by Jesse Jarnow

Dedicated to Rick Danko, 1943-1999

December 12, 1999 - Oberlin, Ohio

First Union Spectrum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

All sorts of nostalgia on a strange night in Philadelphia... a shining city from the Whitman bridge... security leaves us alone (for the most part), as one of our own infiltrates the team... conceptually conceived jokes and arena-style hijinks... the circus, Chanukah, and you.

"God," Erin began. "If I were drinking orange juice right now,, I think I'd feel like I was five years old."

I looked at her and took a sip of my big mama orange juice, as the waitress had called it. I love orange juice. It's probably my favorite drink in the world. I once announced to my literalist Ayn Rand-loving roommate that "orange juice is the nectar of the gods".

"No," he had said in return, staring me right in the eye. "It's actually the nectar of oranges." He moved out soon thereafter.

The thing is, though, I've always loved orange juice. I drank it nearly every day when I was growing up. In one sense, when I drink it, I feel small twinges of nostalgia. On the other hand... I don't. I never stopped loving orange juice, dig? There's a continuum. It never stopped being cool.

All of which made sense while contemplating why I had enjoyed the Bowie > Have Mercy > Cracklin' Rosie the night previous. Was it nostalgia that made me dance and laugh almost uncontrollably? I never stopped thinking that the kind of music that Phish produced in 1993 and 1994 was cool. It just sorta seems that they did. While it may have been somewhat an act of nostalgia for them to play that sequence, it wasn't one for me to appreciate it. At least, that's what I've been telling myself.

>From the Bob Evans, we moved across the Walt Whitman Bridge into Philadelphia. As we crossed, we listened to ethereal Lazybones by Soul Coughing. The sun was just about setting. The glass and metal skyline glowed golden in the late afternoon. It was quite blinding. To see an entire city illuminated in such a manner was damn near magical. It looked like a CGI-generated metropolis sitting in front of us, each pixel manipulated just exactly perfectly. As the band hit the peak of the song, a flock of birds suddenly emerged from under the bridge, flapping their way in subtle mathematics across our field of vision. Off to the left was the Spectrum.

We explored the scene, sprawled across several lots, before (somewhat) easily meeting up with everybody who needed to be met up with. Inside the venue, the four of us - Erin, Harriet, Mint, and I - headed down to the seats rightfully belonging to Erin and Harriet. From my perspective, they might well have been the best seats I've ever had at a show. They were on the side of the stage, about eight rows up, on what is now Trey-side. The sight line was absolutely gorgeous. Essentially, we saw the show from Trey's perspective as he faced the rest of the band and played.

At that angle, the communication between the band members was both visibly and audibly apparent. Essentially looking over Trey's shoulder, it was easy to tell exactly where he set his gaze. Most of the time, it was on another band member. His attention was divided pretty evenly throughout the night. When he looked at musician, it was crystal clear what his musical intentions were. In "the Grateful Dead Movie", filmed in 1974, the volume of each musician went up when he appeared on screen. Watching Trey interact was like that. When he looked over at Fish, suddenly the guitar and drums seemed in perfect synchronization; the rhythmic element of Trey's guitar part relating very distinctly to the melodic element of Fish's drum part. It was the most apparent I've ever witnessed the musical conversation going on between the members of Phish.

It's always there, I can assume. I'm not sure if it's always at the level it was on Saturday night, however. The circumstances make it kind of hard to tell. Our seats were amazing, the crowd noise (from where we were) was at a minimal, and there was just an insane amount of open-ended material. In short, it was everything I wanted at a Phish show all fall and never got... until Saturday. From the Harry opener, it was clearly apparent that the band wanted to go out. It took them a goodly amount of time to even make it to the first lyric section of the song. This was the first place where they engaged in a careful improvisation.

All show, and during the Harry intro in specific, I also gained a very new appreciation for Trey's use of effects pedals -- often maligned by fans as any number of negative adjectives. Watching Trey dance the dance on Saturday, though, there is very little that he needs to be forgiven for. Just as his hands shape the pitch of the sound coming out of his guitar, his feet shape the tone which comes out of his speakers. People complain that Trey's sound isn't as pure as it once was. While, overall, his playing might not be quite as fluid in some senses as it used to be, the basics of his expression are still there -- new things have just been layered atop it.

The vibe in the room, both onstage and off, seemed to feel coherent. During the Harry jam, for example, the (unfortunately) requisite glowstick war erupted. Thankfully, the bulk of the projectiles were the softer glowrings. Within minutes, though, the bulk of the objects were no longer airborne. Instead, they were linked into a long and flowing chain that extended from one side of the floor, almost straight across, to the other. It looked like a pulsing neon light, uncoiled and organic. Occasionally, there were breaks in the chain. Following the spaces with one's eyes, he could see loose glowsticks being passed atop the crowd in the direction of the gaps. The whole thing looked and felt alive.

