From the stage of the MGM Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Phish conquered David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on Halloween night 2016. It was their biggest challenge yet, and they rose to the occasion. The first set was rather pedestrian-- but I’m getting old, and particular in my old age, at least when it comes to live performances of Phish. For more than half of the first set I had to keep messing with the browser window, from which came a pretty decent audio stream, but no video. I trying to do whatever was necessary to get both video and audio out of the LivePhish stream: downgrading bandwidth? Hard-wired connection? Nothing worked. I was jazzed for the concert and found myself second-guessing what I had paid for (just the audio? Could they do that?). After having streamed the sound of the audience mics for over an hour pre-show, the video simply never turned on, for me, anyway. Later in set three I got some sustained periods of playback, but in general the video feed was a flop. When video did come through, it felt like I was getting postcards sent to me from the stage: sudden glimpses of a moment in the music in which my view was unobscured. When I had a view, it was incredible. During the second set I abandoned all hope of video and simply enjoyed the music.
This was, after all, the epic conclusion to a four night run in Las Vegas: the seventh, eighth, and ninth sets of a long weekend. And Phish are not the youngsters they once were-- rather, they are the bandleaders of the mob of headbanging youth whose parents were in grade school when the band was busy writing “AC/DC Bag,” the second memorable song of the night, and one of my favorites. Like the Grateful Dead, Phish has a handful of songs that appear frequently in the same places in their setlists, and “AC/DC Bag” is an excellent choice for the top of any set.
The “Phishbill” had proclaimed the news: Phish was to cover Ziggy Stardust, and not alone, either. Inside an essay by David Fricke (in that patented Rolling Stone font) was a big reveal: Phish would be joined onstage by an ensemble of vocalists and a small string section. Why? To create the atmosphere and sonic character of the original album, something Page alone couldn’t do with his Yamaha synth or Clavinet. Nobody could have predicted that a string ensemble and backup singers would have been deemed necessary, as the band took on the project. When was the last time Phish performed with backup singers-- the in-studio version of “Julius?” And while Trey at one time worked diligently arranging the song “Guyute” for orchestra, this was not his rodeo; the strings and even the vocals were arranged by someone else.
These choices characterized the performance: it wasn’t Phish onstage, as much as an ensemble of their own (collective?) design. Which was consistently good, with smatterings of greatness, but did leave me wishing the sound techs provided a written disclaimer as to how they were going to modify the typical Phish mix to accommodate the big Vegas band that would be assembled. I kept thinking of the Joe Cocker album Mad Dogs and Englishmen, one of the greatest live recordings I’ve ever heard. That band was twice the size of this oversized Phish-does-Bowie group, had rehearsed only a handful of times, and was under the musical direction and stern rule of Leon Russell-- though Cocker was the center-stage star, Russell controlled the players, gave directions, and legendarily turned into a dictator during live performances. But no one ever questioned who was leading the band (think about the critical importance of the big-band baton wavers in the 1930s and 1940s). Phish, during its Ziggy Stardust set, felt strikingly leaderless, and I'm not sure why.
And a leadership vacuum has always created a chemistry between the four members of Phish-- it is the root of their improvisational technique (‘the beat is where ever you think it is,’ one of the members once told a reporter). So the introduction of additional players onstage disrupts that dynamic-- which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and wasn’t necessarily, here inside of Ziggy Stardust. But it was no spontaneous, wild, onstage collaboration with John Popper or gritty strummer Dave Matthews-- this was arranged, orchestrated, as premeditated as a high school marching band’s halftime show. By the close of the album’s second song, it was clear to me that Phish was not going to use the Bowie album as a springboard for any of their own jammy inventions, but rather play it straight, and treat the songs with a dignity and tenderness they don’t usually reach for. The band was new to every song on the album, probably in part because Ziggy Stardust is not in the rock-jazz fusion tradition, but rather a sociological and artistic costume, donned by an already-established weirdo who sought to change the culture and succeeded.
