend to a contour whose wavelength is far longer than a human realizes she’s able to perceive (but she is, or why go on)—makes available something which isn’t about immense song length or harmonic opposition or torrential guitar downpours but which maybe requires some or all of those things. And it seems to me to be worth it; worth two hours, anyway. After listening hard to this music for half my life, I believe that intimations of something beyond pleasure or its absence are in fact central to this band’s project, its true meaning; and it’s a great blessing for me to be able to share that belief with you. To testify to what the music reveals. Whatever it is, joy is how it does.  129 •

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All of the Places and People Belong

Having opened with Lawn Boy’s closing track, “Bouncing,” A Live One closes with Lawn Boy’s opener, “The Squirming Coil,” which tucks an imagistic verse/ chorus/verse/chorus story-song inside a harmonically knotty prog composition with a strong narrative arc. The lyrics evoke Icarus and summer camp, birth and flight, mothers and sons, departure and loss. The singer strains to hold onto a vision of a setting sun. The composed portion runs four and a half minutes. Song and album close with seven improvised minutes: a slowly unfolding group improvisation and a long solo piano statement from McConnell. Trivia: Several ALO tracks received minor studio touch-ups—an overdubbed word here or cleaned up chord there—and the album-closing “Coil” is actually a first-set version (10/9/94) which, on the night, ended with the “We’re going to take a very short break” that closes ALO disc one. The “Coil” jam is the most harmonically and emotionally ambivalent material on the album, freely  130 •

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mixing major and minor modes, tense dissonances, and deferred resolutions to haunting effect. After the bright bold climax of “Hood,” “Coil” feels like the slow morning of the world. The other three musicians walk offstage. Page remains to speak for them. His solo is simple, almost naïve; it surges, crests, suffers heartbreak, recedes, never rising above an abashed mezzo forte. An album full of extreme dynamic contrasts and rhythm tricks ends with a gently elaborated amen cadence. The quiet rationalist of the group, uncomfortable in a crowd, says, “We’ve had a great time tonight. Come see us again. Thanks.” The final minute is just the crowd cheering, clapping, and—as the house lights come up—gathering their things and heading out into the evening. It’s sad and sweet. Then the PA music plays. It’s one of the guys in Phish chanting in a creepy voice “I saw you, I saw you”— the lyrics to “Golgi Apparatus.” Trey and some friends wrote them in eighth grade biology class. They’re about cellular organelles and ticket stubs, HA HA HA.

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Afterword

The essential Phish book is The Phish Book, a lavishly illustrated volume of funk-era interviews skillfully edited into a continuous free-flowing conversation by Richard Gehr. The movie to see is the 2003 IT documentary. The encyclopedic Phish Companion is the canonical resource for hardcore fans. My 2012 book A Tiny Space to Move and Breathe talks about Phish’s Fall 1997 tour and other things. The essential fan resource is phish.net, home of one of the very first online fan communities, entirely run by volunteers from the Mockingbird Foundation, which supports music education throughout the U.S. Since the mid-90s, phish.net has been at the center of my fandom, and this book couldn’t have been written without it. Of course, without the community of seekers it nurtures, there’d be no book to write. The following authors shouldn’t be held responsible for my distortions of their work: Reynolds and Marcus on postpunk, Malvinni on Dead jams, Holm-Hudson et al. on prog, Fellezs on fusion, Elsdon and Ake on Jarrett, Waters on Miles Davis, Gioia on jazz history, Bebergal and Davis on rock occulture, Iverson on Ornette and Jarrett and much else, et al.  132 •

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Selected Sources

Direct quotes come from the following sources. Online resources accessed April 2015. Bittersweet Motel, dir. Todd Phillips (2000) Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, dir. Murray Lerner (2004) “The Idea of the Writer,” David Milch lecture series (2007) Condensed Chaos, Phil Hine (1997) “The Heart of the Cavern,” Sean French, Sight & Sound (Spring 1987) The Phish Book, Richard Gehr & Phish (1998) Band biographies at rollingstone.com, allmusic.com Anastasio speech, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony (2010), via YouTube  133 •

