Appropriating What Is Important

I-70 east
Leaving Noblesville, Indiana; in transit to Oberlin, Ohio

No quarter, big news... the Disco Biscuits return from the dead, cause confusion, all from many miles away... Phish continues to prove their mettle... song selection, improvisation, monkeybones, oracles, and sages... how to appropriate rhythms from old Talking Heads' songs and use them for your own nefarious purposes...

Sweet Jesus.

We slip outside the radar for a few hours - hell, a few minutes - and something actually happens. A moment ago, we received a frenzied phone call from a friend, at home in Florida, watching tonight's Disco Biscuits' show on the web. "Brownstein's back in the band," he frothed at Jeremy over the cell phone. In some quarters, this might not even count as news import. But fuck it. We're in my quarter. This is big shit.

The last ten minutes have been spent in a bevy of attempted communication. With no net access in the car, we have only to rely on the rapidly dying battery of Jeremy's cell phone. People are flipping through their notebooks and phone number files, desperately trying to find the number of somebody who might be in State College right now, walking out of the gig. Rumors fly stealthily in an age of high speed communication and it could all be a load of sushi, but it's given the tired bodies in this car an adrenaline kick, the kind committed political junkies are said to live on.

What does this all have to do with Phish?

Disregarding anybody's opinion but my own, the Disco Biscuits - in 1999 - provided people with the feeling of what it might've been like to have been into Phish in the early years. Not that they sound anything like Phish, but the rate at which they grew musically, introduced new songs into the repertoire, and meticulously planned their performances, gave off a vibe that I could only conceive of as being similar to the sheer energy surrounding Phish in the early 1990s. Of course, since the early '90s, Phish's own methods have changed. There's still an energy around them, but it's not the same edgy power that used to envelope them. It's something far more refined. When Marc Brownstein parted ways with the band in January, things became a whole lot more uncertain.

To be blunt, before that, my own relationship with Phish's music was in a peculiar state. My assessment of Phish as the greatest thing ever was plunged into doubt. And, to be honest, it was a good thing. It forced me to listen to Phish with a more critical ear, made me assess their music in new ways -- both inside and outside of the closed system that gets constructed around their music. It wasn't so much comparing one band to the other as comparing Phish's music to the larger universe that they occupy a formidable spot in. At times, Phish's status was diminished. More often, it increased.

Tonight was a night where it increased: jams pushed boundaries and, more, an unreachable maturity showed through. The My Friend, My Friend was shaky in its majesty, but still served as a marker at what amazing music the band has produced. As the Curtain petered to a close, Trey began playing something that hasn't been played in over ten years -- the original ending to the song, also known as the Curtain With, which was later appropriated, sped up, and turned into the fast middle section of Rift. Tonight, it was played in its original glory, slow and stately.

Trey parlayed the melody into something which can only be described as a Reba jam. The band meditated on this for a bit, realizing they had quite a bit of freedom, not tied in as much as they usually are to the Reba changes and ending. The jam had a bit of room to move around in its clothing. Gradually, Trey reintroduced the slowed-down Rift theme and the band moved back into the composed section. The remainder of the first set was extremely well played. The first Free of tour was absolutely huge, building methodically to a powerful stadium-like crest. The Squirming Coil closer featured a gorgeous end-jam, a little bit more dissonant than usual, which Page hinted at slightly in his solo, before settling into a more harmless space.

The second set opened with a powerful Birds Of A Feather which, while not approaching the outer territories in the same way the Holmdel rendition, ventured outwards quickly and was hauled back in gracefully, like a master yo-yoist. Piper was, again, enormous. The song, I am fairly confident, has returned. The jam in between verses was pretty typical, though - like the Character Zeros from this tour - it somehow contained a more open kind of energy, even if it was staying within the boundaries of the song. The band built the song upwards into a seething chaos. When the smoke cleared, they were back in the verse.

The band tumbled headlong into the verse at the breakneck speed of Piper. Fish did his best to pull back the reigns so the group could explore at their own pace. He did this by alternating tempos between the hyper Piper and a slower thing, gradually easing the band into something midway. All tour, people have been referring to a certain jam the band has been pulling out as derived from the Talking Heads' Cross Eyed and Painless. Hopefully, the jam's juxtaposition with an actual rendition of the "Remain In Light" classic will do much to render this misguided opinion as utter hogwash. If anything, the jam is related to the staccato rhythms of Psycho Killer (which is how I've been referring to it). Via a quick turn using the start-stop trick, the band leapt into Cross Eyed.

The song itself was played at a sluggish tempo, with some kind of instinctual oomph missing from the song's impact. The jam out of the tune stayed fairly close to the base, with Trey or Fish pulling the band back in every so often. Soon, Fish found an interesting part based around a series of cymbal fills. Trey mirrored these fills with percussive palm mutes and set them going in a loop. The rest of the band got really quiet, looking for Trey to begin the next song. Instead, Trey continued to play with (and over) the loops, and headed full-on into a sublime ambient space, on par with just about anything off of "the Siket Disc"; probably closest in feel to the disc-closing Albert. Mike pushed aggressively during the jam, as if he were building towards something -- like the drums should suddenly kick in or something.

It was almost too easy when the Trey began strumming the elegant opening chords to Prince Caspian -- kind of like a segue from Boogie On Reggae Woman into N.I.C.U.. The Caspian's intro was more interesting musically than the bulk of the outro jam. At the end of the song, there was a giant swell, out of which the band easily could've steered their way back into ambient space (and I almost wish they did). Instead, Trey opted to launch into Meatstick -- a version that was wholly unremarkable both in terms of amusing banter and serious musical content. They didn't even sing the damn Japanese lyrics.

The Wading In The Velvet Sea encore may well just have been one of the better-played renditions of the tune, though it wasn't exactly what people needed to conclude the night, as well as the three-night stand at Deer Creek. We took off into the Indiana darkness, somehow eluding police roadblocks, and sling shooting our way east, towards the Ohio border.

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