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Can Someone Explain Phish to Me


dcbc

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  • 4 weeks later...

Twenty-five years ago tonight I saw my first Phish show. 

Phish | Tue Apr 20th, 1993 | Newport Music Hall | Columbus, OH 

Set 1: Runaway Jim > Weigh > Sparkle, Stash, Bouncing Around the Room, It's Ice > Glide, Uncle Pen, Lawn Boy, David Bowie1

Set 2: Chalk Dust Torture, Fluffhead > Sample in a Jar, Big Ball Jam, The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu > The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, My Friend, My Friend2, Llama, You Enjoy Myself, Hold Your Head Up > Whipping Post3 > Hold Your Head Up, Golgi Apparatus

Encore: Funky Bitch, Amazing Grace4

1. Simpsons and All Fall Down signals in intro.

2. Beginning featured Trey on acoustic guitar.

3. Fish on vocals.

4. Without microphones.

The Bowie intro contained Lawn Boy teases from Trey as well as Simpsons and All Fall Down signals. The beginning of My Friend featured Trey on acoustic guitar. YEM contained Mission: Impossible theme teases. Whipping Post featured Fish on vocals. Amazing Grace was performed without microphones.

 

I saw my second Phish show the next night. 

Phish | Wed Apr 21st, 1993 | Newport Music Hall | Columbus, OH 

Set 1: Buried Alive > Poor Heart, Foam, Guelah Papyrus, Maze, Colonel Forbin's Ascent > Fly Famous Mockingbird > Rift, Punch You In the Eye, I Didn't Know1, Run Like an Antelope2

Set 2: Possum, Mound, Split Open and Melt, The Squirming Coil, The Horse3 > Silent in the Morning, Big Ball Jam > Mike's Song > The Great Gig in the Sky, Weekapaug Groove, Gumbo

Encore: Sweet Adeline, Cavern

The jam segment of this Melt is the one that appears at the end of Demand on Hoist. The Mockingbird Narration contained a quote of the Winkie Chant ("O-Ee-Yah! Eoh-Ah!") from The Wizard of Oz. I Didn't Know featured Fish on trombone and The Horse featured Trey on acoustic guitar. Antelope contained a Divided Sky tease from Trey, an I'm a Man (Spencer Davis Group) tease from Page, and Simpsons, Key Change, Tritone Down, and Random Note signals. Mike's contained a brief Oye Como Va tease.

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Cool.

Hauled ass back from TX/OU to catch the second show of a two night run at the Austin Music Hall for my first show.  Priorities.

SET 1: Buried Alive > Poor Heart > Slave to the Traffic Light, I Didn't Know, Demand > Llama, Foam, Strange Design, I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome[1], David Bowie

SET 2: Julius, Simple > Tweezer -> The Lizards, Sample in a Jar, Suspicious Minds > Hold Your Head Up, Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise

ENCORE: Funky Bitch

[1] Acoustic.

 

Ticket was $17.50 according to the internets.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 3 years later...

I believe Phish peaked in the 90’s. I’ve purged a lot of their music from my collection but I still have a big box of live discs. I’ve got about 75 discs on two spindles in my car that have been there for several months that I plan to offer to someone I see with a Phish sticker on their car. I haven’t seen a Phish sticker on a car in all that time. But then I don’t do a whole lot of driving around town. It’s weird, though, because the main reason I checked them out in the first place was because in the early 90’s, every time I was going to Dead shows I was seeing more and more cars in the lot with Phish stickers on them.

I did have Trey’s thesis The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday on one of those spindles but reconsidered and decided I should probably hold onto that one.

I still need to tell the story of my 4th Phish show on 6/21/94. It’s a great story.

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  • 2 months later...

On the CBS morning news (aka “CBS Mornings”), they just came in from a commercial break with the opening riff from Tweezer. Tony Dokoupil was doing the commentary. He’s married to Katy Tur, a Phish fan (or phan) who used to work for MSNBC before she became a mother. That can’t be a coincidence.

Here’s Katy posing backstage with Phish lyricist Tom Marshall:

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Love hearing those little drops. Sporting events on Fox often have it as well, but it’s sometimes just barely there… almost subliminal-like.

This article did a good job explaining it:

https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/entertainment/2021/10/28/vermont-band-phish-songs-world-series-2021-outro-music-commercial-breaks/8581419002/

Also, I miss Katy Tur. I actually didn’t realize she left MSNBC, but good for her. Her Phish drops were a work of art.



Really liking the sound of the band during this spring tour. A shame they didn’t play any Texas dates this time around, but it’s hot as balls outside. (Friends and I are hitting up Dick’s for the Labor Day weekend run. Should be fun.)
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11 minutes ago, dbecks said:

Love hearing those little drops. Sporting events on Fox often have it as well, but it’s sometimes just barely there… almost subliminal-like.

