Music → Markup.

[This turned out to be something, but it's still just about Phish, so if you're at all skeptical about this sort of thing, skip to the bottom paragraph and be done with it. Seriously! You have been warned.]

For many Phish fans, the segue is the true measure of a set's fluidity and complexity. In Phish-fan parlance there are two kinds of segues - the bracket and the arrow. Take this setlist, from 4/5/98 in Providence:

Oh Kee Pa > YEM, Theme > McGrupp, Gin → Cities > Sparkle, Melt

The crucial element in there is the Gin → Cities marking, which denotes an improvisatory bridge between the songs, a passage that's neither the clattering midtempo rock of 'Bathtub Gin' nor the thumb-on-the-turntable sludge-funk of Phish's Talking Heads cover. Not only does the music not stop, it changes form to get from one tune to the other. If the tunes aren't in the same key, the band might start the second song wherever they already are, tonally, and drop into the right key after a few seconds or minutes - or the may walk the circle-of-fourths for a while before alighting on a suggestive key, which might prompt a new musical direction. The point is, when you see an arrow on a setlist, it means something is going on, risks are being taken, truly new music is coalescing in the gutters between tunes. The word 'composition' is being stretched and joyously repurposed onstage. For Phish fans (as for Deadheads) there's nothing better than a clean-but-crazy segue, one that in retrospect makes perfect sense but could never have been predicted at the outset of a jam. For many fans, those are the holy moments.

The bracket segues, on the other hand, can denote anything from the stop/start of OKP > YEM to the band fading out 'Theme' while Anastasio tosses out the opening licks of 'McGrupp.' Old Phish setlists tended to be heavy on the brackets and light on arrows - though once in a while you'd stumble across some absurdity like this, from 2/20/93 in Hotlanta:

Wilson > Reba, Tweezer → Walk Away → Tweezer > Glide > Mike's → My Mind → Mike's > Hydrogen → Kung → Hydrogen > Weekapaug → Have Mercy → Weekapaug → Rock and Roll All Nite Jam → Weekapaug, Fast Enough for You > Big Ball Jam > HYHU > Terrapin > HYHU → Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise

Yes, the show is as ridiculous as its setlist. (And a fine copy is available in the Live in Atlanta box set.) The Glide > Mike's Song suite feels like a single performance; the frenzied quote-heavy performance of 'Glide' carries over as Anastasio starts whipping up the 'Mike's Song' guitar line, and when the band slingshots into the tune it's like the resolution of the previous song's tension. The spirit is improvisatory though the setlist was at least partly written in advance, and if the set wasn't full of onstage composition, it did feature wild onstage rearrangement - songs popping up within other songs, lengthy quotes piling atop one another, an anarchic party-hearty spirit that might've seemed strange from a bunch of 20something nerds. 'My Mind's Got a Mind of Its Own' evolves organically out of a cooled-out 'Mike's' jam; 'Kung' starts up where 'I Am Hydrogen' should be; 'Have Mercy' slips into a 'Weekapaug' longueur before a brief KISS tribute, and the whole scene feels like a single suite. Segues got more meaningful later on in the band's career, as average song length stretched far beyond the old standards:

Halley's Comet → Tweezer → Black-Eyed Katy > Piper, Antelope

That's 11/22/97 II, one of the canonical Phish sets from the band's greatest tour by far, Fall 1997. In this case the setlist hides more information than it reveals: 'Halley's Comet' skips right past the usual outro chords and into a greasy funk groove that mutates, after fifteen minutes or so, into a terrifyingly intense 'space jam' - roaring noise and feedback, celestial synth textures, and a pounding lost-in-a-cave beat from Fishman on drums. The whole thing lasts 25 minutes, and if it's the most interesting and uplifting jam of the set, its appeal is matched (in other ways) by the devastatingly sexy Tweezer → BEK middle portion. The set wanders all over the goddamn map musically, and there's nothing in 'Halley's' or 'Tweezer' that would explain what transpired between the two songs.

