Overstimulated

177 White Plains Road
Tarrytown, New York

Sleeping man snoring like a chainsaw gone rusty, gasping every now and again like a disemboweled clown... the synchronous cricket-like sounds of parallel geekin'... over-zealous rent-a-cops replacing hippie love with complete violence... Trey Anastasio replacing delicate flowerings with complete rock-stardom... though he's really the shy, sensitive type...

Make no mistake about: New Jersey sucks hard. I will make no apologies for it and do not intend to offend any of the state's fair residents. But the place blows. You can't make left turns. The air is flammable. More, though, they seem to have dispatched several legions of their proudest state troopers to give us hippies that extra special treatment that we love and deserve. Throughout the evening, they maintained a pleasant level of fear throughout the show and the parking lot.

If someone so much as lit a cigarette in the pavilion, a guard - wired to the gills with headphones, flashlights, walkie-talkies, and some sort of utility belt built with esoteric dials and gadgetry - was there to make sure it was extinguished with all haste. At one point, I saw a guy selling shirts, containing no Phish logo or reference to the band name, just a neat graphic and a list of cities on the back. A rent-a-cop began to bear down on him, screaming at him about copyright infringement, insinuating pretty directly that by putting a list of cities on the back of shirt, the man was threatening the financial interests of Phish and, in the process, damaging everything that our nation stands for. He finally relented when I reminded him that one can't copyright a city.

Inside and outside the show, the guards were abusive and out of line. I saw a group of seven of them tackle a small woman. I saw guards screaming, with no apparent provocation, at a group of people who were standing just an inch too close to a piece of fencing.

And for what?

A law, series of laws, based on a bullshit notion of morality. Despite the presentation of some suitably trumped up charges about actions that may or may not have occurred around the time of last year's shows, what it comes down to is the fact that the state of New Jersey (and probably most states for that matter) don't like people to use drugs. That's really too bad -- not that people don't partake in drugs themselves, but that they are so closed minded to the, frankly, quite positive effects that some kinds of chemicals can have on the human mind and consciousness. It is slightly ironic that some of these drugs have the potential to produce precisely the kind of paradigm shift required to adopt such a new attitude.

It is further ironic that the very driving force behind the bogus War On Drugs is a morality based (theoretically) on highly religious Western principles, while the drugs they seek to ban have been used as means to access the sacred for millennia before the highly religious Western principles existed. Likewise, when taken in proper mixture with music (or any number of other factors), they can produce an experience more sacred than most people seem to experience in modern churches. In a way, they are attempting to place a ban on a certain kind of encounter with the infinite. It is illegal.

Phish's music is not synonymous with drugs by any stretch of anything. Out of the Phish shows I've seen, I've only seen a very small fraction (namely, three) while under the influence of a drug. Their music is what it is. Like it or not, a drug culture has been tied to it. Because of this, connected to that whole damn morality thing, civilized folks seem to have make it their task to make it harder and harder for Phish shows to take place. So far, we've managed to make it through anyway. Perhaps someday history will vindicate us.

It's too bad it had to happen at the PNC Bank Arts Center. It's quite a lovely venue. The parking lots are tiered and spacious, the avenues are tree-lined and shady, and there's a huge field smack in the middle of the lot that is perfect for hanging out in, resting, playing frisbee, or doing whatever. Inside, a wide lawn makes way to a flying saucer shaped pavilion, both serviced by a crystalline sound system that presented the band almost to a fault. If the locals are going to continue to present so much hassle, I'd argue that it's not worth a trip back by the band for next year. Leave us the hell alone and your damn venue (and town) will still be standing in the morning.

A huge backup at the entrance to the place (thanks to the overzealous security farce's searching brigades) got us inside a little too late, and we ended up getting to our seats smack in the middle of a raging Chalkdust Torture jam. It raised an interesting question of context. I could tell it was coming out of Chalkdust the second I walked in, but without the context of actually having heard the band play the root song for the jam, I sense that I though the improvisation was more out than it actually was,. Nevertheless, if I were to take the jam as it stood when I walked in as the base level, it got pretty darned far out from there.

During Chalkdust, as with most of the show, Trey was bouncing all over the stage - and all over the fretboard - like an excited child. The show alternated between extremely high energy music and quiet ballads, with rarely any middle ground. The sound in our corner of the pavilion was boomy during the first set (we fled to the lawn for the second), and tended to swallow up the subtler parts of the jams. Taste went into some interesting spaces, away from the delicate syncopated rhythms it usually occupies and into more rocking territory. Piper began at its usual intensity. When it came time for the band to move into the jam, they faltered and couldn't really find anywhere to go. Their attempts at dynamic shifting didn't quite succeed. The band (or Trey) was wired for the hard stuff and couldn't quite get out of it.

