I noticed that one video blogger's copy of this video has been taken down, so I want to recommend it while you can still watch it: part one of a home movie of Phish making Hoist, their first bad album, in the fall of 1993, recording in a dreary commercial studio in L.A., some suicide office paneled and carpeted for depression, or a dormitory where you are trapped and must goof off to be free, the making of a sort of conceptless Wayne's World Sgt. Pepper's with a lot of money to burn, an eclectic album with major 90s alternative adult guests, Phish's first adult contemporary rock album*, instantly and widely regarded as a sell-out. Hoist was a crushing disappointment for me when I first heard it (March 1994, the day it came out), and the beginning of the end of my spiritual commitment to Phish; yet I came to secretly enjoy it. Watch for Trey's Music Hall T-shirt in the video (it is probably from their two-night stand there in 1992, where they debuted like half the songs from Rift, their best album (aside from Junta, which is in a different spiritual class); Rift is a studio masterpiece, their only real studio sculpture in sound, a fully stylized product and a radical (I want to say modernist) reinterpretation of Phish, yet most of the songs had been repeatedly workshopped and jammed out in concert before the recording. Most of the songs on Hoist, by contrast, were reserved for the recording, supposedly so the band could think them through fresh in the studio, which was a total mistake, for they don't seem to be thinking at all, except for Fishman, whom you see playing chess. It's like they set up all the material elements for the perfect fantasy but forgot to use their imagination.
*I remember hearing songs from A Picture of Nectar on the radio. I heard Chalkdust Torture on WTOS, the Mountain of Pure Rock and Roll, and that slowed-down vocal that makes Trey sound fat was my first exposure to the band's music, though I thought it was Blues Traveler. WBLM, the Blimp, played Cavern, probably because they had H.O.R.D.E. tickets to give away. That refrain was the first bit of Phish that took root in my brain, the spider beginning to spin its web (& it is a spidery addiction
