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superdee ::
kayceman ::
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getz
AARON STEIN FROM THE FRONT ROW
How many metaphors can one weekend produce? How much symbolism should we look for in acres of mud in northern Vermont? Can the entire Phish experience be whittled down to a single song?
Take Care Of Your Shoes : Coventry by Rie Kasahara |
I believe it can be, but for each of us it will be a different song. For me it will be "Reba," the first Phish song that I heard and thus the bookends to my personal Phish saga--high school to graduate school to the working world and family life. It was 12 and a half years of "Reba" for me, so that's what I was screaming for and that's what they gave me and doesn't it just sum it all up? A bouncy melody with catchy lyrics that don't make sense in any context; a long twisting composition featuring an over composed cat-and-mouse between not two, but four musicians. Yes, a mighty struggle to get through this late in the game, but they make it nonetheless, never as good as we remember it once being; a glorious jam that seems like it's completely driven by devilish guitar licks but probably gets most of its fuel from the other three hangers-on. It sums it up perfectly for me.
Trey : 08.15.04
By Tony Stack |
Maybe for you it was the "Piper." The beginning was slow and somewhat uncertain and while we expected it to build and build at a linear pace, it abruptly hit its stride seemingly way, way too soon. Then before we could catch our breath, the guitar was wailing at a pace only an NRA apologist could appreciate. Faster, faster, more and more out of control... Glazed looks on that guitarist's face shot in this direction and that. And then those crazy eyes catch your crazy eyes just like they have so many times before and yet this time it's the last time and so you move your body like it hasn't moved in a decade. For just that brief moment you are dancing with a ghost. The rest of the band barely keeping up until finally letting up just as abruptly as it had started. The crowd not sure if it wanted more and if it did if they could handle it. Who knows what the band was thinking.
There are hundreds of choices and Phish only gave us a small sampling of them over the course of the weekend which of course is disappointing but was inevitable nonetheless. This band has always been about the music to me. At its core it was the music, the musicians, the music. And yet Sunday, it really didn't matter what they played or how they played it. This is what made it strange. We struggled a Jobian struggle to get to Coventry and in the end it didn't matter that they reward our persistence. The reward was already meted out over a two-decade long stretch of album covers, mid-week Midwest bustouts, sets that lasted all night and crested two millennia, small-venue vacations in Europe or jams from flatbed trucks or airport control towers, long trippy narrations in the middle of bits of a college thesis, guest trampolinists and long, scrotum-rattling vacuum solos. We'd already reaped the rewards of travails through traffic and manure-stenched mud baths: before the fact! Now it was their time. We were only there as observers. If they told you the setlist in advance you would have still done it, right? That was the gift: we knew it was the last one. We were given a chance to say goodbye if we were willing to endure and improvise just as this band has endured and improvised every time nature or the authority has said it shan't. As it turned out, they put on a pretty good show as well. Well, that isn't quite true. For me it was one of the best.
Coventry By Tony Stack |
You have to understand that I am the most critical Phish fan on this planet. I have seen the mountaintop and it was perfection I came to expect and frowned when they didn't make it there. And those six sets were anything but perfection, believe you me. But they contained perfection and I learned, maybe too late, that that was all that really mattered. It was the best of times it was the worst of times, but it was quintessentially Phish and you really had no choice but to love it or go home. There's so much to talk about between the rain and the turning away of dedicated travelers, but I won't comment on them. I was lucky, I know that. I empathize with everyone who wasn't, but I cannot sympathize. We were lucky.
Trey : 08.14.04
By Tony Stack |
From my point of view, they could not have ended the trip any better than they did this weekend. Yeah, no bustouts, no craziness, unbelievable sloppiness at points, etc... But who cares? I can't bring myself to complain about one thing from these shows. It was the best Phish has to offer and the worst Phish has to offer all at the same time. They showed us why they were so great, displayed all the reasons we loved them for all these years and most importantly they showed us in full Technicolor why they undoubtedly, please stop saying otherwise, need to stop -- all in the context of six sets. Six sets with only three covers, only a few post-hiatus tunes and only one song from their new album. Yet there was plenty of sick, sick sickness, plenty of silliness, more missed guitar sections than could fill one side of a 90 minute tape, plenty of Trey's self- indulgent ramblings, a final show that featured "Reba," "Slave," and the "Curtain With." I can whittle down the entire show to these three songs and feel as remarkably buzzed about it as I ever will be and yet it was so much more than just songs. These shows had to be for the band and not to appease the needs of the crowd; anyone bitching because they didn't get a (sure-to-be-botched-miserably) "Fluffhead" doesn't get it. The amount of negativity surrounding the resulting shows is beyond my comprehension. Never has there been a grander challenge in the history of rock and roll... has there? Did the band deliver? Take it from this whiny bitch – they did! We had 1200 Phish shows to see our songs, complain about mistakes, get sweaty to head-kind jams, have them make us laugh and try to return the favor, learn the Secret Language, wait in traffic, discuss the socioeconomic implications of Gamehendge, trade tapes, DAT's, CD's and SHN's. These shows had nothing to do with any of that and most of all the band didn't owe anyone anything.