On my Greatest Phish Tracks Of All Time mix CD (I may forever think of music in terms of playlists existing in a permanent sequence on analog media), there exists more than one track from Phish’s cover of Ziggy Stardust, which is more than I can say for other Halloween endeavors. Some of the majesty of a Phish Halloween ‘musical costume’ is that there is no bar. Most recently, the band took on their most inventive, if not creepy, endeavors: a unique interpretation of a Disney-produced “Haunted House” sound effects record, a spaced-out, sampling-over-jamming special. This whole tradition began with a surprising and epic take on the Beatles’ “White Album,” way back in 1994, followed the next year by a cover of the Who’s underappreciated Quadrophenia. The choice of Ziggy Stardust was a good one, something I called for years ago, but am very glad it happened now.
Because we may only have five years, and we may not need a spaceman to tell us such. The album’s opening song is an epic prophecy, heralding not just the arrival of the outsider but providing a first-person account of what he saw-- the heap of broken images so common to works of 20th century art (“telephones/opera house/favorite melodies/I saw boys/toys/electric irons and TVs/my brain hurt like a warehouse…”). “Soul Love,” the second track, was understated, resonant with the late 1960s jangle of pop music, but with a low-voiced, pleading Bowie vocal line, creshendoing into a some desperate statement, a construction that would be heard on many records following Ziggy Stardust. “Moonage Daydream,” the first real rocker of the album, felt accomplished and complete-- from Fish’s careful drum fills around the all-important vocal breaks, to Trey and Mike’s not-elaborate jam section at the song’s close.
“Starman” has always seemed like Bowie’s answer to his own song “Space Oddity,” as the latter leaves a hero stranded, to die alone in space with a great view of the earth. “Starman” is a song of forgiveness and redemption: “there’s a star man/waiting in the sky/he’d like to get to know us/but he thinks he’d blow our minds [...] he told us not to blow it/because he knows it’s all worthwhile.” The song is elegantly uptempo and remained so onstage in Vegas. If Mike had any fun (he admitted to David Fricke that he ‘was the guy in the band who didn’t know this album’), it seemed to me like it was during “Starman.” Trey’s guitar work was especially pleasant in contrast to the string arrangement, and the result was triumphant. This was a moment when the mix worked, and the blend of additional instruments made sense for Mike’s bass, Trey’s guitar, and Page’s keys to be turned down. There were, however, moments when I actually wondered what Page was doing, if anything, and a handful of times when I wondered if Trey realized his guitar was coming across as quietly as it was.
“It Ain’t Easy” followed “Starman,” providing a stark contrast between the common rock anthem and a downtempo soul number that came across as downright reserved. The song is the first mention of spirituality by Bowie’s imagined spaceman (“it ain’t easy to get to heaven/when you’re going down”)-- following up on the hope of redemption established during “Starman.” The interplanetary visitor cannot offer salvation, however, contrary to popular belief-- no matter what direction one may travel, the ultimate challenge is to pass into heaven, despite all that may or has come to pass on this planet. Page appropriately rocked a chunky Clavinet during this number.
My favorite song on all of Ziggy Stardust is “Lady Stardust,” a rock ballad that allowed Bowie to go even-more-once-removed from himself, and imagine the fictional Ziggy in female form. It lies at the greatest distance from the narrative of the album, but also offers listeners the greatest and most hopeful rallying chorus (“it was all right/the band was all together [...] the song went on forever”). Interestingly, there were no backup singers or strings, though there could have been. Did Phish want to tackle the song by themselves for maybe sentimental reasons, or did the string and vocal arranger simply run out of time, and could only accomplish so much scorewriting? As the verses’ melodies passed by, I wondered if Page knew the chords, and was intentionally turning them inside out and jazzing them up, or if he was faking it. The song “Lady Stardust” has great sentimental meaning to me, and I am glad to say Phish’s cover allowed me to get swept back up into the emotion of it, regardless of Page’s “interesting” piano work.
