Reading the book

HARTFORD
Concrete steps stories high, Aztec pyramid-like, lead up to the lawn (a venue is a sort of temple); the lawn is littered with crushed and jagged cans (though going barefoot is spiritually required); a recurring friendly loop animates the jam of the summer (everyone stops playing and Trey dances to the loop)

MERRIWEATHER
Lindsey and I left at the weirdest point in the jam out of 46 Days. The gatekeeper made sure we knew we could not return. I looked into the illuminated fountain at the bottom of the steps and imagined microphones there, capturing the waves the music made in the pool. The way out was a path through a terraced garden, and all the kids who couldn't get in got to sit among the rocks and plants of Symphony Woods. I envied them, hearing the music as so many modifications of the lush night's air, the sound not of Phish, but of Merriweather Post Pavilion. How freeing to walk away from this concert, the object of so many months of speculation and worry! And how wonderful to hear the music all the way back to the car, possibly miles away, the whole way lit by globes that all glowed the same, for Columbia, Maryland, a modernist utopia of the 1960s, was built all at once, and according to one vision. Shapes of Oh! Sweet Nuthin' and Harry Hood floated through the vacant city. How incredible to look up at the stars and hear the most abstract summary of this music echoing off the side of a parking garage or apartment building! We heard an ambulance's siren--maybe this was Beth on her way to Howard County General, where we would meet her shortly. A woman was reading by the light of the closed library. Turning the corner we saw a man sitting in the pebbles, his back against a plate glass window, also reading. Night Phish, night reading! The city whose people love to modify their minds at night!

SPAC
Drenching rain prior to show, mud footprints on the turning calendar wheel to mark Woodstock (40, to the day). An exasperated clerk at a Massachusetts rest stop the following morning: "What's with all these kids with their wet money?"

Comcast Center

Lindsey and I took the MBTA train from South Station to Mansfield, and on the ride we talked about different Buddhist traditions' meditation practices, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to pupil, the years that lamas spend alone in meditation and study, whether Buddhism could save the world, Heidegger vs. Buddhism. I knew I was on a commuter train talking to a friend about Buddhism on our way to Phish. Thank you God! The seats were wide and leathery, and the windows were yellowed and scratched. We couldn't see out, but the people behind us knew when we were in Mansfield. The acoustics of my sun hat made it impossible to talk while wearing it, so I left it in our hotel room. We walked to the venue. There was an amazing rusted bicentennial sign in the town green. There were long roads for cars only that we crossed with caution. We walked under a couple overpasses, the kind of bridge underneaths that are always black and drippy. There were modest suburban homes with decent lawns. The sidewalks were mostly good. We talked about karma (causality), depression, drugs, Wallace, Phish. Dancing bear tie-dyes we had once owned, how we had imagined the Grateful Dead in early grades. And where were all the other walkers? We expected sleepy Woodstock masses, but it was just us. At the end of the four miles, the travel and pre-show anxiety had floated away, and we were sun- and walk-perfected, ready for Nothing. Everything was easy. The workers were helpful. The venue, though no longer called Great Woods, was still surrounded by very tall, breezily treetopped trees, and the place was overgrown with summery plant life, and the trails inside were little rock garden trails bending around shrubs, and the wooden walls were weedy. It was perfectly dense with people. Phish came out and played. No one could guess what they would play next. The songs were linked in a perfect folding twisting non-flow of substitution, risk, and reversal. How wonderful to be lost again in Phish! Trey seemed to be at the center of a tunnel of sound, and the music was science fiction. We met Beth beneath the flagpoles (America, Massachusetts, Comcast) and the three of us walked home. A balloon floating in the road ahead of us led the way.

Fenway

My friend Lindsey emailed me a picture she took at the Nikon Theater, where Phish is playing tonight (right now, blazing that weird trail of the musical present with the cutting, killing edge that exists only in the immediate performance, the always-disappearing part that makes even a familiar song impossible to understand, especially when it's very loud. She's looking down an extremely steep slope of seats toward the stage, which is contained under a corrugated shell spanning the towers of a concrete castle, and the whole thing sits in the water like it is undergirding a drawbridge or processing sewage or producing nuclear power (what is it about Phish that makes their music so uniquely suited to brutalist municipal architecture?

