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.