|
|
innerspace #14 Misty Mountain Symbop:
Phish and the Ever Widening Locus of the Fool On The Hill
by Carol A. Wade - caw39@columbia.edu
Walkin' in the park just the other day, baby...
What do you, what do you think I saw?
Crowds of people sittin' on the grass with flowers in their hair said,
"Hey, boy...do you wanna score?"
I really don't know what time it was, oh oh oh,
So I asked them if I could stay awhile.***
The first time I saw Phish live in concert, I couldn't figure out how to get back to my house after the show. I was moving through space in a blue Honda, with a college friend of mine and a few of his buddies. The bunch of us were steeped like a fine, mellow Oolong in a dense, dusky smog of altered reality. We were living the rock 'n' roll nightmare-dream again, but for the first time, in full, alarming Technicolor.
Lights squiggled from the side of the road, ears buzzed: there were stupid risks being taken, exhibition of ass-baring audacity, the stereo was thoroughly cranked, and total confusion reigned supreme. Shot out of some kind of incredibly vital sonic cannon, I was suddenly new to the world, and I knew I'd have to re-learn everything. It was like what coming back to my house after being gone a while would remind me of. Step into the tube, and everything soon looks different.
That was July 23, 1993, after Phish played Jones Beach Music Theater in Long Island, NY. I was nineteen years old. Myself and my old, totally platonic writing-major buddy, "Nile" Zablocki, were on summer vacation from college and the rigors of Upstate NY. He'd had an extra ticket, and asked if I wanted to check it out. My parents' home is only about 20 minutes away from Jones Beach, but it somehow, after the show, it took us an hour-and-a-half to find it. Clueless as to the proper route, I mistily recalled the earlier part of the evening, passed staring at the bandshell and thinking to myself, "This is the strangest music I've ever likely heard anyone attempt to play. And they're not only succeeding, but it sounds entirely unfathomable."
I sat in the back of the Honda and blindly ogled the world outside the windows, as Nile drove on without aim through the teeming seaside air, his hilarious old friend, Phil, drunk and writhing anxiously in the passenger seat nearby.
*** "I didn't notice but it had got very dark
And I was really, really out of my mind.
Just then a policeman stepped up to me and asked us, said,
Please, hey, would we care
To all get in line, get in line..."***
Nile and I used to play a LOT of SCRABBLE in Oswego. The State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego suffers, along with the rest of the small port town, almost six solid months of brutally shrill, sub-zero weather per year. I was bemused this past Summer when Phish squarely illumined the name of my frosty Alma Mater upon the map, only to have it be probably one of the hottest days that town had ever seen...and I wasn't there (due to lack of funds, agency, etc.).
During nights spent in the Orwellian Skidmore Owings and Merrill lean-to that is Funnelle Hall, Nile and I would play "RULES SCRABBLE", the sort of SCRABBLE that insists upon spelling the name of the game as the trademark suggests (in all caps), which takes no prisoners, and does not suffer semi-illiterate fools gladly.
It was a cold night in February 1993, when through the still, elephantine pauses in which we hatched our silent, masterful verbal assaults, I noticed that there seemed to always be a gentle susurus of music bubbling out of Nile's boom box, when his roommate Ben Doyle wasn't listening to raucous indie hardcore bands like Samiam. At the time, I was largely into bands like Samiam, or Fugazi, or Quicksand. But this other music was a nebulously twirling, casually deft musical explanation of time, construed as a happily noisy baby being pushed along an uneven, sun-stippled cobblestone path, in a wobbly stroller.
"What are we listening to, here?" I finally asked.
"Phish. With a "Ph". You heard of them?" he answered, shuffling tiles intently.
I said that I had, but didn't know very much. I knew they played at places like the Capital Theater in Port Chester, NY. They seemed weirdly fringe; not quite rock, but not "alternative" either, a kind of wry, cheeky, but ultimately mysterious expanding cloud of activity. And wow, I'd finally found someone who was into them.
It took me until the next month to take active steps towards sampling Phish's elegantly evasive effusions. I trundled into the school store after an abysmal Chemistry class one afternoon, and purchased the band's first remarkable studio concoction, "Junta," from 1988. As one who was always a little frightened of the creative indulgence of very long songs, flipping open the case to find TWO CD's (no wonder it was so expensive...I just thought it was rare) was a little nerve-wrinkling. However, determined to see it through, I sat on my dorm bed beside a window in 207 Johnson Hall, which at that moment looked directly out over the diminutive vastness of Lake Ontario at sunset. I hit "Play," and time shifted in the gathering dark.
