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?