All day I've been thinking about the concrete underside of Fenway Park, the dark and echoey ring of corridors and chambers beneath the seats where all the human business of the ballpark is conducted. Hearing Character Zero as vibrations in the walls of the men's room seemed to confirm the many dreams I've had lately about going to Phish shows in infinite concrete basements, hangars, and locker rooms. This music is about modifying space. Whatever the music might be reduced to on a recording, however much detail it may contain in itself, the point of the music at the moment it is being made is to overload the medium in which it is resonating, to find the harmonies of this accidental surplus, the strange congruences of vibration in stuff never made for music (bridge resonance and the longer waves of rooms

Night at the science museum

The itunes picture for "Time Turns Elastic" is a black square with massy sans serif block letters in the lower righthand corner, and fellow ECM lifers will recognize the Pat Metheny Group font in these Hubble letters full of space, a little too dense with planets to be an actual astronomical view, a little sickly space-measled like a tee shirt of the solar system and beyond that may have glowed in the dark in the early 1990s, which is exactly where in imaginative time you want to be with Phish, daring to be weird, hypnotizing yourself with the alienation effects, glad to be wrong, tripping on the whiteness of the high tops. Thank God Phish doesn't care if they're cool anymore. We have been many places with Phish, and we are so relieved to be back in the planetarium, following a laser pointer tour of the story of time and dreaming of the museum gift shop outside. "While all around the rocks collide." Thank God someone is writing about rocks colliding. Phish compositions: celestial elements in no orbits the universe would ever form (true orbits only in mindless jam

I don't know exactly which sound in early Pat Metheny Group is denoted by "Oberheim," but that's my name for the keyboard in TTE that saws through the surface of things and seems to signal a documentary flyby of frozen wastes. An actual helecopter flew over on my initial listening walk and though unrepeatable was the best part of the song. I got up late yesterday and ran to the bus stop in exactly 13:30 (space turns elastic, the rolling piano keyboard undulation of crumbly brick blocks of Cumberland Avenue sidewalk I run over, when the feedback ended the bus was just peeking round the corner, I even think the song may have 13.5 sections. So glad Phish is dreaming big, even if the music is incoherent and sort of embarrassing. "This life is bending and swelling around me"—the song succeeds or fails depending on whether you believe this line when Trey sings it (this lyric is the meaning of bVII to I, it's like the chords can finally sing themselves in words). "The blossoms all scream and it sleeps around me"—thank God they are mixing metaphors again (the song would be dead without everything that's wrong (this is the key to all rock and roll. "The winds all rising in the west around me"—so glad to find myself again in the wrong grammar of this double location

Birds of a Feather 12/17/99

12/17/99 is typical night of 1999 Phish: there are glints of light and color and consciousness in a vast black ocean of unknowing. At times they are playing to you as if from a hospital bed (your sick host recites vapid truths while his mind is nowhere (there are moments of clarity and flight, brilliant gasps, but you can hear that Phish is dying. There's the sustained, spacey, loopy, heavy, slow stuff, which can be vertiginous and exhilarating, a romantic evocation of death, and then there's the modal jamming, which is a performance of death. Trey's solos seem to be issued from his autonomic nervous system (lizard brain guitar), while his musical mind is in a sort of coma (the melody never remembers what happened the measure before (the purpose of a drone is to externalize musical memory

