Electric People and Summer Music

I-22 east
Leaving Burgettstown, Pennsylvania; in transit to Oberlin, Ohio

Looking for a place to rest my weary bones... "Twin Peaks" and the element of serialization in Phish tour... the questing beast... summer breezes and a Manson-like figure blow across the lawn... peachy keen jams, fuzzy around the edges... the yearning for sleep and a bed for the night...

Hairy and sleep deprived, it's right in here that tour is beginning to catch up with us. We have a native determination to it all. After all, if one's gonna do something, one might as well do it right. That said, we've had some doozy drives recently, with the biggest one of them all looming ominously on the other side of a short night of sleep back in Oberlin. It's weird how fast we're driving just so we can get to sleep and drive more. At times, Phish can be a hazard. I know plenty of people driving straight to the next show in Wisconsin, a good ten hours from here, tonight. I feel no inclination to do that. Sleep is good, especially when it's in one's own bed.

The last few days have certainly had their share of driving. When one sets out to do a handful of shows in a tour, he generally can afford a few days previous to get there. On this tour, we've been sucked into a constant rhythm -- show, drive, show, drive, show, drive. It's a cliché, but it's the truth. Tour is a great way to see the country, but it's not a great way to enjoy the country. Nonetheless, I've been sucked into a serial -- a kind of continuing musical plot involving Phish. Each show is an extension of the last, with threads picked up and dropped off. I'm in it to find out just who, exactly, shot Mr. Palmer. Each show provides more clues, more backwards-talking dream dwarves, and subplots that - hopefully - will add up into something grand.

Individual shows begin to lose their uniqueness, but they also tend to take on more meaning. It's a perilously desensitizing process. It's an addiction. Even if one doesn't get as excited about each individual show as he would if he were only seeing a small handful, there is something almost more powerful to latch onto, a bigger wave to ride. It's what propels us from town to town, city to city: some primordial quest for a simple understanding of this undeniable force in our lives. The more we look and the more we understand, the more places there are to look and more things to attempt to wrap our minds around. It's a serpent feeding on its own tail -- which, freakily enough, is just the model many use to describe addiction. But it's also a metaphor one can use for a quest for knowledge. In truth, it's both in all of their glory.

The first set of tonight's show at the Star Lake Amphitheater in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania (outside of Pittsburgh) seemed to be a breather from the bigger picture. In television terms, it was an episode filled with light-hearted twists. It was fun and exciting, but not overly compelling. The music was breezy -- of a fading blue sky on a summer evening. Chalkdust Torture and the first Gumbo of the tour were somewhat lazy. Gumbo featured a slowly burbling jam that ended with an old-school Tweezer-like breakdown and eventual ending. The end jam of Divided Sky, just before the final crest, was extremely interesting, with deep exploration from both Fish and Mike, with Page (and, to an extent, Trey) holding down the harmony section.

By the time Maze began, the sun was sinking rapidly. Suddenly, a Charles Manson-like figure showed up near our spot on the lawn, wild-eyed on some exotic chemical, with a woman in tow. He shook her violently and screamed. "THE BEST IS YET TO COME, BABY!" He screamed this menacingly. She smiled, seemingly entranced by this charismatic prophet. Was this a harbinger of things to come? Was this greasy, bare-chested, tattooed man onto something? I'm not too keen on prophecies, though I've been damned when they do come true.

Page's solo percolated while Trey shifted the pitch of rhythm with his whammy pedal just slightly enough to throw one's ear off. Trey's solo began oddly, with him playing fast runs which blended more into the total soundscape as they did function like a solo. By the time one was able to discern his notes from the texture of the full band he was playing the Shafty melody pretty distinctly. The rest of the band picked up on it, and they ran through just the third-ever version of the tune (not counting the original Oblivious Fool). After the end of Shafty, the band shifted effortlessly back into the ending solo of Maze, which was unfortunately somewhat anti-climactic.

The second set opening Ghost struck quickly into the rock groove the band has been mining in recent versions, though without the harder edge that the others have had. The jam pulsed along with a soft, fuzzy, almost pastel coloration before settling into some typically Phish grooves with Fish locking horns melodically with other band members, doubling others' parts. After a while, Trey moved over to the keyboard. Soon after, there was a marked drop in tension, which I realized was Trey losing interest in the jam -- a passive-aggressive way of instructing the band to move on to the next song, which was the first post-Camden version of Gotta Jibboo.

Both the Jibboo and the Melt were good - really good - but there was something kind of depressing about both. Melt has made major strides in the last year, becoming a song whose jam can swallow the structure whole. In Camden on the fourth, Jibboo, too, became a song like this. When the band doesn't engage in a jam that discards the petty shackles of the songs, it's almost like they're failing to deliver on a promise. At least, that's what my subconscious says. I wish it didn't. Each of these versions was excellent in their own ways. I'm not sure why something like this should bother me.

The Melt dropped the weird time signature fairly rapidly. Fish has been playing the extra beats with less and less oomph in recent versions, such that they sound like an almost superficial part of the groove which can be easily discarded. And they were. The jam in the middle was pretty, though - again - it felt like something undelivered. Likewise, the Jibboo moved quickly from Trey's solo into an ambient space, which danced on the edge of the vastness of the Camden version. In that, it was perfect. To force themselves out on the next version after the fourth wouldn't be true to the groove of the song. Nonetheless, it was a let down in that regard. Without the formidable shadow of 7/4, the music was sublime.

Roggae, played under a crescent moon and a starry sky, was another song perfect for a summer night. During the jam, Mike led the way with a rapidly spiraling bassline, before the lead shifted to Page (who led on the baby grand), who - in turn - handed it to Trey, who led the charge to the reentry with a sparkling solo of his own. The Mike's Song easily topped the two weak versions from earlier in the tour, with a volcanic psychedelic blues jam, which rose and fell with the same ease as Ghost before peaking and dropping into Simple, which was an utter disappointment. I'd been hoping for a Simple all tour because of, well, the jam... which was non-existent in this version. As soon as the band finished the song, Trey led the band down to quiet and, then, a stop.

This summery show - somewhere in limbo (along with Toronto) between the northeast and midwest runs - left a pleasant taste in our mouths as we prepare to begin on the final leg of our journey, off to the three final stops of the tour. Tomorrow will be a challenge -- a long ride to a venue neither of us have been to before; one that has played host to several near-legendary shows, taboot. Right now, some perverse combination of sleep and driving call -- I will drive so I can sleep and I will sleep so I can drive.

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