The narrative break (or poetic turn, your choice) of Ziggy Stardust is the song “Star,” in which Bowie’s character realizes his potential as a “rock and roll star.” This awakening to identity was a common theme among the concept albums of the early 1970s, and cannot occupy an entire narrative, but must come to a point (“go to the mirror, boy,” was a similar pinnacle in the Who’s Tommy). “Star” supposes Ziggy’s future to be one of prophecy couched in rock and roll performance; on the original album, when Bowie yells “get it on, yeah!” and the electric guitar sings in its distortion, the listener may rest assured the extra-terrestrials believes they found their calling. Phish’s rendition of this moment was understated but accurate, inspired but not believable. But was Bowie ever, or did we know this was something of a farce the first time we heard it? Trey admitted to David Fricke he hadn’t gotten the concept of Ziggy until very recently, and had believed the album’s closing song to be about much more than the death of a fictional alien visitor-turned-celebrity. Ziggy Stardust is a tale of disillusion and fragmentation, of a dysfunctional world that does not allow for mistakes, but rather nothing but the frantic moving ahead. It is in that madcap progression forward (with merely five years left?) that one may discover, or rediscover, identity: “if you think you’re gonna make it, you better hang on to yourself.” This song (“Hang On To Yourself”) is the whirlwind of celebrity and fame which envelops the fictional Ziggy, almost immediately upon his realization. It’s a decent song, but was started off too slowly and never found its groove-- until a drum fill from Fish brought it gloriously up to tempo, eight bars from the end, giving a glimpse of what the performance should have been. Despite it being rooted in a Jerry Lee Lewis style of rock, the song fell flat for Phish, even when Page played the appropriate high-voiced percussive piano chords.
The album’s title song, “Ziggy Stardust,” tells the tale of Bowie’s creation, through the eyes of an omniscient narrator (making the original work not only “seminal,” to use Trey’s word, in the canon of popular music, but an experimentation with point of view). Trey’s guitar work on this-- the radio single from the album-- was well-crafted and mature, like a session guitarist. The lead vocal felt over-rehearsed, and treated the song not for what it is-- a lustful recounting of a rock icon’s peak of fame-- but as a vocal exercise. This sin is more than forgivable; they simply didn't want to get it wrong. There were moments when two male vocal lines competed for proper diction and cadence, and again I wondered why-- since we were dragging along at a ballad tempo anyway, why the strings couldn't have been providing some contrapuntal melody, or at least wailing away as rock strings often do. The result would have sounded more like Supertramp and less like Phish’s cover of an early David Bowie album, so maybe the more-sparse arrangements were intentional.
Page became unrestrained in “Suffragette City,” the album’s penultimate track: Ziggy, having found his calling, is now ‘too far gone’ (as contemporary Neil Young was writing at the time), his fame having unraveled his identity, and all too quickly leaving nothing but a world of “wham/bam/thank you, ma’am.” Bowie’s spaceman cannot prove to be anyone’s salvation; he, or someone like him, cannot “afford the ticket back” from where ever their celebrity has taken them (for more on the self-contextualization of pop music icons in the early 1970s, see Bowie contemporary Lou Reed’s Rock N’ Roll Animal). Amid Page’s rapid-fire piano (again, let’s assume he was ‘jazzing up’ the chords), the band ramped up the energy level and raged through the blocky rock chords, the last true rally of the album. The work’s final song, “Rock and Roll Suicide” describes the end of Ziggy Stardust, his return (or ascension) to the place from where he came, having lived out his moon age daydream. Phish’s rendition of this was diligent and heartfelt. For me, the finest David Bowie cover I’ve ever heard was the Flaming Lips’ in-concert rendition of “Life On Mars?,” and that’s probably because Wayne Coyne is hoarse as fuck and does little correctly, but exudes a confidence that Phish sorely lacked (when Wayne asked the song title’s question, it didn’t matter to me if he hit the notes or not-- one could feel he truly believed the words he was singing).
Phish are most obviously at ease when performing their own complex fugue-like arrangements, because they’ve been responsible for every note, throughout their careers. Some songs-- David Byrne’s “Cities” and Ween’s “Roses Are Free” are two examples-- fit naturally into the Phish catalog and bear the same comfortability, as their lyrics are just abstract enough, and the groove just bouncy enough, to fit the bill. The strings and backup vocals were fun, but were fully arranged by someone outside of Phish-- a different approach for a band that’s at times relied on its spontaneous improvisation. This cast this project as far outside their usual flavor, but a step even farther toward the premeditated and careful. Their cover of Ziggy Stardust was indeed as calculated as the handful of Page-led jazz standard covers they performed in the early 1990s (“Take the A Train,” etc).