Birds of a Feather is a sort of double-time Doors jam, and Trey gets stuck stuttering in broken staccato phrases; he sounds like Walter Becker soloing over new Steely Dan. You are desperate for a melody, for sustained notes, for rhythms that cross the bar line, and you curse Phish. But then there's this glistening part where Trey is playing more or less the same sort of phrases but everything synchs into a more organic geometry, the flow and counterflow of living things. The basic rhythmic and harmonic frame is the same, but it undergoes a sort of aspect shift; Trey is bending the notes subtly, the guitar becomes a little voice speaking, the music becomes three-dimensional; they figure out the right gravity and distance and spin to get all the planets moving in orbit around the sun (consider the prevalence of the trope of the gears that turn the universe (this moment or place exists only because Trey fought through shit to get there. There's no way for Phish to skip straight to such musical plateaus (except maybe by playing the first 2 seconds of YEM, or during so much of 1998, when they seem to be always floating, and the music starts free and stays free) It's like a little dream before you fall asleep, where the exact contours of the rush are directly influenced by whatever story you were just telling yourself, but the effect is a qualitative break from all narrativity (you are just delivered to friendly light (the band seems to be illuminated through a crack in the universe (this is the meaning of "The Divided Sky," and, I think, a reason they played that song less in later years: it represented something spiritual they couldn't reliably achieve (this is why the 2004 Keyspan Park "Live in Brooklyn" Divided Sky is so disappointing; it's not that it's bad, it's that they don't respect the song; they trot it out as a gratuitous greatest hit, and Trey blows over it selfishly (maybe he is trying to kill it (Trey's incredible independence from Page and Mike is also one of the good aspects of 2004; you get to hear the pure idea of Phish: just Trey and Fishman (the Zappa thing over the Bonham thing (my feelings about the Keyspan Divided Sky may be influenced by the fact that I was listening to it at top volume at the moment I realized my car had lost its brakes and was flying independently down 495 (I did coast to safety

Halley's Comet 12/7/99

This night at the Cumberland County Civic Center, the strawberry goo is thick and black and starry; the jam on Halley's instantly descends into night and sleep; as soon as the composed singing part ends, they sink into the darkest, most unconscious groove of the jam, it strobes out in the concentric outlines of an expanding echoing shape in a PBS animation, the dull orbit of stars around the head of a man sleeping on the sidewalk on Free Street, the froth of some bagged 40 circulated in a bank vestibule on Congress, the upside-down concrete terrace of the Civic Center flying through space, an ark, the concert within sort of literally taking place in another dimension, unimaginable from the concrete hallway surrounding it (tonight we looked through the windows at the empty hallways (counters, kiosks, bathrooms (it has the brute functionality of a traffic island or parking garage. Part of Phish 99's sound is blankness, openness, and emptiness (a sound suited to the modernism of of 70s civic architecture). They explore impersonal spaces, and you sort of find yourself in this dreamy, personality-medicated but intoxicatingly deeply depressed nowhere. The ambient landscapes are darker and spookier, less friendly than 98, less exploratory than 97, less jazzy than 96, less classically perfect than 95, less adventure-sportsy than 94, etc. Phish has quaffed from Lethe and lies sprawling on the shore, dreaming of nothing, and Trey's backwards guitar lights out into the night space of late Hendrix, the color specks in the darkness on the Band of Gypsies gatefold, the gatefolding double-wide of cinematic space vision, the frame of silence and slow-moving destruction, and this Halley's goes deep into the brain damage and forgetting of millennial Phish, rave Phish. The loop siren (the ghost/drip sound) echoes through, by now an old friend in the world of Phish sounds (thank you for saving me again and again!) The jam turns major at the end, stiffly Ionian, like columns of snare drummers, and the chill-out feels rule-based and forced. Trey does this repeating pull-off thing, a sort of idiotic Allman Brothers riff, an obvious accident of memorized finger positions on the fretboard. He is caught in a trap, and it is a relief when he stops playing and the notes slither backwards in watery reverse delay and finally sink into a drone. This music tends toward death. You can hear what they were trying to rescue themselves from by going on hiatus (there is a void at the center of this music (when they start The Squirming Coil, for a second you hear the kind, breezy summer song you knew from some hippie girl's hatchback, but a wave of blackness quickly descends (in 1999 Phish is almost intentionally sinister (though the next night they bring the kindness (is a comet a flying ice-ball?

More Chinese Democracy reviews

6 Sarah Rodman, The Boston Globe
7 Hank Shteamer, Time Out New York

From Chuck Klosterman's review (1):

Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom?

