@kevinAreHollo said:

Why does the experimentation, the playfulness, the technical envelope pushing have to be mutually exclusive of the emotional, the depth, the gravitas? What if those tools (because really, that's what what those things boil down to) could be a roadmap to emotional release?

Kevin -

Thanks for this comment. I think my posts tend to get hyperaggressive about Phish's young-time music, partly because so many fans are undervaluing the incredible stuff they're playing now. But I have a hard time articulating exactly what I mean in technical terms (as if those would help anyway!).

Maybe this iamge will make it clearer: the difference between Phish's (say) pre-1995 jamming and their later, deeper stuff is the difference between a great TV show about farming, and a day on the farm. The TV show can do all this work to place the farm in wider social/economic contexts, can give us vivid characters, can even seem far realer than real...but a day's manual work does something to you, to your thinking-body, that the show simply can't touch. I've always been one to prefer the TV show, but the last couple years that's become harder to sustain.

(That's not meant to denigrate fans of the early stuff, though in my clumsiness I'm probably sounding that way.)

There's a moment in the studio version of 'Light' when, over the beginning of that spiraling guitar solo, Trey sings a single sweet note at the octave...nothing but 'oooooh,' a lonely syllabub held as long as he can muster while the instruments start to bang away underneath. That note, the emotion behind it, is something I'm not accustomed to in Phish's studio albums: it's pure. No tricks, no arrangement, no ideas at all. Just the reborn feeling that comes of unself-conscious release.

That moment in 'Light' - and, say, the whole of 'Twenty Years Later,' one of the best tracks Trey has ever written - gives me a feeling, even 'just' preconsciously, of emotional vulnerability and full presence. I think 'Eliza' and 'Billy Breathes' and 'Cavern' and 'Esther' and 'Divided Sky' do express something wonderfully human and humane. I've always admired Phish's efforts on behalf of joy and uplift - and they long ago mastered a rock'n'roll language made to communicate those very things. But their delicacy and sunlit happiness in those early years seemed to emerge, not from ragged weary living, but from a childlike feeling of lightness, of getting away with something.

For me, the old stuff is far better at doing Happy than at living Weary - in place of the latter it often seems to offer (pardon me) sentiment. Does that make sense?

I don't know that I'm actually offering an argument at all here. But this feeling, for me, is inescapable now. And what's weird about it is that Phish's 1993-1995 music has brought me SO MANY TIMES to a place of thrilling heart-swelling happiness...but that tends not to happen for me now. When I listen to that young-time music, I hear the brainwork, a pulsating neocortex so rich with ideas that it can never fully give way to the hormonal rush.

And I continue to think that that transition, from brilliant young players able at times to access feelings far older and deeper than their own glands or big ideas to mature musicians able to join in the Weave, really kicked in around summer 1997. Not coincidentally: when they slowed down, quieted down, and cooled off.

So I'm not disputing your account of the band's early power - they could bring something wonderful to their music from the very start, as even the studio 'Esther' and 'Reba' show - but I think part of that power is the rush of possibility, or something impressive.

Apocrypha: James Joyce, asked whether his was a productive writing day, protesting that while six words' worth of output was reasonable, the problem was getting the words in the perfect order.

Bill Evans:

There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.

Phish's music never lacked for complex composition and textures, back then or now. But the thing that escapes, the hidden term, the truth (time passes; death comes; distant one may as well be beloved other; nothing will save you but you can be saved)...that suffuses their music today, I think. As it suffused the Dead's music. Phish have never been heartless. Far from it. But I think they had to become brainless. And they have. Which is why so many folks insist now on the importance of the fact that they're no longer impressed, when the music says over and over that 'impressed' isn't much of anything at all.

'Impressed' is to look at The Wire and say 'This is a good cop show. Better than that other cop show.' And only that.

Again - I think I'm not really addressing your point. But maybe that's my point: I can't. I can't see the old stuff the way I used to. I can't get past a feeling I have. And I needn't give any of it up, anything that's ever been, to feel as truly as I've ever felt anything that something new, everything new, is yet to come. A new category of thing.

***

The key, here, is that Phish killed it last night, and you might like it.