In the future we'll make improv-rock setlists as we now make 'tag clouds' on blogs - the heaviest tracks will simply be noted in a bigger font, and big breakaway jams will get their own 'Jam' notation in 48pt blinking Comic Sans, and the world will be light. Or shit - by then I suppose the world will be shit. I wonder whether they'll look back and say this post sped up the process of beshittening, or stemmed the tide for a moment - or perhaps they'll say nothing at all, as I've just done.

Well. To sum up: Improv-rock fans use straightforward markup for their setlists, which in combination with fan expectations and collective knowledge enables complex evaluation and info-exchange - despite the data's lossy compression scheme. This notation is unique to improvisatory rock; most jazz fans rarely need to note segues in this way. What's important to me isn't important to you, probably, though the fact that it's important (to me) might be an entryway by which you access the hidden heart of Just Another Human Being. And so how will I find my way into yours?

Comments

[Sherv]

I'm not starting a blog!

[Wax Banks]

Sounds less like a statement of fact than a ritual incantation to ward off evil blog spirits... [insert little winky smiley here, alas.]

[Mr Misty]

How much of this do you think of the following was pre-written, and why? Sounds fairly fluid and nutty to me.

Wilson > Reba, Tweezer → Walk Away → Tweezer > Glide > Mike's → My Mind → Mike's > Hydrogen → Kung → Hydrogen > Weekapaug → Have Mercy → Weekapaug → Rock and Roll All Nite Jam → Weekapaug, Fast Enough for You > Big Ball Jam > HYHU > Terrapin > HYHU → Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise

[kevin are hollo]

@mr misty

the inclusion of the "rock and roll all nite," replete with guest Jay Von Lehe as gene simmons (he had to be there, and dressed accordingly), makes me think they planned things out a little bit (maybe a lot).

some of those songs (tweezer, mike's) lend themselves to segue simply by song structure, mode, key, etc. i imagine trey writing things out by saying, "we start here (tweezer), and find out way here (walk away)."

dunno. maybe it really was black magic, and things were culled from a mid-air cauldron. i like to think so (on my good days).

[Matso]

A follow-up post to this entry would deal with the totally unsexy "," and the rather more exciting "*" (the latter however being used to excess by the good folks at Phish.net).

What's interesting to me is how often these symbols are misused because that's how we want a set to be. For example, is it really "HYHU > Terrapin > HYHU → Hood"? (I can't remember, it's been a long time and I couldn't bring myself to shell out for this set). Even if it's not the case in this set, isn't there often a pause between HYHU and a Fishman tune, which nonetheless gets represented as a >? It's what we expect, even if it's not what we hear.

And a HYHU → Hood? How can that possibly work given that Hood starts off with a declarative smack of the toms - were Page and/or Mike just holding that last night of HYHU right into the drop into Hood? Isn't that closer to a > in spirit even if the songs overlap?

In that respect, I think we need another mark to signify the difference between a true segue (eg. DWD → Mikes, 7/22/97) and a new song starting up before another one completes (eg. Ghost → Free, 12/29/03 - Trey can basically steer anything into Free by signalling it with those chop-chop-chop chords and letting the other guys fade out). Perhaps the latter should be a >>? True →'s are much rarer in practice than in theory. Imagine, if we could get improv-rock fans to use >> how exciting it would be to see a → in a setlist.

[Matso]

Not sure what happened with the itals... It was just supposed to be the word 'want'.

[Matso]

and that should read 'last note', not 'last night'. Sincere apologies.

[Mr Misty]

Honestly, I don't understand the intense focusing on the > vs. the -->. Really, when listening to it, every individual will declare their own thoughts anyways, right?

This isn't meant to be negative, just pulling the truth out of it all.

PS - @kevin r hollo - yes I agree it may have been somewhat pre-written, but the playing throughout, and all the teases, etc, are played with absolute pinpoint accuracy. Amazing stuff!

[Goliath's Daddy]

I have never even seen this differentiation between arrows and >. I guess I am out of the loop.