Almost three hours later, my roommate, Natalie, showed up on the scene and cracked a harsh hallway glare over what had been my pitch-black, star-splashed experimental immersion space module. I glowered around the room, blinking idiotically.
"Hey! Phish!" she exclaimed, gesturing at the stereo as the lazily grinning cha-cha shuffle of "Contact" neared its confounding entry into the 25-minute hellborn railcraft that is "Union Federal".
"They're pretty awesome! Didja buy this today? Carol? Hello? Can you hear me? Hey! Ground control to..."
*** So, great. I totally dug Phish. All my "hardcore" friends now viewed me with suspicion, as I couldn't keep shoving the ubiquitous CDs and tapes, which were mounting and slowly engulfing my sound system, under the bed. I inadvertently impressed people at parties by boredly whistling the most complex of Phish songs, like the labyrinthine "Reba," almost precisely from beginning to end, composed parts and all, while virtually passed out drunk in a corner. My first show having been a blur, I decided that I'd have to do it again really soon. The people at the Phish shows all seemed so free, so willowy and savvy, gleefully enmeshed in their abstract and elemental world of music and spontaneity. In their stead, my local hardcore townie tough pals seemed to be achieving very little, with their low-rent mishmash of apathy and useless "throwin' some eggs at buses" anarchy."They asked us to stay for tea and have some fun,
He said that his friends would all drop by..."***
I'd also been playing bass since 1991, eleventh grade, as I started honing my chops on grainy Led Zeppelin tapes, whist partaking of silly Long Island joyrides with my big brother in his shitty Nissan. A month before my first (and only, as it happens) Phish New Year's show at the Worcester Centrum on the heels of 1994, I finally joined my first real band, Powerdump, on bass guitar, after having jammed ineffectually and occasionally on Pink Floyd and Stone Temple Pilots songs with random area musicians. We were a terrible, scrappy quartet, with two guitars, bass and drums, doing 16-minute Sabbath covers and originals that sounded like Sonic Youth, Neil Young, and Rocket From the Crypt, all stranded together on a rainy, suck-ass camping trip.
There were also some lively Powerdump politics, with J.J. (Guitarist A) being well into Phish and the Grateful Dead (whom, for the record, I have not even scratched the surface of), and Kyle (Guitarist B) being of the "hardcore" camp, asserting that Phish was just a mediocre Frank Zappa rehash band. I later discovered, thrilling to both the studio and live versions of things like Zappa's "Apostrophe", that although Kyle's comments seemed a bunch of grossly mis-estimated shite, he was, in the end, saying quite the opposite by merely seeing it fit to mention Phish in the same sentence with Zappa at all.
I did that funny old "rock star" thing, playing some hilarious gigs around Oswego with the 'Dump, and doing the college thing, walkin' to class groovin' down to my favorites, the Very Early Phish Tapes, ad infinitum (like the infamous 5/28/89 Hebron House show). It started seeming stupid to me to solely support music that wasn't somehow proven to be as consistently adventurous and illuminating as Phish had merely, obviously appeared to me, following one solitary live show. So, for a while, I saw some indie heavy hitters like Pavement, my real favorite band, at venues near home (and no, I'm not just saying that because Trey likes them, too...I could go on for another fourteen pages on that story). And, while at school, I sought out local shows with bands like the Ominous Seapods. Not a bad deal, as it later turned out.
Phish New Year's 1993 > '94 in Worcester, MA, was a simple, yet wildly deafening, Chime of the Mind, another permeating foray into pearlescent depths, incisive confusions, bounce-and-sway-inducing machinations: that intense, penetrating and oft turbulent subtropical ecstasy. Nile, Phil and I, along with another legendary rugby weirdo named Ben, inhaled, ingested and otherwise inverted ourselves before and during the show. Father Time doddered towards the Edge. Meanwhile, the band reached new zeniths of subterranean implosion, tossing headfuls of psionic skull-flowers from the huge stage of the venue, which had been skillfully transformed into a large, supremely goofy fish tank.
Again, my friends and I couldn't seem to find the hotel where we were supposed to go after the show. The four of us, with Nile at the helm, reeled in the new year lurching sloppily through the streets of Woosta, looking for another friend's hotel. Ben searched for Yosemite Sam (read: Sanity), finally spitting a mouthful of water inside the windshield of the Honda, as a four-alarm building fire burned in a surreal crescendo right up the street.