For the band that some could characterize as being primarily responsible for bridging the generational gap between the Grateful Dead and the legions of “jam bands” proliferating the musical landscape today, Phish excelled at the task they set before themselves (which is important, considering I attended what was said to be this band’s opiate-laced swan song performance, in a muddy field in 2004). Each band member was stretched beyond their comfortably-numb musical royalty status, and into learning chord changes and beats only David Bowie-- thinking and acting like said spaceman-- could have invented. Bowie’s genius in Ziggy Stardust was that, as a spaceman down for a visit, the whole narrative was pressurized: time was not, in fact, on our side, but quite the opposite. The songs “Starman” and “Lady Stardust” were highlights; at the end of the second set, I do not think the venue at the MGM Grand in Vegas contained any more understanding of Bowie’s generalized plea for the survival of humanity through the embrace of life from other planets. Despite this I thought the performance had a great feeling to it-- lacking frivolity and the typical Phishy decorum, I wondered if this is what Phish-as-a-wedding-band would sound like. The strings were lively and accurate, and kept Trey from taking up his usual sonic space. In fact, I do not recall one ‘solo’ within the second set, but rather Trey busying himself with the interior licks that keep these repetitive songs in motion. He was understated; he did a good job. I wonder to what extent Trey’s recent experience playing Jerry Garica-- for much more than one Halloween show-- has helped him process his history as a musician, and has pushed him into a more mature stature as a musician.
The relief was palpable at the beginning of set three: as the bass and drums picked up the jam that initiates the song “46 Days,” the unmitigated and unadulterated sound of Phish returned (not to mention the sound crew returned all levels back to their set-one settings, making Mike loud again and making Page work and play harder). The third set included a host of jammy works, including “Sand,” “Meatstick” (with Japanese lyrics; an inspired but very slow rendition), Deodato’s arrangement of “2001” (the only other cover of the night), “Backwards Down the Number Line” (with authentic mindless rock noodling by Trey, marking the moment they achieved ‘phoning-it-in status), and the non-Bowie highlight of the night to me, “Slave to the Traffic Light,” which began as one might expect, but became incredible quiet and reserved (before, predictably, building back into an orgasmic climax, or, if you prefer, a climactic orgasm, of sound). Set three reinforced my hypothesis: the melodrama of Ziggy Stardust did not exactly put the band at ease, which led to their decisions to add additional instrumentation and vocalists. Resuming the chemistry that came from the four (and only four) members on stage had an effect on the music-- though set three felt markedly downtempo, Trey’s wonking away on guitar inside “2001” made me smile, as did the encore: an acapella arrangement of “Space Oddity,” featuring only the four members of the band. This was good, though I wondered again if the vocal/string arranger had handed the four of them this arrangement, and it was theirs to learn. Perhaps I’m being too critical; regardless of whose arrangement it was, the effect of the acapella encore was tremendous and fun, as good an ending as any to an extended engagement in Vegas.
The band Phish has come a long way since the days of the traded cassette tapes documenting their early performances (archive.org features a slew of these). As my musical tastes have grown and morphed, I am still interested in Phish and am very glad to have tuned in (as best as bandwidth would allow?) to their Halloween 2016 performance-- and will admit I’ll be reaching for one of my cassettes from a 1990-1993 show and cranking the volume before I’ll be spending money on Big Boat, their latest studio release. Their cover of Ziggy Stardust taught me they’re getting older, wiser, and making more conscious decisions with every performance-- when they venture outside of the wildly lucrative three-chord-jam mold. Therefore, the next Halloween musical costume? Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue-- based on the Paul Whiteman recording, the Gershwin piano roll transcriptions, the in-studio Deodato arrangement, or some hybrid interpretation of the band’s own creation. Forward into the past, I say; I trust Mike, Trey, Page, and Fish to rise to the musical and highly technical occasion-- even without outsourcing!
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