 That seemed to be the prevailing theme of the evening. For the first four shows of the tour, the band reacted to Trey's pyrotechnics by meeting him in the stratosphere and then easing him down into the quiet stuff. Tonight, they relented and provided an energetic bed for his explorations. Gotta Jibboo - placed midway through the second set - is a good example of this. Normally, the jam is quite mellow, almost ambient in its groove, with each band member making up an equal part of the spectrum. Tonight, the jam was very Trey-led, feeling in places like a slightly mellower Down With Disease, which proceeded it by two songs in the set.

It should be noted that Trey's soloing throughout the big rocking songs - Bathtub Gin, Taste and Piper in the first set; Down With Disease, Gotta Jibboo, Weekapaug Groove, First Tube, and Loving Cup - was excellent. It was creative, flowing, melodic, and exciting. There was just a lot of it. In many ways, the structure of the jams reminded me a lot of the kind of the improvisation the band was doing a lot in the fall of 1998, during the weeks following their Halloween performance of the Velvet Underground's "Loaded". It was straight-forward and not too twisted. Likewise, tonight's set was extremely well-played, just not to my particular taste.

There are a couple of pieces of improvisation worth noting: Harry Hood and Mike's Song. The Harry Hood, placed second in the second set, wasn't quite a deviation on the norm, but it almost was. Two songs in Phish's catalogue that seemed to have gotten swallowed by their own legends are Harry Hood and Run Like An Antelope. Throughout the first years of Phish's career, they both earned reputations for providing orgasmic peaks. As these reputations grew, it seemed that the band - more and more - began to overly respect the sanctity of the songs' respective structures.

These days, a typical Harry goes from point A to point B without all four of the band members letting themselves go to the point where they can create an unselfconscious climax to the jam, where they can work perfectly within the structure by transcending it. (The Harry on "A Live One" is a great example of this kind of transcendence.) There doesn't seem to be any one band member to blame for this. Any time that the jam begins to go a little further out than they might want it to, somebody will begin to improvise more and more directly around the song's changes, emphasizing them more and more as it reins in any wayward band members.

Tonight, Harry was good. It wasn't great, but it was good. At times, as many as three band members were skirting with the outer limits of the song. Coupled with the experimental (if only for the change) Harry Hood > Dog Faced Boy > Harry Hood in Nashville, I have high hopes that the band will be able to breathe new life into the song. In Holmdel, New Jersey tonight, a small plastic milkman, kept crisp in the freezer for several years, began to twitch the tips of his fingers.

Mike's Song, usually a conduit for high-energy playing, was surprisingly devoid of it tonight. This lack of energy (which isn't the same thing as a lack of musical momentum), led the jam into different territory than where it usually ends up. Tonight, the band ended up in a twisted funk groove, slightly reminiscent of where a jam on Back On The Train might take them. The groove burbled up and about for a few minutes, before the band did a start-stop pause. After resuming for a few minutes, the band dropped another pause, during which Trey began to strum the intro to Neil Young's Albuquerque.

This, along with a stunningly gorgeous rendition of Los Lobos's When The Circus Comes, were the highlights of the evening -- with a bust-out version of If I Could (the first since summer '98, the second only since summer '96). Each one of these songs was damn near perfect, with well constructed arrangements that seemed to be spontaneous and rehearsed at the same time -- and probably were a little bit of both. Each song hinged on Trey's new voice, which now rests just as much on expression as it does on execution (in terms of both vocals and guitar playing).

The energy picked up again gradually during the Weekapaug, which began casually -- almost like an Antelope intro (which is what I thought it was at first). The encore - a double-punch of First Tube and the Stones' Loving Cup - was marked by an over-stimulated Trey and served to demonstrate exactly what was right and wrong about tonight's show. On one pod, the band reacted responsively to Trey's big guitar solos, if not meeting him outright in terms of energy, then at least adding a solid groove underneath. On the other pod, once the groove was established, it didn't change much. There was plenty of jamming, but not much in the way of deep improvisation.

Tomorrow, we go back to PNC for more -- more music, more abuse from security, more everything. After seeing the cops absolutely step over the line after the show tonight, it'll be interesting to see what tomorrow's lot scene will bring -- both in terms of the security and the reaction among heads. It could well provide for a kind of tension that would draw the scene together, but also provide for some requisite ugliness that is certainly not needed. In either situation, who knows how that would play out in the music -- it would certainly provide for some sort of litmus test to see how connected the band is to the scene outside, not they necessarily need to be connected.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage.