Is it program music?

This is a yes-or-no question for songs (we are interested in whether the music is programmatic with respect to the song’s title (the title is a short poem (is the poem about the spirit of the music?

Let us test our quiz on Phish, 7/2/98, Set II, The Grey Hall, Freetown Christiana:

Ghost: yes
Runaway Jim: yes
Prince Caspian: yes
You Enjoy Myself: yes

Escape to Snake Rock

There’s an episode of The Wonder Years where Kevin and Paul are hanging out with a new friend, sort of a bad kid, and they go out to a campfire spot by the tracks and drink beer and listen to an 8-Track of Sunshine of Your Love. The riff is so heavy the first time you hear it, at the inaugural moment of the buzz, when you first feel your body's motions being tracked in distorted overtones, before the riff is weakened by an overdubbed blues lead and then neutralized entirely by the IV chord. Every town has some bridge, pit, quarry, culvert, well, jetty, landing, clearing, trail, tree, or trestle, some concrete slab with a little charred cairn and Bonham circles, some magic mountain or hobbitland where joints of stems and leaves may have been passed, where in the glittering beer glass you can still find pull tabs from old cans like the ones Kevin and Paul might have cracked. What are these places?

Clocks are running late

Paint by number morning sky/looks so phoney: is the first verse of Touch of Gray about waking up early or staying up all night? Does Jerry like looking out his window and seeing this sky, with everything outlined and layered in the minimal shapes that some crude intelligence thought it important to lift out of nature and communicate? Isn't sunset at Shoreline one of those things that fans have mythologized, like, what song were they playing when it happened? Were there any Grateful Dead sunrises? Jerry in aviator shades: does he wish it would be night forever? Is Jerry a paint by number guitar player? What is the nighttime of the music he makes, a sleepy breezy unseen outdoors? Phoney is a Holden Caulfield word, and it’s usually one of those boomerang words like “corny” or “cheesy” or “funky” that turn back on the speaker and drip from them like goo, like to call something phoney is itself pretty phoney, plus corny, but Jerry can say it and send it straight out at the thing. The subtitles on this DVD are stuck on (View from the Vault III, Shoreline—I always write shorline—Amphitheatre, 6/16/90, a month before the early and tragic death of Brent Mydland (when Brent is playing his introductory solo to Touch of Gray and kind of going nuts on the organ (think "Mr Moonlight") Jerry looks over to Bobby and smiles like "we are so lucky to be playing with this guy"). You see the lyrics on the bottom as they sing, so you’re forced to consider the song as an event in language. Seeing the words sharpens your perception of the storyteller: you can see the intelligence in his face as his mouth forms the words, in the way he catches and pauses on copper in copper dome bodhi drip a silver kimono, the way his mouth holds the shape of the final d of like a crazy quilt star gown through a dream night wind to sustain the meaning, and just seeing those words coupled with the man—this is the fat, old Jerry in a black tee, and his long white hair is extra long in the back—this is sort of the essence of poetry, this wild pairing of person and word (the art is in the gap between them), the shock that this is what Jerry was saying in 1990, and not just reciting the words but telling you where he is and who.

I hear the sound of psychedelic blues

7/25/97 Starplex Amphitheatre, Dallas, Texas

I happened to be in Texas that summer, and though I wasn’t really into Phish anymore, I went to the show with some friends. Here’s what I remember: we were on the lawn, and since I didn’t feel compelled to watch the band or dance or sing along, I was free to walk the length of the hill and lie on the grass and look up at the sky (the show was far from sold out, so the lawn was a place of freedom). I remember watching clouds during Wolfman’s Brother and thinking that Phish, whom I hadn’t seen for a couple years, sounded like the Grateful Dead now, as though the dome over Phish’s biosphere or terrarium had finally been cranked down and the life within could breathe real air and join the same sky that everything is in, the mountains, the trees, the water, plants and animals, humans (the genius of the Grateful Dead is to represent humans as their skeletons). Listening now, I can make out the chorus of Beauty of My Dreams over the noise of the refrigerator. Harmony vocals thicken the words, the words sound like their shapes, like blueberry letters, paisley blorbs, plum bombs. Isn’t there a Paul Simon lyric, I hear the sound of psychedelic blues? So many of these Texas jams have these places where you don’t know where you are or how you got there, this pool you are emptied out into, no idea which song this is*, this groundless star place where the musicians emerge from whatever fever dream of forward motion and look around for the first time and see each other and the space they are creating, and that their rhythms are marking one infinite bar, that they are spinning the slow wheel of the universe, and that these heavily effected instrumental melodies, entities in electronic music, voice beings, melodies that God put into the universe, these phrases are alive and singing themselves. I hear the sound of a capella blues, yeah—like Jarrett soaring over gospel or Daryl Hall high on LSD singing doo-wop on the streets of Philadelphia.

*It is Bathtub Gin.

Lost on Snake Rock

Where does Snake Rock start? I followed the path that comes down from Indian Head and curves under the English Bridge, a mossy stone arch dark and drippy underneath, and when I stepped out of the tunnel and looked up at the ferns growing between the blocks— I live in the English Bridge—I was sure I had entered a different land. I followed a path marked by two red circles, a picture of fang marks, and it terminated at a rock marked with an X and the word END in red paint and 666 in white. I looked over the rock; after a step up it gently sloped down and widened out, a long, flat trough covered in lichen. Should I climb over and sit and write? No—666 says not to loiter. I soon found myself on a path marked with one red circle: another picture of the snake, a cross-section or a view down the worm hole. This trail is well marked, with a red circle always in sight, on a tree or rock. I love this language of trail signs, these markers of the mind in nature. They say: I think you know where you are (you’re on the back of the worm (the trail is the worm. Now the red circle is painted over fading yellow rectangles: a palimpsest. Then red rectangles over yellow, then just red rectangles. Is that the sign of warrior people, a picture of a stripe of war paint? Is this where I once looked down and saw boys at the bottom of the hill pouring gas into a motorbike from a can? No—I am on top of the English Bridge, crossing over my old path; I do not know the curve of the spirals I have walked.

Narnia gate into Phish

Some people can do Magic Eye on origami paper or wallpaper or anything that repeats and call up the extra dimension more or less at will. Others see only the field of jumbled particles and not the image beyond the page. But a simple rote action makes the secret picture available to all: by holding the book up to one’s face and pulling it back slowly, one can trick one’s eyes into focusing wrongly, and the Magic Eye dawns upon whatever unicorn, dollar bill, ice cube, or hovering ball has been hidden within the matrix of static. Is there a parallel action one can perform to become attuned to the worlds described in the jams of Phish (& are the objects found there as trivial as ones hidden in stereograms)? Is there a physical exercise that results in finding one’s body in the space behind this music, communicating with friendly beings? Is there some way to show your friends this world is real, an objective property of music, and good? Dancing? Yes. Smoking pot? No—people who don’t like Phish still don’t like it when they’re stoned, no, it makes them feel like shit, and the parts of the music they find pleasurable are the ones they hate the most. Besides, many fans preferred to see them sober (though for some, Phish and pot are metaphysically equivalent; they are of the same substance and refer to the same things). Is it like Christian music, where you have to be a Christian to get it?

My practical advice to non-believers is this: listen to Fishman. Follow the hi-hat when it is played by the foot as an extra tick between beats. Listen to fills that go down the tom-toms evenly. And listen for breakouts of syncopation on the bell of the ride cymbal late in some jam, for if a friend refers to “the best Ghost” or “the best Reba,” they are probably thinking of one that has the cymbal thing.

Where does Led Zeppelin live?

In the glow of the gatefold of Houses of the Holy. Yet also in the jacket of the tape, in the black bars that frame the square miniature of the album cover.

The conclusion of The Pure and the Impure, by Colette

A model of correct style:

The word "pure" has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it—in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

