Hampton Comes Alive Revisited

Originally, my column this month was going to be a treatise on the second side of "Billy Breathes" - in other words, Train Song through the end of the album - and how wonderful it is to listen to that suite of songs in the fall, with the window open just a crack, and cold air seeping into the room. It's a wonderful thing, and I look forward to the temperature drop each year just so I can do it. It's a kind of naturalistic "Dark Side of the Rainbow" -- a perfect environment to listen to a certain album.

But I'm not gonna write about that. At least not yet.

This afternoon, I was struck by two quick impulses on the way out the door. The first was that I wanted to hear a really good sounding Phish set while I was in the library. I was already bundled up and didn't particularly feel like pouring through a couple of dozen boxes of tapes to find something. And, besides, my Walkman hasn't worked well for over two years. Somewhere between the skydiving and the submersion in a deep trench in the Pacific, the gears finally started to give. So, as is the usual, I grabbed some CDs. For some reason, "Hampton Comes Alive" jumped out at me. Maybe it's because I couldn't decide what songs I wanted to hear, and HCA provided a bunch of 'em in the same box.

The second impulse was to pick up an old, half-finished journal of mine that's been floating around my desk for the better part of the last two years. The motivation was practical. The pocket notebook I've been using for writing lately has simply become annoying to use; too small. In the library, I sequestered myself in the second floor stacks, and sat for a while, revising an English paper and listening to hypnotizing electronica that served well to drop my brain, like a slowly dulling needle, into a relentlessly repeating groove.

After a little over an hour, I was ready for a break. I stood up, stretched, and went for a brief walk around the floor. When I got back to my spot, I reached into my bag to pull something out and came up with "Hampton Comes Alive". "Swell," I thought. I instinctually pulled the last disc of the set out of its sleeve and slipped it in my CD player. The band's over the top cover of the Beastie Boys' Sabotage thundered through my headphones. I slid back in my chair, placed my head on the back, and stared up at the ceiling with a smile plastered to my face.

It was weird to think that this somewhat private moment was once something shared by 13,000 people. It was an odd little moment, and I decided to write it down. Opening up my journal, I discovered that the last time I had written in that particular notebook was on November 28, 1999 -- an entry titled "notes for 'hampton' review". How's that for synchronicity? Reading them over, I discovered the outline for what would ultimately turn into a somewhat negative review of the set. There was something about the Sabotage that didn't hit me the first time around, when the album came out. It was something in the room: an expectancy.

I back-tracked to the first disc and began from the beginning. One of my early notes reads "this is NOT yr average phish show". Quite true, quite true. To make one obvious observation along those lines: the song selection is incredibly wide-ranging. In fact, one might even argue that the Hampton '98 shows feature arguably the nuttiest Phish setlists this side of this past tour's Vegas gigs. The songs stretch from complex Phish originals to dusted off oldies to new covers primed up just for the occasion. It's certainly an extreme example of the kind of party band Phish were in 1998.

This vibe, defined very much by the slew of covers introduced on an almost daily basis during the summer of '98, permeated the band's shows through the next few years. Hampton is probably the most extreme example. In that, it's probably then the example most likely to let the listener relive the feeling of surprise. Even being fully aware of the setlists as I listened, the cartoonish exaggeration to which the song selections on these discs stretched was enough to keep me constantly on my toes.

Talking about the legendary Big Suit in "Stop Making Sense", David Byrne has often gone at lengths to explain the theory that everything must be bigger on stage -- presumably because something normal-sized would look wee to an audience seated far away. Likewise, a normal setlist would seem particularly bland on album - the audience in another dimension entirely, at home, listening on their stereos - while something exaggerated (like "Hampton Comes Alive") would serve well to recreate the moment.

And recreate it it does. I've listened to the show enough times to know the setlists pretty damn well, but the outlandishness of the songs still filled me with a joy that I can only compare to actually seeing the band bust into a song I haven't heard in a long time. Granted, the playing is still quite sloppy, which can definitely be frustrating, but - I think - it's ultimately forgivable. Phish is gone for a while. That much is obvious. Seeing them was something special. Tapes and CDs can try, but won't ever really be able to recreate it, though they can certainly trigger similar emotions through different means.

For example, at one of my first shows (6/29/95 Jones Beach), I heard what I took to be an amazing bass solo in You Enjoy Myself. When I got the tapes, it didn't seem like anything special. Sometime soon after, I got the tapes of the show three days prior to that (6/26/95 Saratoga Performing Arts Center), which also featured a YEM. The bass solo on that version somehow sounded like the way I remembered the Jones Beach version sounding. Perhaps an emotional memory and documentation of the actual thing are two different entities.

Which, in a way, kind of loops back to "Billy Breathes". I've never heard Phish play anything as quiet as the second side of that album in a live context. But, I certainly have felt the same intimacy at shows, albeit through different means. Who knows what the next years will bring beyond surprises in small nooks and corners of a tape collection?

Jesse Jarnow can't think of anything witty to say.