I attended area Phish shows whenever possible over the next three years, but still stayed mostly anchored to responsibilities for the sake of my dear, long-suffering parents. Quite like the perfectly phantasmal, monochromatic illustrations of Jim Pollock, which have acted as a perpetual hallmark to all things Phish since the band's origins in Vermont, I saw many big, happy feet tumble and glide over floors and grasses, as things live and dead flopped and got wiggly, intertwining in the presence of a hurdy-gurdy sound, while sense plunged into nonsense, surfacing for occasional inhalations of structure and form.
*** "Why don't you take a good look at yourself
And describe what you see...
And baby, baby, baby...do you like it?"***
One of the three objects that I fabricated in my Sophomore year jewelry-making class in 1994 was a ring based on the Pollock drawing of Esther's doll, from the liner notes of Junta It's a sweet, clunky, eerie little ring of sterling silver, depicting the notorious thin-grinning, hollow-eyed doll in a tin bucket. The ring's band swirls around the main image in a Gorrey-esque rash of dark ocean waves. I realized when gazing at the ring, polished and ready-to-wear in the palm of my hand, that I was probably more than a little obsessed. Over the course of time, though, I've begun to understand my ever-growing relationship with Phish to be much like the process of crafting my perfectly weird ring of Esther's doll, and my relationship with the ring itself.
To fashion said ring, a small block of hard, purple wax required hours of precise, focused carving with an X-acto knife, a delicate task which, if endeavored at all carelessly, would have proven to waste much time, energy, and wax. The intricately carved form was then embedded in a block of plaster, making a mold, and scraps of an appropriate precious metal were placed in a connected chamber adjacent to the wax mold. The whole thing finally got heated quite fiercely, then wickedly spun in a dizzy centrifuge, and halted abruptly at a special moment. Finally, the piece of finery was extracted and the mold discarded, never to be used again.
I wore the ring for a while, gleaning a few stunned utterances of "Whoa!" and "Nice!" from various heads on campus and at shows. But soon, I came across the conclusion that the music, i.e. the people on the stage and the people behind the stage, and the people before the stage, all of us jiggling and Snoopy-dancing, were like something mined from the shimmering depths of my unconscious...something so incorporeal, so outside of traditional description that the word "music," in this case, actually comes to mean a dance of will and intention that wraps around forms and dissolves them with a big, jolly fizz. The music, like the ring, stands as a delicate evidence of the power of craft, ritual carvings, arcane journeys through form and space. I wrapped up it in paper and put it somewhere safe.
I stopped collecting live Phish tapes almost as soon as I'd started. Something about the concept began to seem vaguely distasteful to me, like collecting butterflies in a jar whose lid has no holes.
Three friends and I moved into a little clapboard ruin a chilly half-block from frozen Lake Ontario in mid-1994. Later that fall, one of my housemates got madly into Phish, and sort of annihilated my tolerance for them after a while, also insulting my self-imposed sacrosanctity of the music by playing the tapes she rabidly and skillfully gathered, quite literally, every waking moment of the day. This served to familiarize me, however, with the gleeful arcana of their repertoire, and served to school me on their current canon as well. And I still went to shows, seeing some totally inspiring ones in Sugarbush, Saratoga, and Fall shows at Madison Square Garden.
I, like everyone else, was thrown adrift by the band's stellar stride at the time. A massive inundation of tour converts arrived on the heels of the Grateful Dead's interruption, caused by the death of Jerry Garcia, who was like religion personified to so many people, in August 1995. I settled into my "I Know Phish, But Know Them Not" phase. I never touched rec.music.phish. I loved Phish phans, and adored my Phishy phriends, but considered myself somehow outside of it all...not from arrogance, but what I now know was a kind of never-ending, otherworldly sense of awe.
*** "There you sit, sitting spare like a book on a shelf rustin'
Ah, not trying to fight it.
You really don't care if they're coming, oh, oh, oh...
I know that it's all a state of mind."***
Instead, I got well into smaller, equally enjoyable bands like moe., savoring the intimate scale of shows. Ironically, I traded tapes with tremendous zeal, and made cherished connections, dabbling amidst their supporters. I toured with moe. like I'd never done before with Phish, learning the ropes of that wobbly-wrought lifestyle, but still coming in contact with the ongoing Phish conversation.