I am in the water, as far as I can see

Drowned, a Who cover, opens the second set of Phish’s 7/20/98 show at Ventura County Fairgrounds, Ventura, CA. It starts like a funky hillbilly hoedown thing (& that's the weird thing about the Who, how they sound sort of country) but a smashing quarter note beat makes it feel like punk; it is surprising that Phish can be rock band: they attack their instruments with the passion and violence of 90s grunge, they are good at power chords and cymbal crashes, and they are committed to the emotional meaning of the lyrics, like when they sing “I wanna drown,” you believe it, the music is making the wish real, the longing to surrender to the original element and be swallowed up by Mother Ocean, waves of distorted noise, the swaying crowd, and drugs. This is the sort of song you’d imagine all day at school, as though hearing it in your imagination could protect you from whatever was happening and however you were being perceived, and you’d be swept along by a rainbow whoosh of it as you walked, you would want to tell people, and you’d run home from the bus to listen to it alone in your room on headphones. Did Phish listen to the Who in the 70s? Fishman said that when he was a kid he’d listen to a Who record, absorb every detail, and then run upstairs to play drums as he imagined the songs playing. (Were the Who good? Yes, watch their segment in Woodstock—they sound like they have never heard rock music and are inventing the whole form of it on stage. ) I wanna drown: Trey’s Hendrixy stuff in the jam seems to come from a truly damaged place, the night space of late Hendrix, where is the guitar is a trail of destruction in a sort of backwards stumble through the music, sort of sleeping through it but also killing it, and as Fishman goes into halftime we find ourselves in space, floating in a matrix of ghosted 32nd notes, and the drip or echo sound of the Ghost flies by, just the trail of the ragged tips of the ghost’s sheet against an October sky, and we deflate into the I-to-IV reggae groove of Makisupa Policeman, and Page’s spacecraft descent sounds more like Dr. Who than the Who, pure synthesizer notes sort of like stairs hanging in the sky, and skunk is the keyword tonight, and Trey’s solo noodles off unmusically into major-scale land, sort of exploring the mode, like each note is a surprise to him, either it will work over the chord or be a fret away from one that does, like his jazz band teacher told him what scale to play, and now, at the concert, he is clinging to it nervously, and there are no natural breaths or breaks in his playing: you’ll never get out of this phrase. Having to improvise in the major scale shows the limits of Trey’s way of being musical, and it is a puzzle how can he go from the sublime abandon of Drowned to something so uninspired; why does he let himself trip out on things that aren’t good? Is this the mystery of Phish? Like, does it suck, is that why it works? Is it part of the brainwashing that things have to be sort of bland and repetive? Trey can obviously practice and learn patterns; couldn’t he study string skipping or strange pentatonics to get out of these traps? But there are spacey delay sounds and Phish is good again; the opening echoes of Maze are substantial and interesting—the Phish of 1998 cares about the timbre of noise more than they used to, a lesson from recording The Story of the Ghost, maybe. (Weirdly, after they record Round Room, their best sounding album, with the most authentic, woody instrument sounds, their live sound gets more insensitive and blaring, as though they can listen only in private.) Trey’s solo is sort of modernist, if that makes sense, and his tone is muted, dark, and compressed. Page’s organ sounds like pan pipes, like he’s spitting “tu tu tu” across the reeds, sort of rapping, and it is easy to imagine the organ as a living crystalline underwater vessel, with the keys controlling its flashes of color. Page, though he is the worst singer in the group, is the best at improvising complete, singable musical thoughts that cross barlines, but he so rarely influences the course of jams in later Phish. Sometimes he does a fake guitar sound when he comps for Trey, using distortion and wah on the Rhodes—was he forced into that role? Did he hate playing with Trey? Did Page remember what was good about old Phish after the other guys forgot, and did he miss it?

It's so stupendous, living in this tube

The Moma Dance opens Phish’s 7/19/98 concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre (Mountain View, CA), and the groove is immediately very thick and heavy, and on the audience recording that I have, you can make out someone, probably the taper himself, saying to his neighbor, “big bass… if I’m not careful… I’m worried about the bass.”

But the taper gets the levels right, and the bass is deep and full without distorting and rattling the speakers; it seems to define an aquatic world in which the bass guitar and the bass drum are currents, waves that toss the body floating on the sea, and the strut of the beat is Bonhamesque—you are not sure where in Fish’s drumset the pulse of 16th notes is coming from, what permutating mix of unaccented snare taps and hi-hat snips—and the tempo is andante, corresponding to the movement of a body walking on a rolling globe, or a body floating backwards “at a walking pace”, with 2 and 4 ringing out as the “steady slap” of the lap of the waves in the song’s narrative of maritime adventure; sailing, surfing, and floating are all very Phish.

Yet the true cresting wave comes later in the set, in Sample in a Jar, where the taper gets the recording right in a quite different way, namely, by getting things wrong: the two microphones are aimed just clumsily enough that one communicates the sound to the tape a millisecond before the other, introducing a faint, flanging wave of phase cancellation, a sort of rolling blackout through the frequencies of the music that causes in listeners a sensation like swirling down the drain or having one’s consciousness sucked out of one’s head through a very thin straw.

This song, a sing-along rocker and a permanent staple in Phish setlists after its minor FM success in 1994, a mile-marker at the beginning of Phish’s arena rock/sellout years, has a sort of twisting Bold as Love guitar solo at the end, played over the four-bar progression from the verse:

| A / C / | G / D / | A / E / | G / D / |

Though these chords continually promise transcendence (just voicelead the triads in a four-bar descent down the guitar neck, starting with A, 1st inversion, with C# at the 11th fret of the D string), Trey usually burns through them automatically and earlessly, and one feels that although the shaman may have set himself ablaze, he is not seeing anything special. On this night, however, he is suddenly possessed by music, as though he has grabbed a lyre from a rack on the wall of the mead-hall of the gods and channeled a forgotten spirit in his song, and for one and a half passes through the chords he plucks out a melody so strong and natural and spontaneous that it seems to be a living thing, a sort of visiting being that has come down to speak to us—hello, for this moment we exist together, in music.

The vivacity of this particular moment of recognition of everything’s being one thing is no doubt heightened by the subtle stereo flanging of the left and right channels of the recording, where the the overlapping double image unites dimensions like the connecting twist of a Möbius strip or the peak of a flash of deja vu in which we perfectly occupy two times, so it is a sort of accident of the universe that Sample is finally allowed to be itself, floating free from Phish, uncomposed, freely given, and sustained by grace.