Sand (Crouton Rockin' with Trey Anastasio in Cleveland)

NOTE: This here article was supposed to have been posted the morning of Tuesday, 2/27 (a review of the previous night), but we've been experiencing some server problems. Sorry it's so durned late. Rockin' the town like a moldy crouton, yo. - JJ.

Studio 77
Oberlin, Ohio

In 1997, near the end of my first semester in college, I saw a shitty Phish show - the tour closer - and subsequently got stranded in Albany for telling a friend that I thought the gig was crappy. I was told that I was "bringing [her] down" and she stalked off into the thick crowd. I was left to take a Greyhound back to Cleveland. As I tried to study in the dim light of the back row, my legs contorted and I fell into a half-sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness in a wholly uncomfortable position. I got back to school in a daze and promptly failed my first major college exam.

Though some like it, the show still stands out for me as bad. At the gig, it appeared that Trey was drunk. And, if he wasn't, it didn't matter in the least: he was just performing badly. The playing was sloppy and it seemed as if the band was coasting on the vibe of an otherwise superlative tour. Besides the 1997 New Year's Run and April 1998 Island Tour - which still strikes me as the peak four shows in Phish's history - the tour closer at the Knick seemed to set the tone for the bulk of the next three years of Phish, until the hiatus in October 2000.

Granted, there were some killer shows in there, but they rode the crest of a vibe, something peculiar to Phish shows, that - at a certain point - became bigger than the band themselves. Whatever it was, it didn't belong to the band. It didn't entirely belong to the audience either, for that matter. It was something in the middle.

This something was embodied, in a way, by the glowstick wars that erupted at almost every show from the Great Went onwards. Simultaneously a bitch of a hassle and a gorgeous spectacle, the glowsticks seemed to be a pure product of the relationship. One can pinpoint Trey's encouragement of the first glowstick war - Harry Hood at the Went - as a moment where the band first lost control.

During 1997, the band entered a heavy funk period. What they were playing wasn't so much genuine funk, but rather some kind of hippie permutation of it -- "cow funk", as Trey called it in "the Phish Book". It was dancing music, and it felt completely natural and right when they began to do it. By the summer of 1998, though, the formula had become a fair bit hackneyed. The band's songwriting during this time seemed to reflect the improvisation.

A batch of songs introduced by Trey at a one-off Eight Foot Fluorescent Tubes show in 1998, a scant two weeks after the Island Tour, and refined on his first solo tour in 1999, seemed as if they were plucked straight from the air -- latent grooves that the band and audience engaged in but had never explicitly stated. These songs included much of which would eventually wind up on "Farmhouse": Gotta Jibboo, Sand, First Tube, and some that didn't, such as Mozambique and Last Tube. The songs, like the jamming, felt truly as if they weren't so much written or conceived but simply taken down, as if the vibe were dictating them.

In that way, and others, the songs never belonged to Phish. For one, they were written mostly by Trey along with co-conspirators Russ Lawton and Tony Markellis. Comprising the first tour's core power trio, they owned - and own - the songs in a way Phish never did. When Phish played them, they had a rock force, but lacked a driving authority. They were swayed and effected by the reaction of the crowd, which increasingly became a more and more important part of Phish shows.

To trace backwards again, briefly, to another moment one can point at as a loss of control for Phish: the Spectrum in Philadelphia in December 1996. During You Enjoy Myself, the crowd began to clap along. They did so quite ineptly, on the off-beat of the jam. After putting up with this briefly, the band faded down to a near silence. When they came back up, they were playing to the audience's beat. It's been like that pretty much ever since. The air was no longer Phish's. It belonged to something different.

That was all well and good so far as some kind of mythic band-audience relationship goes, but it was also deadly to any notion of art. It made it too democratic, without any real drive behind it. Phish is on a hiatus right now. In part, it seem as if they are doing it to reclaim their air, to reshape it -- an enforced silence during which they can grab control. It will happen in imperceptible ways, piece by piece so one doesn't notice it at first, but it will happen. I wrote before that the music at the Roseland show was low stakes. That's wrong: it may actually be the highest stakes music Trey Anastasio has ever made. After all, he's trying to wrangle it back.