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Anastasio Q&A, rollingstone.com (July 22, 2013) “Trey Anastasio Hints at Phish Reunion,” rollingstone.com (May 28, 2008) Anastasio interview, The Believer (July 2011) Anastasio interview, Charlie Rose (May 26, 2004), via YouTube Fishman interview, http://www.gadiel.com/phish/articles/ fishman.html “Turkey Shoot,” Robert (November 28, 1995)

Christgau,

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Next Steps

The following Phish shows, all commercially released at livephish.com, are very much worth hearing if you enjoy A Live One: 2/20/93 and 5/7/94: whiplash-inducing segues, absurdist comedy, cathartic uplift 11/25/94 and 12/29/94: maximalist ALO-esque madness 12/7/95, NYE 95, and Halloween 96: howling intensity, provisional next step 11/17/97, 12/6/97, 12/30/97, and April 1998: cosmic psych-funk 6/14/00, 2/28/03, 6/19/04: long strange trips 8/7/09, 8/15/11, 8/19/12, 10/20/13, 7/13/14: postreunion maturity

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Deepest Gratitude

Toby, Iggy, Rob, Andy and Zac, RJ and Brad, Mike Hamad, Jake and his Dissertation, Rosemary and her Digest, Brian, Norah, Lynne, Goliath’s Daddy, Crau, Anna and Greg, Cameo and Maciej, Krevice, Lindsey and Rugs, Todd, Jeremy, Dan and Meaghan, Andy and Kelly, Michael and Jo, Larsson, Mr. AK Lingus Esq., Mr. Chris Bertolet (thank you Chris), Dirk420, Terri Tickle, Sherv, Kim, The Good Doc, and Bischoff: Thank you so much. I’m sure I’ve left people out. Thanks (and apologies) to those folks too. My teacher David Thorburn had more impact on my writing than anyone else. He is an extraordinary teacher and writer, and the best editor I ever had. I consider it a privilege to dedicate this book to him. Sinclair Jennings Jr. was a funk/soul singer and barista at Cafe Luna in Cambridge. For a year and a half, from nine to three nearly every weekday, we would talk about music and everything else, occasionally stopping to write or serve coffee. He became one of my closest friends. His girlfriend Jessica was the love of his life; he loved talking about her, so I loved hearing about her. He had a great voice. He taught me so much. Our conversations deeply  136 •

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shaped the plan for this book. Sinclair passed away in February 2014. Too young. It makes my heart heavy and light all at once to dedicate this work to his memory. My editor Ally-Jane Grossan and her assistant Michelle Chen asked the right questions, made judicious suggestions, and pointed me to places I wouldn’t otherwise have gone. This book is better for their contributions to it. And I’m forever grateful to Ally-Jane for taking a chance on the work in the first place. My brother Phillippe and my dad Wally Holland Sr. deserve much more than thanks. I’ve cut as many profanities and parentheticals from the manuscript as I could, for their sakes. Dad, Phil: thank you. This work is only possible because of my wife Agi’s patience, kindness, insight, generosity, and extraordinary work ethic. She is my first and my ideal reader, my most trusted confidante, a great mom and partner in crime, and a very fine writer on her own account. I can never repay my debt to her. I hope our brilliant, beautiful, curious, wonderfully weird son Feliks picks up this book with pride years from now and is like “Phish? The dweebs who sing ‘AC/DC Bag, AC/DC Bag, DC Bag’ over and over? Let it go, Dad.” Agi and Feliks: This is yours, as I am.

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Also available in the series 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans Harvest by Sam Inglis The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli Electric Ladyland by John Perry Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Let It Be by Steve Matteo Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk Aqualung by Allan Moore OK Computer by Dai Griffiths Let It Be by Colin Meloy Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis Exile on Main Sreet by Bill Janovitz Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno Murmur by J. Niimi Grace by Daphne Brooks Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese Low by Hugo Wilcken Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes Music from Big Pink by John Niven In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy Doolittle by Ben Sisario There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis The Stone Roses by Alex Green In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti Loveless by Mike McGonigal The Who Sell Out by John Dougan Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

A LIVE ONE

41. Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris 58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. XO by Matthew LeMay

64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards 67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

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89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Entertainment! by Kevin J. H. Dettmar 92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica by David Masciotra

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