We get a lot of Dead and Phish snippets in the outros of NFL broadcasts.

The all-timer of Tweezers, aka “Tweezerfest,” was performed at the Bomb Factory in Dallas on 5/7/94. And it was the bomb. That was in their heyday.

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38 minutes ago, dbecks said:

Yes, yes you do.

 

Okay. You asked for it. It’s a long story and you’ll see why I’ve been putting it off. Buckle up.

Summer Solstice shows used to be a big deal for the Dead. I assumed the same would be true for Phish. It really wasn’t but this was a crazy show. It was at the Cincinnati Music Hall which is a gorgeous venue.

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It was a beautiful day, great weather. Back then there wasn’t much of a lot scene at Phish shows. We tailgated close to the venue. There wasn’t a big parking lot. There was a park across the street and we hung out there for awhile. We saw a grand total of one dude selling t-shirts. Another guy was selling stickers. That’s the extent of the vending we saw.

So into the show. We had really good seats. We had box seats on stage left. There was a separate hallway that you could only access with those tickets. We had our own refreshment stands and restrooms. To get to our box, we’d go into a little hallway, then each box had a little cloakroom with a curtain on both sides, then you’d get to your box. The chairs in the box weren’t fastened down so we stacked them up in the cloakroom, kicked off our footwear, and danced barefoot on the carpeted floor. It was luxurious.

Now, I’d already been to dozens of Dead shows. I’d had a lot of hippies ask to borrow my ticket stub to bring a friend down to the floor or the pavilion or wherever. I’m no sucker. I’m sure they meant well at the time but I also know that as soon as they got to wherever they wanted to go, returning my stub to me was not going to be a priority. But in this case, some kid, who couldn’t have been older than sixteen, if that, asked if he could borrow my stub. It was such a cool scene and we were having such a great time, and there was no way in hell that he wouldn’t come back to our box. So I gave it to him.

And a few minutes later...FIRE ALARM! They stopped the show and everyone had to leave the venue. And I was left without my ticket stub. We all filed out, and into the park across the street. I frantically scanned the crowd to see if I could find that kid who had my stub. No luck.

Fortunately I was there with a couple friends and they were able to stub me back into the show. When the band came back on stage, Trey explained that there could be no more smoking or if the fire alarm went off again then the show would be over. (They played a continuous set after that and opened with a cover of Hendrix’s Fire.) We were still able to sneak into the little cloakroom to smoke a bowl behind the curtain.

And I got my stub back. Because who wouldn’t want to return to that box and the person that kid was stubbing down was...HIS MOM! She apologized profusely. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” It was all good. But let that be a lesson to you. Never, ever let anyone borrow your ticket stub.

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Here’s a fairly decent bootleg video of the show with good quality audio:

 

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That show gets overshadowed because the next night at Vet’s Memorial in Columbus was released as Vol 10 of the Live Phish official releases. That was an amazing show too. It was also the first time I saw a real lot scene at a Phish show. The venue is right by the river and, while the parking lot is on the opposite side of the venue from the river, there’s a lot of grassy space to hang out on between the venue and the river.

It’s a solid venue but I’ve only seen a handful of shows there. They’ve never hosted a lot of shows since I’ve been living here. But it’s a weird mix. I’ve also been there to see Jethro Tull, Howard Jones, Yes, String Cheese Incident, and Bob Dylan. Isn’t that bizarre? (That Dylan show kicked ass, btw, not like the first time I saw him at a stadium.)

Anyway, since I’m in a storytelling mood, I had great seats for this Phish show. My roommate and I had third row center seats. On that tour, Phish was only booking venues where you could buy tickets at the box office without having to go through TicketMaster. So we went down to buy tickets the day they went on sale. When we got to the parking lot, there were some other fans hanging out. We went to the box office and took our place first in line.

Then some dude who was in the parking lot before us approached us and said he should be in front of us in line because he was there before us. I told him, “Sorry, dude. The line starts here.” And then I added that he learned a valuable lesson that day. Idiot. Still, first person in line at the box office at the venue at the moment the tickets go on sale should get front row center seats but that’s now how ticketing works and we probably did better than you could ever do today.

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I mentioned the “Tweezerfest” show from Dallas. I’ve labeled this show as “Teaserfest.” You should check it out. There are a lot of quotes from other songs and a lot of ins and outs. Also, it was my first time trying to keep a setlist at a Phish show and my first time hearing Simple. I labeled it “Skyscraper.”

The next day I boarded a plane for Vegas to see three nights of the Dead. That began my departure from the Dead and getting on the Phish train because they had a lot more energy. 

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