The Bonzo Treatment

Command Center, Residence Inn
Fishers, Indiana

The justification for lugging a crate of books around with me this summer... guilty of coming out of a Phish concert... the subtle leitmotif of the summer: Gotta Jibboo... the clobber-one-over-the-head-with-a-mallet leitmotif of the night: Moby Dick... fun, fun, fun...

Hunter S. Thompson has often offered up sage advice. "I spend a lot of my time on the road," he once wrote "renting typewriters and hustling FAX machines in strange hotels and always too far from my own massive library at home to get my hands on the wisdom that I suddenly realize - on some sweaty night in Miami or a cold Thanksgiving Day in Minneapolis -- I need and want, but that with a deadline just four or five hours away is utterly beyond my reach."

"You cannot call the desk at the Mark Hopkins or the Las Vegas Hilton or the Arizona Biltmore and have the bell captain bring up the collected works of Sam Coleridge or Stephen Crane at three o'clock in the morning..." (Thompson 1988 9). When I decided to take to the road geek-style for this summer's tour, that piece of wisdom was suddenly recalled via pneumatic chute to the forefront of my memory. After deliberation, I allowed myself one box - a milk crate - of books that I thought I might have to reference at some point. Tonight, one of them is finally relevant -- well, two.

In "Fear and Loathing and Las Vegas", Thompson offer this advice to would-be traffic offenders: "We will start apologizing, begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. ... Let him unwind; keep smiling. The idea is to show him that you were always in total control of yourself and your vehicle -- while he lost control of everything" (Thompson 1971 90-1). Just outside of Deer Creek, cops set up a check-point, pulling over randomly "selected" cars for possible interrogation. The probable cause?

Being at a Phish concert.

We sat serenely, quietly even. When the cop shined the flashlight into the back seat, I instinctively smiled and waved at him. He moved the light away. We watched people getting pulled from their cars, cops carefully noting license plate numbers to see which drivers were multiple felons wanted in Iowa for jacking a 1986 Volvo station wagon covered with Grateful Dead stickers. The car we were in, with window decals for a couple of respectable institutions and no bumper stickers, was relatively stealth. We got waved through. I'd like to think that I've absorbed so much of "Fear and Loathing" that it's part of my unconscious, but we probably just got damn lucky.

The show we were leaving contained a tight first set and a second set which was amazing when they weren't futzing about. The highlights of the first half of the evening were a gently stretching Ya Mar which featured airy keyboard loops from Trey, sounding much like steel drums. When he returned to guitar afterwards, his percussive arpeggios returned to the steel drum theme of earlier. A predominantly boring Drowned gave way to a brief big rock jam which collapsed inward to a Fish/Mike duet, dropped into a quick start-stop jam, and resulted in an odd surf-guitar mutation over which the band sang the title of Chalkdust Torture, creating a spontaneous vocal arrangement ala Catapult. The Chalkdust that followed, burst with energy.

The second set exemplified a problem Phish suffers from time to time: a set that is downright amazing in the moments the band isn't goofing off. This set was split neatly into segments, with a jam on Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin dividing them. The band would go out on a song. explore a little bit, and then fall back into Moby Dick. It was like a television program interrupted with constant commercials. The program itself was remarkably interesting, with some interesting themes that ran through it.

Something extremely subtle was going on underneath the Moby Dick shenanigans. While the Zep cover acted as a superficial motif for the set, Trey's constant reformatting of the main lick from Gotta Jibboo was what really tied the improvisation together. It appeared multiple times -- at the head and close of his Down With Disease solo, in the middle of Back On The Train, and even in the quiet Rhodes-filled space of Harry Hood. The theme has surfaced in many jams this summer, and binds the whole together with a kind of Phishy version of conceptual continuity. The second set was a particularly good example of the way the lick can function in different ways -- and, in a way, is a kind of textbook summary of summer 2000.

Down With Disease is traditionally a song that features a flashy Trey solo. It seems that the band is attempting to question their roles once again as they react to Trey's usually bombastic solo. In each version of Down With Disease this summer, Mike, Fish, and Page have reacted by playing harder and louder to match Trey's intensity. In each case, it got the band working as a foursome again, usually bringing the intensity level down a notch or six. Tonight seemed to be a battle of sorts between Trey and the rest of the band.

Trey introduced the Jibboo lick early in his solo. The band came up behind him, playing as hard as him. He seemed to relent and the band dropped down slightly. With a flourish, he played the Jibboo lick and started soloing fiercely again. The band tried to play catch-up. Trey slowed down and waited for the band, then sped up again. A slight misstep in one of the speed-ups dropped the band into the first Moby Dick jam of the night.

Runaway Jim, which may have featured the best jam of the night, did not feature the Jibboo theme. It was also one of the few jams this summer that seem to have transcended the style that Phish has been playing so much of. Part of that does have to do with the absence of the Jibboo lick. Midway through, the band dropped into a quiet, almost jazzy section, with Fish riding the hi-hat and Page twinkling gently in the upper registers. The jam built, as if it were going to drop into Free (which has been conspicuously absent from setlists this summer), before it dropped into the second Moby Dick jam.

The band has not ended several of the recent Back On The Trains, leading one to believe that they may be consciously attempting to push the songs boundaries. If so, it keeps edging slightly closer. Tonight, the Jibboo lick was used as a springboard in that attempt, perhaps attempting to use the energy it liberated from its mother song on the fourth of July in Camden. After trying their hand at this for a few minutes, Trey introduced the Moby Dick riff. Fish kept the Back On The Train beat going and, for a little, it was both simultaneously -- which seemed like it could twist into something delightfully new. Unfortunately, Fish soon relented and the band was full-on back into Moby Dick.

Harry Hood, too, was embellished by the Jibboo lick. Though I'm not sure if it's entirely fair, I think Page may well be to blame for the stagnancy of Hood for the past few years. At the beginning of the jam, he's taken to launching right into the Hood chords, albeit quietly on the Rhodes, ruining the what tension may be established. Tonight, Trey cued with the Jibboo lick rallying cry, and Fish immediately began going on small rhythmic excursions within the Harry jam. The band would drop with him slightly, but mostly just hold him by a bungee cord strapped to his stubby little legs as he spelunks in the depths. Trey got into the act towards the end and gave the Hood a magnificently joyous release.

The final commercial break of the evening was an extra long classic rock affair -- a double sandwich of Argent's Hold Your Head Up (Fish's theme), Syd Barrett's Terrapin, and another rendition of Moby Dick. It was long, it was hilarious to watch, but it wasn't great music by any means (though, for what it's worth, Fish's vacuum solo actually did seem more melodic than usual). The Character Zero, perhaps the most obvious song to receive the Bonzo treatment, was left unscathed, though the version was still unremarkable. The First Tube encore was, as is the standard, quite blistering.

And we left the show, eyes all aglow, to go and deal with the cops.

Works Cited

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. New York: Vintage Books. 1971.

Thompson, Hunter S. Generation Of Swine (Gonzo Papers, volume II). New York: Vintage Books. 1989.

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