david taus

This Has All Been Wonderful

music: Phish- The White Tape

Twenty-some years ago, four college kids got together to play some music with each other, and in doing so became friends. What that friendship and that music grew into in subsequent years was most likely beyond the scope what any of those four college kids could dream up back when the four of them jammed late into the night in the early 1980’s. Their music was quirky, intricate. But for some reason it took root in the ears of their friends and grew. And grew. And grew. Twenty years after college ended these four friends were still making music, although the circumstances were quite different. By the early 2000’s, these four friends had effectively built nothing short of a cultural institution, a quirky and intricate empire of which they were the reluctant figureheads. And this past weekend, the four musicians known as Phish closed the door to the empire they had built over the past twenty years and handed back the keys.

Phish’s final concert was held in Coventry, VT, a location that bore heavy personal significance to the band in their evolution in the earlier years. As soon as the band announced that this end-of-the-summer festival would be their last performance as Phish, the concert became an event of epic symbolic scale. Those who had at any point in their lives found a personal affinity for the Phish phenomenon scrambled to be a part of this last concert, to revel and dance one last time, and to pay their respects. Expectations were high. The Phish Nation would congregate to celebrate (and/or mourn) the music that in many ways gave them an identity and a sense of affiliation.

The getting there proved to be the most difficult part for some. Because of the heavy rains, Coventry, VT was turned into a colossal mud pit. Thousands waited in traffic for over 30 hours, and when word came down that no other cars would be allowed in the venue, thousands abandoned their cars on I-91 and walked up to 20 miles in order to be a part of the show. I too joined the final pilgrimage with my friends, although we had a fairly painless time getting into the festival grounds as compared with most others. Other than a reunion with this group of people, I did not really know what to expect from the weekend, from this band. But ultimately, this weekend was not about me. Nor was it about any of the 70,000 other individuals who were in attendance. The final Phish concert was not for us; it was for the four members of Phish.

Never before has the band seemed so human to me as they were this past weekend. Whereas before they took the stage, played, and left without a word to the audience, this weekend the band spoke directly to us so informally and sometimes awkwardly it could do nothing but take them down from some exhalted place and humanize them to us. We got stories about origins of songs, we got glimpses into the inner workings of a band rehearsing, we got personal narratives, we met friends and family members, we heard tearful expressions of thanks. They stopped songs in the middle only to restart them in a different key, to deliver anecdotes, to somehow try to include all 75,000 of us in their world of inside jokes that we thought we knew so well. The concert, as a result, felt less like a professionally packaged entertainment event, and more like a backyard barbecue and family reunion.

It quickly became apparrent that the weekend was not about the quality of music. I personally did not go to Coventry to hear Phish give a recital of the body of their work, and I think that those who did go for this reason were fairly disappointed. Those of us who cared about Phish at any point did not need to hear them play difinitive versions of any of their songs. We had heard them do that before. This weekend was more about witnessing how the four members of Phish would reconcile their own experience, how they would walk away from the thing that they had created and built over the past 20 years. We were to be flies on the wall of a final jam session between these four people whose music we soaked up for so long. And as it turned out, the jamming was what Coventry was all about. Compositions were flubbed throughout the weekend, entrances were missed, notes were struck sour, but when the band pushed away from song structure and began to play with each other, and more importantly for each other, the music’s quality appropriately matched the epic scope of the weekend.

The first day and the first set of the second day were precursors to the pith of the experience: the last two sets of the festival. On paper they looked fairly unremarkable:

Phish, 8/15/04, Coventry, VT

Set 2: Down With Disease -> Wading in the Velvet Sea, Glide, [band speech], Split Open and Melt -> jam -> Ghost
Set 3: Fast Enough for You, Seven Below -> Simple -> Piper -> Bruno ->Dickie Scotland -> Wilson -> Slave to the Traffic Light
[fireworks]
Encore: The Curtain With

