A to B

Residence Inn
Fishers, Indiana

Being on Phish tour is a dangerous thing. It has done weird things to the way I perceive music, by Phish and everybody else. I have a conception of Phish as a whole that has been pieced together slowly over the past seven or so years. Each time I heard a tape, read an interview, or saw a show, my brain processed the information and placed it somewhere into the total picture. It wasn't a linear way of understanding Phish, though it formed a continuous mental image of their work.

Things were juxtaposed. It wasn't uncommon to receive a batch of tapes with some show from 1993 next to some show from 1988 next to some show from 1995. Even if the tapes didn't come at the same time, I was always very conscious of Phish's overall history. There was a beginning and, if not quite an end, a cut-off point. The progression from one period to another began to clearly emerge. From 1993 to 1995, for example, Phish evolved from a hyperactive acid-cut-with-speed outfit to a more relaxed acid-cut-with-opium group. How that progression occurred is a matter up for much debate.

However, listening to, say, an Antelope from 1993 next to an Antelope from 1995, pivot points begin to emerge. In the hyper excursions from 1993, one can start to hear hints of the creased textures the band would delve into deeply during the summer of 1995. By cancellation, things become apparent -- but only through time.

In Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia" (1993), Valentine Coverly studies the mathematical formulae that underlie nature by researching the changes in the grouse population on his family estate's. "Real data is messy. There's a thousand acres of moorland that had grouse on it, always did till about 1930. But nobody counted the grouse. They shot them. So you count the grouse they shot. But burning the heather interferes, it improves the food supply. A good year for foxes interferes the other way, they eat the chicks. And then there's the weather."

"It's all very, very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk -- I mean, the noise! Impossible! ... You start guessing what the tune might be. You try to pick it out of the noise. You try this, you try that, you start to get something - it's half-baked but you start putting in the notes which are missing or not quite the right notes... and bit by bit... (He starts to dumdi-da to the tune of 'Happy Birthday'.) Dumdi-dum-dum, dear Val-en-tine, dumdi-dum-dum to you -- the lost algorithm!" (46).

Within Phish's history, there's a lot of noise. A lot. The tendency, I think, is to overreact. I'm guilty of this as much as the next person. The last two versions of Piper, for example, played at the Molson Amphitheater in Toronto and Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisconsin have been considerable deviations from the thumping arena-rock versions the band has played since 1998. They've made me very happy, as they - to me - have rescued the tune from the dead. I've been quick to jump to conclusions, making grandiose statements. "Piper is back! It symbolizes Phish's new commitment to expansive jamming like they did at Big Cypress!"

That might be true, but it might well be a load of hooey. Either way, it's too early to tell. There's still too much noise. Trey could've gotten shit-faced on a bottle of Jack and wanted to go out and be rowdy. Fish could've sneezed during one of the changes and ended up significantly altering the beat. It's not necessarily a sign of a drastic alteration in Phish's approach to the material.

In "the Medium Is The Massage", Marshall McLuhan wrote that, the way of the electronic revolution, "we have had to shift our stress of attention from actions to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see. George Washington once remarked 'We haven't heard from Benj. Franklin in Paris this year. We should write him a letter.'" The speed with which everything happens has definitely had a profound effect on my mental processes. I'm not sure if it can be characterized at all by any once incident or mode of thinking. Suffice it to say, though, that at an increased speed, everything seems to have more impact than it might actually have -- perhaps because we see "results" more rapidly.

A way to describe it is this: an action A might have the results B, C, D, and E. At the current pace, when B comes up, it might seem to be the most important result of A. C, then, seems like the biggest result of B, etc.. In truth, sometimes, only A and E are important -- B, C, and D are expendable (though necessary) steps. Learning to filter them out is important. The problem is that because we have the ability to document everything, we do. In the past, - without all this highfalutin', high speed communication - B, C, and D all existed, just nobody deemed them important enough to record. Consequently, E was B. The distance between major cause and effect was (and is) exactly the same.

The 'net - and mailing lists in particular - allow people to be really nit-picky without really seeing what the cause and effect of the things they're analyzing are. Because we have the ability to discuss things instantaneously, every little thing becomes a huge signifier. Of course, they are (in a way), but they do end up easily drawing attention away from what's important. I'm speaking in platitudes, so I'll try to come up with an example -- albeit a moderately banal one with no impact on anything other than the system it exists in.

The Grateful Dead were a constantly evolving outfit. It's very easy to track their evolution over the course of an entire year -- say, 1974, when almost every show is readily available. It also makes it much, much harder. Compare it 1975, when almost all of the music played occurred in rehearsal and is, ergo, not available for public consumption (though some interesting rehearsal tapes are in circulation). There were four shows (3/23, 6/17, 8/13, and 9/28). Hearing the development through those four shows makes a lot more sense than analyzing every single show of 1974. The changes are much clearer.

In one way, this is what is good about studio albums. Listening to Phish's studio albums back-to-back, one senses an enormous musical growth. One way to make sense of this growth is by listening to tapes from the intervening years. The Disco Biscuits, for example, have not recorded a studio album since late 1997. In that time, they have completely reinvented their sound. When they next put on a studio album, sometime (theoretically) later this year, they will sound like almost a wholly different band. Time does these things naturally to artists.

If we only had studio albums to go on, there would be a lot less noise. We wouldn't be able to seek out other sources of information. The evolution of Bob Dylan's work - especially in the 1960s - makes a fair deal of sense. One can make broad statements about his development, how he moved from a polemic protest singer to a surrealistic poet, and not be too horribly off. With bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead, there's simply too much noise.

In "the Backlogs Of History", Cullen Murphy wrote "a professor of mine once said that the only thing enabling him to complete his study of medieval France was that so many of the records he would otherwise have had took at were destroyed during the Wars of Religion and the French Revolution. I called him up recently to ask if I remembered his remark correctly. He said yes, I did. And he recalled with particular gratitude a certain bonfire in Carcassone."

What does this all mean?

In short, everybody - myself included - should chill the hell out. In terms of email discussion, going back and forth every day one's thoughts on a given subject might not change at all. One might go from point A to point B and it might seem more significant than it actually is. Given more time, one will probably realize that B is actually nothing more than a small stepping stone for something else...

Works Cited

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber. 1993.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium Is The Massage. New York: Bantam Books. 1967.

Murphy, Cullen. "Backlogs Of History." In Best American Essays, 1997, ed. Robert Frazier, p. 93-7. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1998.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Tour journals are located here.