***
The crowd outside the State Theater in Cleveland was familiar. It was a celebration of sorts. People seemed happy to be back together in a way that doesn't happen with smaller bands. It's not a matter of one band picking up the slack, as it were, nor is it even so much the music itself, but the same vibe that took hold of the band. The air is sweet after one has been away, no matter what its actual condition.

The theater, lushly decorated in a vaudeville style, had a vibe in itself. These kinds of venues exist all over America, constructed over the first half of the 20th century in an effort to instate some kind of class into what was generally considered to be base level entertainment. In a way, playing in a nice room (such as the Trey Band is doing plenty of during this tour) forces the audience to surrender their own vibe to the room. It's a way of preliminary reclamation on the part of the musicians -- not a guarantee, but at least a start. This may be why the Roseland show on Friday was so subpar: the venue is heartily non-descript (an almost featureless hall, albeit with some history).

The first set featured a handful of new songs, though little spectacular playing. The Way I Feel opener hit into a slanky groove that permeated the set. The new songs featured throughout the night fell into three categories: acoustic instrumentals, electric jazz-funk pieces, and reggaeish pop songs. In the first set, Acting The Devil hit sublimely with an almost ska-like tempo. Burlap Sack and Pumps fell into the instrumental category -- an interesting head punctuated by the entire band shouting the title ala Dizzy Gillespie's Salt Peanuts. A sedate trio performance of Marc Ribot's Aqui Como Alla continued in the same vein.

A suite of acoustic compositions (with a Bathtub Gin interlude) followed. The new acoustic material is all pretty similar to Josie Wales -- it borders on Windham Hell type cheesiness but, for the most part, relies on something else to make it classy. (In the case of Josie Wales, I'd argue it's Page's tastefully subtle piano accompaniment.) Waves almost doesn't make it. In fact, I'm not sure if it does at all. At The Gazebo, however, a sequel to 1997's At The Barbecue, is punctuated by its horn part, lifting it up from lite music banality into something interesting.

The first set closed with what the second set would have in spades: sheer force. I've always liked Billy Preston's Will It Go Round In Circles but was never sure why. Tonight, two hooks jumped out at me -- the ascending chordal build into the chorus as Trey sings the title and the Russ-led mini-bridge back into the verse where the music sounds like a great weight shifting. Both struck me as marks of a really great song. The band integrated both hooks into the themes of the improvisation. Bluntly: a pumpin' set closer.

Danny Whitten's (Come On Baby Let's Go) Downtown began what might be the most forceful set of music I've heard Trey Anastasio play in a long time. At times, the energy of the group reminded me of the brutal heat exerted by Bob Dylan and the Band on their "Live '66" album, documenting a show on Dylan's legendary first electric tour of England. Throughout the second set of the show (the first set is just Dylan solo acoustic), the crowd erupts and generally tries to drown out the band so that Dylan would - presumably - return to the simplicity of his acoustic guitar. The band - the fucking Band, with a capital goddamn B - responds with a performance of enormous leverage.

I'm not saying that the Trey Anastasio Band was fighting with the audience in any tangible way at the Cleveland show. It seemed as if they were wrestling with that elusive vibe. There we go again with that hippie word. Following Downtown, the band delivered a crisp version of Stevie Wonder's Signed, Sealed, Delivered and launched into a familiar groove -- Sand.

As soon as the jam began and the lights dimmed, Trey turned to his keyboard. As soon as he did, the glowsticks started and the crowd erupted. It pissed me off, as the chorus of the song ran freshly through my head: "if you can heal the symptoms, but not effect the cause, you can't heal the symptoms". The symptoms involved people not listening to the music. The cause was that the music itself wasn't that interesting.

The band pushed on, playing abstract music, while people screamed and howled at the flying neon green lights. During the melee, I recorded the following conversation between the two people next to me (I swear): "yeah!" "you caught it!" "ooh!" "yeah!" grunt! "ugh!" "throw it!" scream! The exchange ended with the two slapping double-five as their eyes darted above them for signs of more glowsticks.

