Why go to 13 Phish concerts?
YOU go to a Phish concert – or maybe all 13 of its doughnutthemed, no-songrepeated “Baker’s Dozen” concerts at Madison Square Garden – because you want to be inside the improvised and therefore uncopyrightable space of, say, Minute 21 of a half-hour-long jam, like Lawn Boy on July 25, during which the thought may have occurred to you that the song had changed profoundly since it started.
In those and similar moments of the Baker’s Dozen concerts – I attended the final two, on Saturday and Sunday nights – it is the type and degree of that change that occupies your hearing, in a retrospective way. Perhaps it does so even more than what’s actually happening in the music when you think the thought, which might include some faults: weedy singing, as if for children’s music; tepid lyrics; obvious, kill-me-now buildups toward a payoff; some ghastly synthesiser tones from Page McConnell’s keyboard rig.
But the thing is, last you’d noticed, the song was in a different key with a different beat and a different mood. Now it’s moving again toward a different place through a melodic pattern or a diffusion of harmonic relationships or a gradual surge in density or speed. And so the value of the concert lives in the music’s imperative of motion. That quality can’t really be bought or sold. That quality is its spirit.
Wait. Did the first paragraph contain, besides a value judg- ment, five commas, two emdashes and only one period? Did we start going in about spirit before we really explained why we’re here? Is that itself a fault? Or is it, statistically and in the aggregate, a rarity? Is this like a late-’90s, first-set Phish jam, going wide right out of the gate, pointing toward interludes and eventual reconnection with the theme? Is this basically 11/17/97 McNichols Arena, Denver?
Phish is a jam band initiated in Vermont in 1983, more or less led by Trey Anastasio, its guitarist, singer and principal songwriter. It has had two hiatuses: Since 2009 we are in what fans call Phish 3.0. Its music is wending, ludic, full of ’70s and ’80s FM-radio homage, averse to moral judgment, almost never dark or emotionally demanding, and popular among two generations of American college-educated glow-stick adventurers.
It likes long jams in long sets, and encourages its audience to listen hard in the long view, to slot the performance of one song into a grid containing all the other performances of that song. Phish’s music is adventuresome exactly to the extent that it is familiar. It is adventurously familiar.
The 13 concerts of Baker’s Dozen represent the longest run in a single place that Phish has ever undertaken – a different order from its customary five-show runs at the Garden around New Year’s Eve. You’d think this would have happened with Phish already: Longer resi- dencies suit improvisers.
Residency was once a clinical word. Now it is a chic one, for good reason. It is possible, if not provable, that by showing up on the same stage repeatedly, improvising artists grow deeper and more complex, or at least remember their own standards of excellence.
Historically, residencies could help a band develop a relationship of trust and respect with repeat customers and local musicians: Think of Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot in 1957, or the Allman Brothers at the Beacon in recent decades, where the residencies ran to 15 nights. But of course a stage before 20,000 people at the Garden is on a different scale of trust from 100 in a club.
In any case: What I saw was a purposeful band in energetic form, better than I’ve seen and heard recently, more willing to let songs assume their own proportions, and going far into its own catalog. Most of all, they did not repeat a song in 13 shows. There were 239 songs played, including covers of David Bowie, Prince, the Rolling Stones, and so on. That takes rehearsing, and resolve.
The burden on Phish, after 34 years, is to keep adding value, because their fans are also advanced-level consumers who know what it means to be satisfied. Therefore, residencies. Therefore, doughnuts.
Each concert at the Garden had a theme, announced that afternoon, roughly corresponding with musical references to a particular doughnut, produced and given out to the early arrivers by Federal Donuts of Philadelphia. My nights were Boston Cream and Glazed. During the Boston Cream night the band played a short, clever and limited mash-up of several songs by the bands Boston and Cream, arranged to be in the same key, gradually superimposed until their lyrics became interleaved.
But I didn’t want a doughnut; I wanted the spirit of the band. Right, spirit! You go for the spirit. But it seems that you also go for the opposite reason, for the body: You are collecting artefacts of sound and memory. A Phish concert is a goodie bag of songs with titles and lyrics and repeatable themes. You put your hand in and attach your desires to the ones you haven’t heard live yet, or that few manage to do.