Arms against a sea of (aquatic versions of) myself, I guess: more on the latest Phish tour, with detailed musical example so I don't completely hate myself.

I liked last night's show, and Deer Creek.

That said.

To deepen my understanding of the fun, quietly disconcerting summer tour at its halfway point, I've been listening these last couple of days to some long '2.0' tracks - the unbelievably cool '46 Days' from IT, the 'Headphones Jam' from the Undermind sessions, the latter two thirds of 6/19/04, the 2/03 and 7/03 jams everyone knows. Trying to figure out what's changed, what's missing, what's been added. Obviously the technical side of the music is stronger than it has been since 1998 at least, maybe earlier. But it's equally clear that the jamming is less adventurous. Less patient. And what's missing, I think, is the deadly electricity that starts flowing after the energy inside a given song-form (and implied improvisatory form) is behind the band.

Here's an example. The IT '46 Days' jumps off the diving board at 3:20 (on the SBD). The implied opening chords thin out to a one-(minor-)chord vamp within a minute or so; around 6:30 the band takes the volume down a little, Fishman starts one of those roiling uptempo drumbeats that characterized so much of Phish '03 (cf. Waves, Walls, Seven Below, Pebbles). By 7:30 Trey is building a grungy soundscape and playing the occasional dark figure in his low range, Page is on the Rhodes, and Mike is in his eerie subterranean place, playing those intricate 2.0 bass figures that are to my ears the most Dead-like thing about Phish's sound. By ten minutes Fishman has cooled out a little along with Trey, going half-speed, but thirty seconds later the band is building intensity and suggesting doubletime rhythms within the kind of ambient-grunge texture they do particularly well.

All of which is to say: eleven minutes into this climactic tune of the festival the band is playing roughly in their scalar homebase, with the same underlying tempo as at the outset, but they're in something of a holding pattern, and anything could happen. What happens is a great big ambient 'space jam.'

If a summer '09 tune reached this point, someone would push the jam somewhere - or you'd have a straight-up ambient interlude and the next tune would kick in.

Nearly a half-hour remains in the IT track, though.

I love the IT documentary (though Trey looks and sounds frighteningly unhealthy in it). There's a great sequence with Page talking about how certain musical moments and exchanges are possible only after you've dwelled with a jam for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes. Underscoring that interview, and then featured for a few minutes, is a long snippet from just after the twenty-minute mark of the '46 Days.' A curtain of noisy guitar/keyboard texture is fading away, and Fish has landed (somehow!) on a sprightly 6/8 beat, counted/accented as two triplets (as in a slightly-fast 'Jesus Left Chicago'). Page starts playing eerie washes on the Rhodes, while Mike and Trey latch onto Fish's new time signature, but feeling it differently - in 3, in 4. After a while Fishman starts subdividing his own phrases in 4, keeping up the tempo (the hi-hat hits are at the same speed) but with a new count (accents and snare hits every 4, then every 8, rather than in 3 or 6).

It is, in other words, a nearly-ten-minute exercise in tension-building following a nearly-ten-minute dark-ambient space-out - and the filmmakers (and maybe Phish themselves?) selected this passage to illustrate one of the central messages of the film and the festival, about patience and empathy and open communication. I think that's important.

So by the 29:00 mark Trey is playing more melodic lines in the midrange, Mike is making groovy suggestions, Page is building some syncopated halfway-funk shit on the piano, and Fish throws some goddamn disco into the drumbeat. From there you get something like a quick quiet 'Piper' groove, shit goes barroom by 35:00 and everyone's getting laid on the back of the 4am bus to Funkytown, and when Page hops back on the Hammond you know Trey's ready to strap on and head home - at 37:00 you have the coolest segue of the weekend, reminiscent of the rocket-liftoff key change leading into 'Mike's Song' on 7/22/97 and complete with suggested modulation from Trey...he takes it back...Page is with him...back...then BOOM, we're back in the home key. Around 39:00 we're out, and the rest of 2003 feels like epilogue.

Why does this shit matter? Because this goofy rock band performs a ten-minute build in intensity, almost without lifting the volume of the music one iota, and it could only have happened after the palate-cleansing, mind-emptying, face-melting blast that fills the song's second ten minutes. Yet those ten minutes would never have happened in early summer 2009.

Maybe it's sobriety.

Maybe it's the twenty-five-year itch.

It's not some new abstract 'focus,' folks - these guys had plenty of focus on that wild summer 2003 tour.

What they also had was the confidence to wait, to listen in quiet for rhythms that aren't only sound, to dig in and revise their jams as they went. Writing is revising, of course; that's the craft. There's a myth that improvised music is totally spontaneous, but that's not quite right. Listening is a craft too, waiting is a taxing physical challenge, and what remains for Phish - what could maybe start coming back in August? - is just that: listening, waiting. Letting the music play itself. Sometimes that means 'noodling' a little. Sometimes noodling (or math, or 'space,' or just cock-rock gone south) gets you thirty minutes into '46 Days' and you've found another universe.

That's the point. That's the thing I've loved most about this band. And if there's a criticism to be leveled at summer '09 so far, that's it as far as I'm concerned: not enough waiting, seeing the other side. Everything up to that point is pure happiness for me, but beyond it is transformation. How fucking good will that feel.

Comments

[kevin are hollo]

SILENCE IS A SOUND.