1996 and 1997 marked some distinct changes in the band's aura, though. Their growing pains from expanding into almost strictly big-ass venues seemed to wear off, even as they had gladly, and with great aplomb, flung open the castle doors and beckoned invitingly to scores upon scores of Jerry's Lost Children, with the equivalent of an "Aww Shucks" shrug and grin. That summer, Nile and I braved the beautiful storm that was the Clifford Ball, again watching Phish pull off some major ground-breaking antics. As a spoon plopped, later that first of November, into my soymilk and cereal, I discovered that, for their Halloween mischief of 1996 in Atlanta, the band shimmied through an electrifying, near-flawless musical mock-up of the Talking Heads album, "Remain in Light." You can damn well bet I obtained a tape of that show, posthaste, probably before I finished the cereal.
After becoming less one-track-minded, mellowing as I had been in the varied pools of improv music offerings at the time, I began to yrecognize something about this band that made itself gigantically clear to me in 1998, as it surely does now...
Phish is a bunch of fucking aliens.
*** "If you go down in the streets today, baby
You better, you better open your eyes.
Folk down there really don't care, really don't care,
Don't care, really don't...
Which, which way the pressure lies."***
This past week, Phish closed out its 1999 Fall Tour, their last of the Millennium, with four quizzically monumental New York shows at Nassau Coliseum, and the Pepsi Arena in Albany. Because I am brainwashed by extraterrestrials, I recall the whole thing in its entirety as a singly surreal moving image: an immense, animated stuffed animal (species of your choice), doing joyful pirouettes over the Himalayas, throwing multicolored poppies to the stars. And the answer to your next question is: no, I didn't do any hard drugs!
The moment I poignantly decided that "Phish is a bunch of fucking aliens," I think I was witnessing last winter's Madison Square Garden show on 12/29/98. Thanks to funny fate, and my friend, my friend, Richard (Gehr...he wrote The Phish Book, man), I had gotten closer than ever before to these translucent enigmas, both that night backstage at the mammoth MSG, and a few weeks earlier, at the book-signing for Richard's fittingly brilliant tome of hilarious, intriguing and inspiring interviews with the band.
One strike against defensible humanity on Phish's part is the ceaseless joy and quiet gratitude which seems to surround the members of the group, as they execute many of their tasks. They visibly and authentically ADORE doing what they do. Keyboard masher Page McConnell, bassist (and, in my estimation, head alien) Mike Gordon, Jon "Fish" Fishman of the skins, and the mighty guitar imp, Trey Anastasio, sat at a table at Tower Records in lower Manhattan. I gazed that Autumn eve, with something like a fist-sized pearl in my stomach, at a few of my heroes within an unprecedented mere sneezing distance.
The four dudes exuded a yards-thick aura of power and clarity, and they grinned, cheerily signing books for a line of exuberant freaks and heads seemed to drool out the store's door, through Greenwich Village, and Uptown to the top of the Empire State Building. Staring in quiet disbelief, I marveled at the fact that, even though they must've been a *little* fatigued (they'd been there for three hours before I'd even arrived), they managed to look almost every one of the hopping, flipping, super-elated and ecstatic phans directly in the eye, surely reinforcing in that person's feeble, human brain, the reign of their secret alien ploys.
I think back to "The Superintelligent Shade of the Colour Blue," one of the "folk" occupying the universe of Douglas Adams' rollickingly pithy sci-fi farce, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Of course, one can't really go much further, at least in English, to describe such an entity, because it is so far outside the realm of human comprehension, that it seems almost too inane to bother.
With the energy of the crowd and the love in the arenas, usually so desperately impersonal, at an all-time high, I found myself doing odd things like imagining I was being sucked backwards into the birth canal as I entered the turnstile, four nights in a row. With my ticket stub im my hand, I leapt and whooped each night, my body tingling from the cellular level, and I came to a new understanding of the song "Golgi Apparatus" (which they played, prophetically, the first night at Nassau). My old pal Nile, who had disapppeared from my world (as he often mystically does), reappeared a week before that first show with FLOOR TICKETS, repaying me for my treating him to the Naassau show two Aprils ago. Floor tickets were a first for me, and I dazzled at finally being able to detect the surely non-humanoid scales on Page's neck.
I danced the "Meatstick" on night two, watching Page's lovely, diminutive wife, Sofi, conduct a crowd of thousands in the nonsensical terpsichorean ejectamenta. From uncharacteristically viewing Phish's setlists of late, I'd realized a few days earlier that they were now totally littered with old-school favorites, and peppered liberally with jam and segue bust-outs of a miraculous ken (eg. "Peaches En Regalia", "KUNG", things like "Mike's Song" > Catapult (?) thirteen other weird tunes > "Mike's Song" > something that's NOT "I Am Hydrogen" (?!) > "I Am Hydrogen" > "Weekapaugh Groove").
