Tom Marshall and the I-Ching

I had a little flurry of Phish and Dead merchandise buying this month. In the space of a week I bought Dicks Picks XIX and XX, Outside Out, Trampled By Lambs, and Don't Let Go. I was constantly going to my UPS drop box to see if any of my purchases had arrived. In the middle of this week, I got a package that I forgot about - Sean Gibbon's book Run Like an Antelope.

This book seemed like it would be right up my alley. Someone did all of summer tour 99 and was going to write stories about his adventures. That sounds great. There was unfortunately one thing the jacket blurb didn't mention.

You know that scene in Bittersweet Motel? There are these two stereotypical frat boys sitting around, shotgunning and talking about women's arm pit hair. Imagine those two wrote a book about summer tour 99. You'd end up with something like this. Outside of an interesting digression about the search for adventure (See my November 1999 column for the same idea.), it's a very humdrum book. It's never about the music or the adventures on the road or the history of the towns. It's about the hot chyx he sees at shows and the booze he manages to drink. The book takes under 3 hours to read and you don't emerge with a deeper insight into anything other than the workings of Sean Gibbon's mind. If that weren't enough, there are two statements that make me wonder why Gibbon even wanted to write this book.

The first one is so obviously disprovable that I wonder why anyone wrote it, "Part of the appeal of the road is that you really don't have time alone to think. No time for self-reflection." Other than a failed attempt at sarcasm, I can't think of any explanation for this statement. When you're on the road, you only have music and a couple friends to entertain you. If you're driving alone - maybe your friends are asleep - there's nothing but time. The very act of driving long distances produces a zen-like trance (drivers' education pamphlets call it "Highway Hypnosis") that makes it all but impossible not to think and have insights. Almost all of my best ideas have come from being in a car or a plane or somewhere where there is nothing to do but think.

The second one comes from Sam Ankerson. He works for Strangefolk's management and for some reason is consulted frequently in this book as a Phish expert. Ankerson claims that Phish's formula was to ignore lyrics completely and focus solely on the "peak" of a jam. Later he claims that "It was only after the Grateful Dead went away," that Phish have written real lyrics. He thinks that this is a good thing, that Phish have made the whole jambands thing easier for everyone and created a much easier template to follow than the Grateful Dead's. He said Phish were dependent on one thing, and said that this thing was easy for other bands to reproduce. There are two problems with this picture. The first one is that Ankerson says that his last show was in 1994. The style he describes is one that Phish stopped playing in 1991 or 1992, back when they were playing clubs. Sure if you hit peaks, you can draw enough people to fill Trax or Ziggy's, but how come Phish haven't played those venues in 7 years and Strangefolk still are? The answer is simple. Phish were never just about the peak, and - more importantly for this column - Phish's lyrics are not as stupid as Ankerson (and Sean Gibbon) make them out to be.

Before we go any further here, let me clarify. Phish do have some stupid lyrics. "Dinner and a Movie," "Contact," "You Enjoy Myself," there are lyrics that are just dumb and I can't defend at all. Others such as "Clod" and "Stash" are clearly written to use the voice as another instrument. However, the vast majority of Phish's lyrics are not stupid. It's not that they're dumb, it's that they're not immediately understandable. [1].

When I was in college, I used the I-Ching on a fairly regular basis. While the I-Ching has a reputation of being a fortune telling device, it actually is something both more and less than that. This is not a Magic 8 Ball that gives you yes and no answers to questions. If you use it correctly, you get somewhat vague answers to open ended questions. It's not supposed to give you answers, rather it's supposed to give you things to think about to clarify your thoughts. The answers are interesting enough to start a conversation, but not definitive enough to stop it. That, in a nutshell, is the secret behind most of Phish's lyrics.

As early as "The Curtain," Phish were writing lyrics in this vein. "As he saw his life run away from him/Thousands ran along/Chanting words from a song." Something is happening there. I have no idea what it is, but if someone has a theory I'd love to hear it. That song ventures a little too far towards obscurity, but it shows the path that later lyrics (mostly written by Tom Marshal, unlike "The Curtain") would take.

What Tom Marshall is able to do better than anyone I know is to paint a moment in a character's life so vividly that you really want to know what happened before and after the event to get them there. And "since the end is never told," you're forced to make up your own stories, forced to become a creative actor, a participant in Phish's lyrics. The first example of him being able to do this is "Sparkle." When I first heard this song in fall of 1991, I was completely blown away. I managed to get a tape of a show, and listened to it over and over again to transcribe the lyrics [2]. Even now, a decade later, I catch myself occasionally rewinding to the beginning of it. Why? "Sparkle" is the flip side of "Terrapin"

"Terrapin Station," for those of you who don't know, talks about two characters who are asked to sacrifice everything for love. The focus there is on the person who took the risk. "Sparkle" follows the other character. The protagonist in this song is watching the love of his life marry someone else. He's trying to be a good sport, buys a present for the wedding, but this is a song of lament and frustration over what could have been.

At this point, there are probably a hundred people poised to send me an email explaining to me that I don't know what the song is about. Tom Marshall himself seems to think this is a song about someone having second thoughts about his own wedding. Well you know what? Tom Marshall is wrong! The song is about someone who missed out on an opportunity and that's that. Sorry Tom.

Being able to write songs that are concrete enough to be able to be moving but abstract enough that people can interpret the songs differently is not an easy task by any means. The missteps of a "Stash" (Does anyone know or even care what, "The solar garlic starts to rot" means?) or a "Lifeboy" (aka "This is my anti-religion song.") are there if you misstep too far to one side or another. More frequently than not though, Marshall does manage to hit it perfectly, creating lyrics which open all sorts of possibilities to think about[3]. Ankerson and Gibbon dismissing their lyrics says more about their reasoning skills than Tom Marshall's writing skills.

[1]The other perceived strike against Phish's lyrics is that they are personal instead of political. One of these months I'm going to write the column that explains why political lyrics are a disservice to both politics and music. For now though, let it be understood that I know that Phish don't write songs about why George Bush really lost the election, and I think of that as a good thing.

[2]When I was doing so, I got one line wrong. I still prefer "Apologize to loosen Lil" (as in, if you apologize to her, she will answer your questions) to "Apologize to Luce and Lil."

[3] Want more examples? How about "Brian and Robert?" I got in a vicious debate on the Phunky Bitches list about whether this is a olive branch laid out to a depressed person, a sneer of superiority towards someone who spends his life watching television instead of living, or just an ode to the music of Fripp and Eno. I know of at least two valid (if somewhat similar) interpretations of "Wading in the Velvet Sea," both which hang on the meaning of "Someone else will set your clocks." There's the chorus to "Sample in a Jar," which has always moved me, even if I didn't quite know why:

I wheeled around because I didn't hear what you had said
I saw you dancing with Elihu up on Leemor's bed
And I was foggy rather groggy, you helped me to my car
The binding belt enclosing me, a sample in a jar

I could go on like this for quite a long time; if you want to hear more, find me at a show and egg me on.

David Steinberg got his Masters Degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1994. He first discovered the power of live music at the Capitol Centre in 1988 and never has been the same. His Phish stats website is at www.ihoz.com/PhishStats.html and he was the stats section editor for The Phish Companion.