Tony Markellis wouldn't have any part of it. None. The bassist grooved continuously, occasionally dropping extremely low notes - bombs, you might say - that shook my stomach deeply. A lot of the crowd continued to not pay attention to the music. On thundered Tony. The glowstick war died out after five minutes, and the crowd stopped talking about five minutes after that. Still, Tony thundered on. This was clearly not a groove that was in any way subordinate to the audience. It didn't pay attention. By the end, all that was left was the groove -- huge and interesting.

When the song ended, people around me - including the cretins who talked their way through the bulk of Sand - sat down. The air belonged to the musicians once again. The next song up was Sunday Morning -- another reggae tune, whose performance at Roseland was generally ineffectual. Here, it was right on. The crowd was nearly silent and the band brought the song down to nothingness before fading away entirely.

What followed is what I would say, with little trepidation, might be the best piece of music Trey Anastasio has written in five years, at least. I'm not entirely sure of the title -- though it might be Nothing But An E Thing, at least per Paul Languedoc. It began like the lead in to Flat Fee, an old Trey chart that I hoped the band would play this tour now that they have the brass. Instead of dropping into a melody, the dissonance kept building and eventually resolved into a complexly textured groove -- atonal and weird. Structured like a jazz tune, members of the ensemble soloed over these intensely strange changes. It warped my mind, at the very least, and further twisted the crowd into submission.

After a quick run-through of Happiness In My Pants (played acoustic at Roseland on Friday), the band slid into Windora Bug, maybe my favorite Trey song of the past few years. The verse of the song was done pretty sloppily, but as the jam began Trey signaled for Russ and Tony to bring it down. As they dropped to a silence, Trey began to play his keyboard, a stunningly gorgeous ambient improvisation. The crowd was, for the most part, entirely silent. This was making good on the victory of Sand. The music bordered on the digital delay loop jam Trey has played at various Phish shows (12/28/96, 5/7/94, and others), but never quite arrived. Russ and Tony sat silently at their instruments -- there was little place for a groove. In some ways, a tag team from Fish and Mike would've been appropriate.

Then, somebody talked. Somebody else "shhh"ed him. Talking. Shhing. Gradually, the crowd started to "shhhhhhh". The total effect was of a layer of filter sweeps on a piece of electronic composition. Hearing it all around me was entirely surreal. At one point, Trey "shhh"ed into the microphone briefly -- either to add on or to tell the crowd to stop, it wasn't entirely clear. At any rate, the jam - if one can call it that - was a revelation: what music can be in a respectful room. It was Trey's music, to be sure, but it became ours in an intimate way -- a way that presupposed a musician/audience relationship in which each were subject only to each other, and not to something larger. The reward, on top of all of this, was Mellow Mood -- also perfect.

A great night of music leaves one with the feeling that he has experienced something genuine, not just watched and/or listened to some people play instruments. Walking out of the State Theater, I felt that. As I walked by a row of policemen, I chuckled. A part of me gets a perversely illicit thrill from knowing that I had a night of unabashedly joyous fun during which I had done absolutely nothing illegal.

As I entered the parking lot behind the venue where my car was parked, I took chance to notice that I was next to the Greyhound station where the bus had dropped me off freshman year on the way back from the fateful Albany show. A man approached me from the vicinity of the toll collector's booth. He was an older guy - clearly not a head - dressed in what could have been a uniform. I thought he was collecting my parking fee. Instead, he asked me for a light. Unfortunately, I didn't have one.

"Look, man," he said. "I'm stranded at that bus station. Is there any way you can lend me some money?" He paused. "I've got a block of hash here..." he rattled off a pedigree. "I'd be happy to trade you some."

"Umm," I began. "I only have ten bucks on me."

"That's cool," he said, took the block out, broke some off, and handed it to me. I pushed it down into my pocket and handed him a ten spot. "Thanks, man." He walked back towards the bus station. I drove home.

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