Battle of the Narratives
7/15/94, Wantagh, NY, Jones Beach Amphitheater
There’s a very human tendency to force a narrative on to the world around us. It’s evolutionary psychology; some ancient, pattern-recognizing part of our mind once used for finding nuts and berries attempting to make sense of the random stimulus overload of modern times. It’s tempting — and fun, and occasionally profitable — to apply this narrativizing effect to inherently messy enterprises such as art, financial markets, and sports. But the curve doesn’t always fit the data, and it’s dangerous when one starts confusing their mind’s distortive storytelling with the truth, or in the case of art, the artist’s intent.
I make this warning self-aware that forcing the square peg of Phish tours into the round hole of a narrative is pretty much exactly what I’ve been doing with this project. And that’s fine — it’s an inherent right of the listener to project whatever feelings, theories, and opinions they want onto a piece of music, once it’s been released from the musician’s grasp. But every so often, in documenting Phish’s long march to their musical peak (itself a subjective location), it’s worth checking myself to see where reality doesn’t quite play nice with theory.
7/15/94 feels like one of those shows. As the second-to-last show of the long spring/summer tour, it would be gratifying to see the band reaching a tidy conclusion, a definitive statement of how they’ve changed over the previous 3–½ months. For this specific era, the agreed-upon storyline is the gradual rejection of the more refined, accessible sound the band attempted with Hoist, moving instead towards the profoundly inaccessible material chosen for A Live One. But this date at Jones Beach is an outlier to that path, and outliers are tricky things — you can choose to either dismiss them outright and hold fast to your original hypothesis, or include them and grapple with how it alters your perception of the truth.
Let’s deal with the weirdest quirk of the setlist first. There’s not one, not two, but three repeats from the previous show here — a proud achievement for most bands, a blasphemy for Phish. Stats like that typically indicate a significant leap of time and/or space between shows, a three-week break between legs of a tour or an airplane hop between, say, California and Texas. But that’s not the case here; Canandaigua to Wantagh is a mere 350 miles, a big drive between back-to-back shows for the era, but surely not enough to discourage the tour rats on a mid-summer weekend.
The specific songs repeated are meaningful as well. Nobody will be surprised to see Sample show up on consecutive dates, as it had already done 25(!) times prior on the tour. The only funny thing in this Sample repeat is that a mere 10 songs separate the two performances, since it appeared in the second set on 7/14 before batting second on 7/15. The second repeat was less typical for the time, but equally pop-oriented: Bouncing Around the Room, which would operate the following year as a sort of single-by-default from A Live One, even if it was already 5 years old.
The third repeat doesn’t really belong in this group — even the “questioning the narrative” narrative doesn’t fit the narrative. But Runaway Jim might also be a signifier of Phish’s “mainstreamization,” even as an older song. As the venues get bigger (15,000 at Jones Beach, ~12,500 at pre-renovation Finger Lakes), there’s a growing need for proven set openers and closers, selections that either boost the energy right away or provide a loud send-off. Thus far in 1994, Jim has opened a set 18 times, and while its usage here at the end of the second set is atypical, it has that Antelope/Suzy/Zero straightforward guitar build-up that the band favors for a walk-off celebration to this day.
But if this trio of repeats is a marker of the band’s evolution from eccentric weirdos to professional shed circuit touring act, the show’s highlight and centerpiece is an astounding and prophetic counterfactual. For most fans, the treasure at the end of 1994’s rainbow — the triumphant conclusion to whatever narrative you try to squeeze the year into — would have to be the Providence Bowie, a 35-minute slab of complex, deep, and unsettling improvisation. But if you go back to the start of the year’s touring, it’s unfathomable that the band would be capable or willing of challenging themselves and their audience to that extent.
Bowie definitely bloomed over the course of the spring and summer, with the jam developing from its prior roots as a battle of dissonance and resolution (making it a close cousin of Stash, which probably explains why the two songs were never played back to back until this summer) into a more wide-ranging journey. By the end of April, it had already broken the 20-minute barrier at Charlotte’s Grady Cole Center, and doing so meant breaking free from the linear path to its rapid-fire peak. The 4/24/94 Bowie jam starts out goofing on a tease (“Tequila”) like it’s 1993, but then progresses through several movements: a dissonant knot that tangles itself into “Dave’s Energy Guide,” a stuttering riff that is patiently nurtured for several minutes, and a demonic, ascending power chord progression that invades the usual end structure. Instead of one big tension/release — or a sidetrack into another song or tease — there are waves of it, a mountain range instead of a ramp.
6/18/94 is a further stretching of Bowie’s potential, most notably in the amount of time and distance traveled before the song proper even begins. For five hi-hatty minutes, the band finds itself in the Dead’s “Mind Left Body Jam,” brings that to an early peak, returns to its gloomy structure, elaborates yet another theme, then finally triggers the beginning of the composed section. The normal jam section holds its own as well, mirroring the 4/24 version somewhat by first attacking a recognizable melody (“Three Blind Mice”), driving through DEG, and placing something unusual (in this case, Hendrix teases) into the cracks of the ending section.
The Jones Beach Bowie is the third mammoth of the spring/summer, by track length (18:29) at the very least. Introduced excellently by the only Letter to Jimmy Page set opener ever, there’s a solid 2+ minutes of atmospheric play in the intro, which the leap into the main jam revisits. Instead of spinning up the dissonance right away, there’s a slower assembly, as cymbal washes, strange guitar harmonics, descending basslines ruminate. A couple minutes later, it’s rocking hard, Trey picks up a melody from Mike, and feints towards the usual Bowie path. Then Trey drops into a sustain drone, Fish goes Animal on his drums (with some added yells for good measure), and there’s a period of aggressive clutter that resolves to…“Jessica,” of all things. That’s followed by yet another melodic collapse, a start-stop bludgeoning, and a half-swaggering, half-seasick section anchored by Trey’s wah pedal, before the big machine-gun finish, laced with haunted house guitar effects and ghoulish laughs.
I’m not sure any of these versions quite pass the true Type II Test, where a listener dropped into the middle of the jam wouldn’t be able to tell what song it started out as. But they’re slowly building a bridge to the landmark Bowie of 12/29, extending the song’s possibilities and testing both the audience’s and the band’s patience. The lengthy explorations that started appearing in the fall, never mind the rest of the 90s, would be impossible without these intermediate steps.
But to just describe Phish’s 90s arc as progressively getting weirder and more experimental and jammier would be a distortion. This show isn’t so much an outlier as an accurate demonstration that they were also, simultaneously, refining what it meant to adapt the Phish experience to a larger stage — a process that would involve just as many false starts and dead ends as their improvisational development. It’s really two sides of the same coin: the growing confidence to both challenge their audience with lengthy, perpetually shifting jams and become comfortable with the crowd-pleasing, broad moves needed to play arenas and sheds. That’s the real story of 1994, and without the simultaneous nurturing of both threads, the future narrative might have turned out very differently.