Onstage, there was a coherence rarely felt at Phish's shows anymore. Harry set the keynote for the first set, kind of like an overture. Bits and pieces of the general ideas stated in the Harry jam turned up through the next few songs. The brief jam out of Mike's Song recalled the darker spaces of the "thank you, Mr. Minor" composed section of Harry, injecting them with a middle-eastern feel. The improvisation produced by Simple followed the broad pattern of many recent versions of the song -- loud to soft. By the end of the jam, they'd brought it all the way down. In some ways, it felt like it could've acted as a prelude to the cascading crescendos of Harry. Finally, so far as that suite of tunes went, there came the Weekapaug Groove, which built into an ecstatic, distinctly un-Weekapaugy jam. Instead of blissed out rock, it was instead a return to the kind of gorgeous melodic peak found in, well, good Harrys.

Did I mention it beautiful?

The next three songs of the set - When The Circus Comes, Scent Of A Mule, and Cavern - seemed conceptually linked in their own way -- a kind of return to the root for both band and audience. One hypothesis produced is such: Trey grew up in the Philadelphia area. He definitely attended events at the Spectrum -- Flyers games, KISS concerts, who knows? Quite possibly, the circus. In retrospect, this is all quite loony, but it still makes some degree of sense. By word association, Los Lobos' Circus was chosen as a song to play. Likewise, Mule could've been called for it's demented cartoon-like, circus-sounding middle section; a similar association. Whether or not these decisions were conscious is almost unimportant. Either way, they provided a thematic tie-in of a return to the root.

The improvisation in the middle of Mule was absolutely jaw-dropping. My notes for this section of the show, among other nearly incoherent ravings, read "Klezmer version of the Popeye theme". That's one way of describing what happened. Two things could've actually occurred. The first, and most unlikely (in my eyes, anyway) is that the band took the time to learn a traditional Jewish melody in honor of the last night of Chanukah. The other, and more likely, is that they spontaneously composed a very Hebrew-sounding instrumental replete with a repeating melodic line and chorus. Trey shined here.

Towards the end of the instrumental, during the leg-kick dance, Mint suddenly got very excited. Mint is a product of the same kind of conventional Solomon Schecter schooling that produced Mike Gordon. Apparently, for about two steps towards the end of the dance, Mike broke very subtly into a traditional Jewish dance. The reference was, again, probably completely unconscious on Mike's part -- perhaps even a stumble. But, the fact that Mike was brought up extremely Jewish, coupled with the fact that Saturday was the last night of Chanukah, was more than enough to tie Mule into the idea of a return to the root. Likewise, the foot patterns at the end of the Cavern set closer were linked to Mule -- perhaps the closest thing there is to a traditional dance in Phish lore.

With the exception of Circus - a cover which feels, though isn't necessarily, older - all of the songs in the set existed in Phish's repertoire by 1994. Five years is a long time in Phish history. With the notable exception of Ghost, the second set was like that too. Unlike the Bowie > Have Mercy > Cracklin' Rosie, though, there wasn't the feeling that the band was doing something to commemorate times gone by. They were just playing. It wasn't nostalgia... it just was. It wasn't calling up the ghosts of the past ("but maybe he's still with me..."), it was staying firmly in the present. Any musical references to the past in song choice or approach to improvisation seemed - like Trey's circus and Mike's dance - completely subconscious. In any situation, trying to trace the birth of the present moment is a nearly impossible task. It is only occasionally where pieces of fate fit together. On this particular night, it was clear that the lessons of the past were clearly taken to heart and dealt with in a completely mature manner.

The lyrics to Ghost worked on other levels too. Like the Harry in the first part of the evening, it provided the keynote for the second set. Over the course of the past semester, I co-taught a class here at Oberlin entitled "Phish For Dorques". As part of the school's Experimental College program, we ran through a history of Phish over the course of 13 or so weeks, focusing on different periods of the band's development. Following the Cincinnati shows last week, which many of the students attended, a lot of them expressed dissatisfaction (ranging from mild to grave) with Phish's present direction. Some students questioned their love of the band, whether or not the band would ever have the same impact in their lives that they once did. Nothing was resolved by the end of the last class, held on Wednesday, before the Philly shows. In some ways, it almost seemed that the band was left in the past, in a box of tapes and ticket stubs that we had picked apart in the class.

Then Saturday happened. It was both historical and timely. "But maybe he's still with me / The latch was left unhooked / He's waiting in the wind and rain / I simply haven't looked." Saturday, I suppose, I did. All of the jams seemed to take on their own identities, but all of them seemed very much connected to where each song had been in the past -- ghosts very much alive and active in the present. The balance between all timestreams on Saturday night was just exactly perfect.

The cover openers - Stevie Wonder's Boogie On Reggae Woman and Alan Toussaint's Sneaking Sally Through The Alley - brimmed with the bar-band enthusiasm the songs had during their days as band staples at Nectar's, as well as being infused with the energy the band has been riding high on lately. While they may have been a nod to the past, it doesn't quite matter. Ghost descended into the absolute nether regions of darkness before emerging into a building and blinding Also Sprach Zarathustra. The entire affair was a class act from top to bottom.

The final touch on the cake was the "all fall down" signal during the intro to a sweetly volcanic of the Gamehendge rural country-blues Possum. Some people fell. Most didn't. It didn't particularly matter. Calling on the secret language was signal enough. To those who didn't care or know what it was, it was just another piece of entertainment from a long evening of such. To those who cared what it was, it highlighted the continuum between drinking orange juice at the age of five, and drinking orange juice at the age of twenty-one. For me, it was a nice end to tour.