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| left by Tony Stack :: right by Dave Vann |
Mike Gordon : 08.14.04 : VT
By Tony Stack |
Saturday was a party, a marathon of survival where exhaustion was the only emotion I am sure everyone was feeling. It was Gordon's night for me. As would be the case, Mike would be a bit subdued on Sunday and I can only believe that he laid it all on the line Saturday for a reason. This was his last show and he played beyond himself, beyond where any bass player could ever hope to have played. Would you laugh if I said it was the single greatest show put on by a rock and roll bass player ever? I don't care, I'm saying it anyway. Everyone sees this band in a different way. This much I have learned over all these years, we are all listening to the same band and yet we are all listening to a completely different band. I listen through Mike and Trey – Page and Jon played as well as could be expected both nights, I love those guys, don't get me wrong, but these shows, for me were about Mike on Saturday and Trey on Sunday. For me all I need to know about Saturday night was that Mike Gordon was over the cuckoo's nest insane on the bass guitar. Oh, that and best "AC/DC Bag" ever?
I can find no comparative event for what we saw on Sunday night. No precedent in any forum or venue that could illustrate the weird black magic floating in the mountain air. I can think of no "it's as if..." that would do justice to the bizarre juxtaposition of raw human emotion and raw musical energy that manifested itself from the Coventry stage. I was lucky enough to be front and center for the finale on Sunday and while it was further away than I'm used to being, I never felt more a part of the band-as-community spirit than I felt that night. I've always known that Trey is Phish and Phish is Trey, but this truism became so much more crystalline on Sunday in so many ways. I won't comment any further on his state of mind despite the plethora of commentary available on mailing lists and message boards everywhere. I will say, in light of the Trey = Phish phenomenon that, for me, it was absolutely tears-of-joy to see a man excise the thing that he loves, that he is, live in front of 65,000 people, break down to almost nothing, and then return to provide us with the music he provided over the course of the last 1.5 sets of the show. He called it "blowing off steam" multiple times during the weekend. I'm not sure that phrase does it justice.
Fishman & Trey : 08.15.04 by Dave Vann |
"Slave." I remember my first time seeing this, how we all called for it from the rail desperate to get into Trey's brain. He obliged and flipped our cerebra forever. Well, not forever, because Sunday night the band flipped it back for me. Howlingly intense, full-band voodoo of the nth degree – this was a building intensity that no hurricane could muster; this was torrential rains that no mulching could absorb; this was thick, gooey mud on the toes of our soul that no shower would ever rinse away. How this band reached down and mustered some of the magic they mustered that night is beyond me. There were moments where I wasn't sure they would make it through a song, let alone the set, let alone the night. I feared a stumble to the finish line, or even worse a Mary Decker Slaney biffing in the limelight so many paces from the goal. Yet they/Trey wiped the tears from his eyes and the clouds from his mind and they did it. The band reached deep within themselves, across 20 years of history and pulled this "Slave" across time. It was music through a cosmological wormhole and the laws of physics bent just a little for this band one last time. If they had ended it here I would have been happy, I was actually thinking "no encore" at this moment and one of the "security" guys up front even said as much. I have to say I'm glad they had one more in them, because one of my all-time favorites ensued, the one song that always seems to come out during those truly great sets...
Coventry : 08.15.04
By Dave Vann |
..."The Curtain." when they played this at Brooklyn I thought to myself, "This perfectly describes the present state of the band, how did Trey know so long ago?" When they started it up again for the encore, a left-field surprise to me and yet as everything that occurred that weekend, it was the right thing, the only thing they could have played. And yet here, the last few minutes of the existence of a band, a phenomenon, a religion... even as they tried to bring down the curtain it bumped into trouble – everyone was out of key on the last song they'd ever play. At first I was disappointed that the majesty of the tune up until that point had been jarred by Trey's taking the microphone to correct it. As if someone had burst into the door during a hypnosis session, like someone had belched during a solemn moment of silence for a fallen friend. But again, it became clear that this was the way it had had to end. Blissful, majestic bliss > OOPS! > Blissful, majestic bliss. After botching and butchering so many other songs over the course of the weekend, over the course of the last few years, without stopping. As if stopping even for a second to make it right would break the spell. As if there were a spell to begin with. There was something to be said for creating perfection from imperfection. Something even more to be said for doing things the way they (he?) felt they should be done. This weekend was all about making perfection out of imperfection. The most perfectly imperfect band ever. They made it right, as Trey spoke the final words to his faithful that they'd ever hear from a Phish stage again [Something along the lines of "I really want to play this right." You wanted a special gift from the band? This was it.], the band entered perhaps the most beautiful stretch of music I have ever heard them play. All pretense and history and interview subject matter seemed to dissipate into the rainless skies. Four friends melted into a single entity, oozed out over the audience, the airwaves, the movie screens, the collective consciousness of something bigger than anyone ever imagined it could ever be and delivered note after note of sheer, happy Phish. Stillness met movement in that short flurry of music. It was always just about the music. Maybe my ears were overcome with the goosebumps that had popped up all over my body, but I won't put it up for argument, it was as gorgeous as it ever was. As the chills overtook my body and the last notes lingered on our dampness I could whisper just one word: "perfect."
Aaron Stein
JamBase | New York
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