Woosterrific Phish: 12/27/10 and 12/28/10

Phish set themselves up for a strange engagement in late December 2010: forgoing any larger tour, the band set up two nights in Worcester, Massachusetts’ DCU Center, before a three-night run at Madison Square Garden— to go ring in a larger and more fruitful year for this nation. Suspicions were mostly confirmed: whether or not Worcester was taken by the band as a warm-up to Madison Square Garden mattered little.

The first night was weirdly calm—what I’d expect if, since the Halloween run, the boys haven’t talked or practiced any Phish fodder: Mike’s been busying touring and pressing his latest solo effort on vinyl, and Trey’s been conducting orchestras in New Jersey ever since they closed their three night run in Atlantic City. The first set of the first night held in it some of the strangest spontaneous choices of any band in live performance I’ve ever witnessed: after a pedestrian “Sample In a Jar” and an unremarkable “Funky Bitch,” it was clear that Trey was consulting with Mike, calling the next tune completely on the fly. These suspicions were confirmed as Page and Trey kicked off a Motown/bluesy take on the long-forgotten Velvet Underground cover “Cool It Down.” Why did this happen—a call to “cool it down” on the third song of nothing but a five-night run? Trey was off tempo, and his playing wandered around as they jammed happily along that one chord Lou Reed wrote—a subtle and different treatment than most other jams, if only for its vintage Velvet origin. Later, as Trey called out “Roses are Free,” and the crowd—having amply applied magic droplets from non-Visine bottles to their palms—jumped up and down as if the Ween tune was a winning lottery ticket. I wished the Regal Raisin himself, Gene Ween had been there to help out Trey’s wimpy guitar stylings: not akin to Mark Knopfler’s carefully-chosen licks, and nothing like the crunchy funness that is a Gene Ween solo. Trey was pensive; perhaps the tempo was one notch lower than his cranium’s metronome could handle at that moment. He showed nearly-redeeming, expressive sloppiness through a fast-paced “It’s Ice;” in more fascinating moments, Trey invented new ways to make his axe go dweedle-dweedle-dee way up high on the scale. Special guests that could have reminded how to play his axe would have included Johnny A, the Allman Brothers, and, as requested by the “LA GRANGE” banner that hung from the railing beside the stage. Highlights there were: the guy next to me spoke emphatically about how he’d been “chasing that “Mound” since 1995,” and that the version of “Cavern” was something more than pedestrian. Trey's repeated guitar notes across the verses of "Heavy Things" were barely enjoyable, though wholly appropriate to the vibe. As we all wandered back through the blistering cold winds, talk of the sets’ references to the prior night’s blizzard didn’t add up to any vastly redeeming display of technical accuracy, creativity or humor: Page chose to employ each of his keyboards during a lengthy jam within “Seven Below,” making great use of the variable oscillator adjustment available on his vintage Yamaha synth—but this experimentation was foreign admist the rest of the right hand-piano/left hand-organ work. I shouldn’t have been left wondering: why was “Seven Below” worthy of cool synthy tricks, and we were left to flounder in the same old groove through most of the show? Finest moments included the ultimate and seasonally-appropriate "Farmhouse," treating this ho-hum ballad as tenderly as any poignant Paul Simon torch song; the greatest instrumental work was certainly "What's the Use?," a chord progression that seemed to belong to King Crimson or the like, but was treated with emphatic whole-note respect, some driving and simple psychedelic anthem. "Possum" was interesting, but held no value compared to what I heard of that song this summer.

Night two was made of marked change: "Kill Devil Falls" as an opener wanted to sound like a swampy John Fogerty rock stomp, but couldn't help emulate Great Moments of Last Night. Most important to the quality of the second DCU Center show was Phish's ability to Make Humorous their own material: Mike's grand "My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own" was quick and right and fast, and Trey's goofing around with a recorder that held and played Sarah Palin quotes during "Alaska" helped establish a more relaxed vibe for everyone involved. Because what are the stakes? One may assume a legion of Phish-show attendees are in it for the "beautiful buzz/oh, what a beautiful buzz" (the chorus that ended night one); as literally hundreds gathered to partake before and after the show in those Irresistible Nitrous Balloons, being dispensed on the side streets surrounding the downtown venue, and as Visine bottles were passed down aisles, and careful drops applied to palms and tongues, I came to understand more about how Phish's musical proficiency doesn't especially matter to those on acid, or those racing to consume as much Bud Light as possible from aluminum bottles. What does matter to these folks is Phish's ability to laugh and be creative: Trey's fooling around with Hockey Mom sound clips, and the incredibly apt and useful "She Caught the Katy" that followed were crowd-pleasing on many levels-- and this vibe came to sum in the second night's finest moment: the first set's "Wolfman's Brother," a song I've never especially dug but was thrilled to be a part of on Tuesday night. The night before, during an especially pseudo-tender ballad, I mentioned to a friend that they sounded, without reason, like Murph and the Magic Tones, featuring Mark Knopfler. Four songs in on the second night my Blues Brothers dream came true. Set two began with "Carini," always an interesting and weird non-Zeppelin riff. Songs like "Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan" and "Backwards Down the Number Line" appear fixed in the band's rotation, and add, I guess, an air of Phish 3.0 notoriety to any set. The acapella song "The Birdwatcher," a B-side rarity from years back, was performed for the first time as the first set's closer, and its tight, weird harmonies were intriguing, not grueling or wrong. From "Limb by Limb" to "Harry Hood," night two set two descended into mediocre musicality akin to the Phish cover band playing at the crummy bar up the street (except the aforementioned and stellar "Albuquerque"). The encore may have been the best choice possible for the time and place: dearest Massachusetts teenyboppers, old heads, dreddies, smelly hippies, drunk jocks, wasteoids, "may the good Lord/shine a light on you/make every song your favorite tune/may the good Lord/shine a light on you/warm like the evening sun." Onto the cold streets of Worcester we all spilled out on both nights from the DCU Center, and probably most of us were still seeking such revelation, as the wind made us cold: our faces were made to shine, warmly, to reflect back to the world the beauty we encounter and hear.