As Down With Disease began the second set, the band began to feel the gravity of the situation. This song is typically reserved for watershed moments (it was the first song after Auld Lang Syne on NYE 2000), and its rousing chorus “Waiting for the time when I can finally say / This has all been wonderful but now I’m on my way” has obvious relevance. The jam to ensue simmered to a tender piano solo, and as Velvet Sea started, Page broke. It was an unbelievably touching moment, one that, to me, outweighed the mud and the traffic and the flubs and the botched musicianship. Music is nothing if it does not move the spirit, and the tears that flowed during Velvet Sea reminded me of just this.. At that point, Glide marked time, delayed the inevitable outpouring. The band speeches, replete with tears from Trey and Page, and the hour of music to follow was truly inspired, an improvisatory magnum opus that at once expressed the tangle of emotions surrounding that particular moment in time. I am tempted to listen to this hour or so again, to revisit the intensity of such a musical conversation, but part of me is insistent that I never listen to Coventry on tape. The second set, like the weekend, was a lot to deal with, but was why I was there.

The third set was more premeditated: a lyrically poignant song to open, then some jamming and silliness. It wouldn’t be Phish with out some silliness. In Trey’s own words, the whole thing was meant to be a big overblown cartoon, and to the end they were as goofy as college kids in a dorm room. At the same time, though, the band needed some time to give serious thought to such a complex ending. They needed to acknowledge the arc of their careers, the places at which they found themselves, and choose to say this complex goodbye with maturity. The Slave to end, in retrospect, was the perfect choice. While people were expecting the band to end their career with some of the centerpiece songs such as YEM, Divided Sky, or Harry Hood, songs that they commonly would use at moments of signifigance, Slave to the Traffic Light was for the most part overlooked to fill this slot. It is in many ways a quiet little brother to YEM or Antelope, but it is also a grand, sweeping composition incorporating quiet, reflective moments as well as exhalted ones. It was more sparsely played than other larger tunes, which rendered it that much more precious. And as the band transitioned into Slave out of the reckless fun of Wilson (“You still can have fun!” Trey yells), the full weight of this decision became clear to me: Slave to the Traffic Light was the first song Phish ever wrote and played. The last song of the last set was the first song the band ever wrote. They had indeed come full circle. Slave’s execution and delivery was transcendental and as perfect a moment as these four humans could produce. The stage fell silent, the four stepped to the lip of the stage, held hands, and bowed deeply. Then they walked off. That was that.

After some fireworks, a few words from Trey, and an encore of The Curtain With, an obscure and very rare tune from the catalog, the lights came up and we were left to reconcile the final notes of Phish for ourselves. The Curtain With, to me, was an afterthought, a postscript. I was done after Slave ended, and judging by the way they performed Slave, so was the band. They made the decision that is ultimately the most important one in an artists’s life: knowing when to stop. Now that the four friends have moved their narrative to the stuff of history, their body of work can be examined as a whole, complete piece. The spontanaiety that made them famous will be gone, but we fans are not without countless hours of their music to listen to. And I am thankful. For their own sake, I hope that Phish never plays another concert.

(This from my little notebook at the conclusion of the second set:)

Revisit this, dissect it. This is really Phish’s final statement. LOTS of stuff here.

They are not interested in playing their tunes - a recital - they really just want to play with each other and for each other. At the end, when there is nothing else on the horizon, that’s what it came back to - four friends making music with each other. At the realization that their shared vision has reached its conclusion, they payed all their attention to each other. When Phish is parsed, dissected, boiled down, and distilled, there are four people, four real human beings, who have built and shared something for 21 years more intimite nad complicated and honest and HUMAN than I could ever imagine. Never before has this band seemed so human. It’s the music, yes, but as a fine art, music is the expression and creation of a human being. It’s not about the scene, the party: it’s about people, individuals, human lives. Four specific human lives, in this case, whose story I followed and entwined with my own for the past eight years.

But ultimately this is not about me. I’m on the outside looking in this weekend. I’m getting to watch these four people talk to each other for a while, publically speak with each other for the last time. To have it out with one another, to love one another, to have some fun with each other. It is sloppy, disorganized, and not always well executed, but it is honest, it is human, it is very much Phish.

I hope that Trey, Mike, Page, and Jon will keep making music together if only for themselves. I hope that they all will meet at someone’s house on some cold autumn weekend and after a fine homecooked dinner, they four retreat to the basement to jam for a little. That is, after all, where they started 20-some years ago: college kids jamming in the basement of some dorm or apartment. I hope that it will come back to this, and I hope that they never record any of it.

Posted by davidtaus at August 18, 2004 12:16 PM