[kevin are hollo]

your exegesis of '46 days' almost has me wanting to listen to that particular version.

almost ;)

[Wally]

Heh - I like the IT version a lot, though it's as murky as all those long-ass summer 2003 jams. I love walking around at night listening to ambient Phish - it has the same effect on me as In a Silent Way, the long tracks from the On the Corner sessions box, or the boring-but-enveloping ambient-orchestral-drone project Stars of the Lid. The return to the home chords in that IT track really tingles my spine. But if you prefer the more discrete, crazy-idea-a-minute stuff from pre-1997, then there's no version of '46 Days' that measures up - though the best 2/03 material might.

[kevin are hollo]

hey! sendspace that tweezer from nassau, or anything else from '03 you think i need to hear. hard to find that stuff in a torrent...

do this....in memory of me. and i'll hook you up with the goods!

[kevin are hollo]

nervenvaun.

i found it all on phishows.com (was broken for a while, and can actually stream it here at work!).

had never listened to the nassau tweezer. my take:

the angry looseness of the opening is made further strange when the crowd ERUPTS a few minutes in. i have no idea why, i wasn't there, and there seems to be no record of it online. need to read more i guess. it sounds like the band is chopping wood, or thowing chairs on stage, all with a lax gravity that suggests "this might be the last song we ever play again." it's dangerous for sure, and i like it.

around 12 minutes in, triscuit stumbles across a three-chord progression that is SO UNLIKE phish that i sat up in my 1973 econoline office chair and apilled some iced coffee. it's like sludgy van halen, a muted math rock chording from hell. awesome!

from there i spaced out a little, or had a conference call, or something. when i paid attention again, trey was leading the ambient barrage with some prickly riffs, and it sounded concerned, not sloppy or wanton. it was really funny to be listening and at the exact moment remember what you said about waiting until some many minutes until the energy gets BEHIND the band, and that's exactly what i was hearing. fish starts doing these double time tonka trucks and trey picks it up like a three day cough. just like old times! great stuff, thought a llama was going to emerge.

dissolves a bit towards the end, but a top five tweezer no doubt.

anywho, i should give some of these other '03s a ride. definitely intrigued now. the shows i saw back then (gorge, cincinnati) were average at best.

[Wally]

Kevin -

Have a listen to the 6/24/04 DWD - the same gorgeous chiming chords pop up in mid-jam like some kind of recovered childhood memory. 03/04 was a weird time, and the best of it blows my mind. Definitely give IT a listen - the Tower Jam is some nastiness, and I'm a big fan of the Ya Mar, Chalkdust, 8/2 III(?) (the one w/Seven Below) and the long 8/3 tracks.

Your description of the shit is solid by the way. I'm right there with you.

[andrewrose]

Wax, I'm glad to have found this. (Matso, a very old friend, indicated to me you were one person who knew what you were talking about and could also articulate it). I just wrote a long comment today on Miner's 'Initial processing' post defending your general position, as I tend to agree with your assessments here and elsewhere.

But this is a curse I feel I've been privy to ever since I started trying to articulate my own informed and contextualized phish-thoughts sometime in the late nineties; most fans just don't want to get down and dirty and detailed and honest about things.

I like context, though. I like history because it makes listening more rewarding when good stuff happens. I was front row for the 2/26/03 show and it was magic, because I knew they were hitting a place they hadn't been to in a while, and I could see that knew it too. But most of the time, you're not only not in the front row; you're not at the show at all. So here's to having others to talk about it who really know what's going on.

Kevin, here's my take on the best of Phish 2.0: 2/03 is the strongest overall month, and it's worth hearing all of 2/26 and 2/28. I saw 4 shows on this tour, and these were the last two. I remember walking into the Worcester Centrum overhearing some people who were really excited about the show the previous night in Philly. It was an ok show, but nothing special, and I said to them "they have a lonnnnng way to go to get back to the glory days". I guess I was tempting fate walking into that venue saying that, because they went back there right away starting with the first YEM opener since 1989.

That YEM, the 15 minute Moma Dance, and the very hot Maze (and I'm not a Maze fan) to close make 2/26 I definitely worth hearing. Set II is right out Fall 97.

2/28/03 is often mentioned for the Destiny Unbound bustout, but yes, it's the Tweezer that's the real highlight, maybe my all time second-favourite to listen to now, behind the 12/6/97 Tweezer, which is resembles a lot in its tempo shift and crazy 'where did he get that idea' changes from Trey. The first set Bathtub and the Hood are also great too.

Actually, Bathtub Gin had a crazy run as jam-machine starting sometime in Summer 97 and never really looked back until sadly now. Fall 98 is a great year for Bathtub Gin, but so is February 2003. The 2/14 and 2/22 versions are both worth hearing.

If I recall, the 2/20 Tweezer is also pretty nice.

This post definitely makes me want to go back and given IT some more listens. With the exception of the Tower Jam, the Ghost and Day 1 set 1 I remember feeling a bit let down by it.

My other 2.0 highlights are definitely the SPAC 04 shows. People always reference 6/19 II, but the 4-song 6/20 II really does it for me, especially the Ghost->Twist. The segue into Twist is incredibly flawless, and the Twist jam is just a monster. Waves and Drowned from that first set are also worth a listen. Just stay away from Conventry!

Looking forward to more, Wally.