The other blot on the credibility of Phish's alleged "of-this-Earth"-ness is evidenced by a full spate of protean, ever-evolving and truly confounding musical lightning bolts. Trey's recent incorporation into his bag o' tricks has been the elemental freak-out that I've happily termed "The Quasa-loop": you know, that crazy thing that he's been doing with some kind of delay pedal, programming one piercing, high-pitched descending guitar shriek into the unit to have it loop out beguilingly, sometimes through the duration of an entire song (at varying volumes). The first night in Albany last week, this bit of intense wizardry served to so successfully "cook" the jams in "Bathtub Gin" and "Stash" that I wrote in my notebook, trembling:
"Who gains from this? What gain? IT is US. WE are IT...no in-between! The ancestry! Heart-login, skipped beat signals closeness...a room of 30,000+ seems like a tiny little theatre...intimate chaotics...something is telling me to face my destiny..."
Once again, I ended up doing a lot of NOT sleeping, and tons of partying and rump-shaking and whatnot, getting the flu, and then recieved some snooty stares from the bosses at work (one being another citizen beguiled by Phish's charms, Jambands.com editor and author of the superbly phun "Phishing Manual," my patient editor, Dean Budnick). But all four days and nights, the lunacy of events which surround Phish concerts, both good and not-so-good, have proven themselves to me, again, to be like some kind of graceful and elaborately humorous spiritual event. Not overtly outer-worldly, they have surveyed our atmosphere with unblinking ease, making a point of doing "little things," like launching tours on nights of Full Moons, and wrapping them up on New Moons. Taking pains, they commune with some larger conversation, their craft being the means by which they deliver their observations to the main headquarters of their far-off, Venusian landscape.
*** "So, I've decided what I'm gonna do now.
I'm packing my bags for the Misty Mountains
Where the spirits go now,
Over the hills where the spirits fly...ooh, ooh, ooh
I really don't know. I really don't know."***
Phish is...well, Phish is definitely on the way to somewhere. Where they're going, and even where they've been have been places made just for them. Heck, they were probably even made for them by *themselves*, as they've slumbered and dreamt, drifting in alien somnambulance. Maybe it's Florida, where they and a million of their closest friends will play amidst the Lizards into the Dawn of the New Age. More than anything, the four guys always demonstrate the power of the raw creative spirit, the way that thoughts can be woven into reality, on a daily basis, and crazy dreams made to seem like the most alluring, appealing, and altogether happy and regular old hoot.
They began the four-night stand with the whirling, cathartic "Piper". They concluded the tour with first encore, "Contact," a symbolic hurrah to the empty joys of tour traveling, and an arrestingly nostalgic song for me, born on 19 November, and forever clinging to the road, it seems.
But the second encore was, for the sake of drama, probably the best moment of Phish I've yet seen, an honest and bombastically triumphal version of Led Zeppelin's classic, "Misty Mountain Hop". Since I am a Symbolist by nature, I wasn't surprised when I tumbled up to friends after the show, swabbing tears from my face with a crumpled concessions napkin, rattling, "You don't GET it? 'I really don't know, know, know...I really don't know, know, know..'?" I bawled near the Waterwheel at Page-side, to smiles and stares of perplexity from kindly strangers and friends, alike. I'm convinced that many of my "friends" are probably one of their agents, as are many people in my life. But I'm not afraid. I'm really not.
Phish are alright. The kids are alright. They've made my world a foggier, weirder, more quixotic and enlightened place. And you can't find that sort of thing anywhere with your eyes open, no matter what they may say about eyes.
Carol A. Wade is hurtling towards the decadent Sodom of a career in Library Science. She is also a musician, writer, artist, and alien life form (whoops). Kick her some knowledge at carol@jambands.com.
she is moving to describe the world
she has messages for everyone
she is moving by remote control
hands that move her are invisible --- "the great curve"
- Talking Heads
October Issue: Home | Editors | Features | Columns | Photos | Regional | New Groove
Road Trip | Tour Journal | Venue | Levels | Ghosts | Homegrown | Inaudible | CDs | Charts
JamBands.Com is published on the 15th of every month. Submissions are due ten days earlier on the fifth of each month. Please contact the specific editor for the section you are interested in contributing to. For general content comments, please e-mail jambands@jambands.com. For all technical web site related issues, please contact Sarah Bruner or David Steinberg