Is this really what Klosterman would be thinking if he saw a unicorn (as I believe he has)? If you suddenly found yourself face to face with a unicorn, if he or she or it stepped out of the woods to meet you, or locked eyes with you from behind a distant waterfall and flew to you, this would almost certainly happen in slow motion, and you would know that the unicorn was a sort of message from the universe, a confession of an unspeakable beauty. I suspect that Klosterman’s choice of the unicorn is not arbitrary, and that when listening to Chinese Democracy he finds himself confronted with beings much like unicorns, with rainbows and all, and that although the codes of his profession require him to hide it behind a pose of philosophical detachment, this music is sort of like the universe singing to him

3 reviews of Chinese Democracy

Hooray!

1 Chuck Klosterman, AV Club
2 Ben Greenman, The New Yorker
3 David Fricke, Rolling Stone

*Update
Let's add Sebastian Bach (of Skid Row) #4

I just read Ian Cohen's Pitchfork review, a collection of clichés possibly plagiarized from Jon Pareles. Did he listen to the album? (His comparisons to REO Speedwagon and Journey seem less musical than verbal or visual, like he was imagining their logos and thinking of what wearing their t-shirt might mean. If you were looking for references based in musical resemblance, I might suggest that Axl sounds, at different points, like Donald Fagen, Don Henley, Robert Wyatt, and Frank Zappa, though it is more to the point to note that Axl's voice is unique in rock music, and that the many voices on Chinese Democracy are clearly his, even through all the digital editing, which his narrative personality somehow manages to master). Can Cohen teach us anything about the music? Jon Pareles, at least, makes the helpful observation that the album concludes with five power ballads in a row (Ben Greenman suggests that the ballads are the key to the album

**Update 2
Like many critics, Simon Reynolds at Salon seems to have written his review of Chinese Democracy without listening to it. He sounds smart when bringing his readers up to speed on "the loudness wars" (=the record company wants their song to be the loudest and crunchiest thing on the radio, so their mastering engineers are forced to compress all the dynamic nuances out of it), yet his claim that Chinese Democracy raises the "signature defects" of compression to "a hideous intensity" appears to be factually false. Bob Ludwig, who mastered the album, writes (#5) that the final mix uses way less compression than the industry typically demands of a contemporary rock release, which makes Reynolds seem like a bit of a phony. Reynolds: "The result [of all the compression and Pro-Tools], audible on 'Chinese Democracy,' is a bionic precision that forgoes any real looseness and swing." No real looseness or swing? "There Was A Time," "Catcher in the Rye," "Riad n' the Bedouins," "Scraped," and "Sorry" are all pretty swinging at points (there are sustained grooves for dancing, driving quarter notes with dreamy implied dotted pulses at the next rhythmic subdivision, swaying circular rhythms at half the speed, you are ecstatically moving forward and the drummer is driving the thing

Reba 5/16/95

Phans who post to Phish message boards often discuss which of the band's performances are "the best" within a given category (best year? best tour? best second set? best jam? best fall 1998 Melt?), though participants often acknowledge that Phish has performed many "bests" during their long career, and that one's personal top picks are unavoidably subjective, based on which shows one might have been to (in my case, I love the Reba from 7/3/94 (Old Orchard Beach) in part because I was there, and although that Reba is especially musical and loose and free (imagine coarse cotton skirts twirling, a picnic field wildflower dance) and though it was probably one of the most transcendent moments shared by humans that particular night on Earth, it is not a musical standout when you consider the whole record of their music), or which recordings one might have borrowed from a friend during a flight of mania, etc. Most fans have a favorite Reba, and there seems to be about 40% consensus (the biggest wedge of the pie chart) that 5/16/95 is the best (see the comments posted to Best Reba Ever? (& they've got a great video of 10/31/94; about four minutes in, the lights get very Doctor Who-esque and video concrète) and I want to hear the best Reba). Here's a link to an mp3 in case you'd like to hear for yourself. While it might not be as grungy and intuitive as 12/7/97, as mellow and kind as 4/3/98, as swinging and rhythmically multidimensional and modernist as 10/15/98, or as psychedelic and spacey as 7/6/00, 5/16/94 might be the most awesome rock version of Reba, the most friendly, and the most magically hypnotic. There's a cool part where Trey loops a chord and it causes the music to take on a sort of spatial dimensionality (it is like an infinitely unfurling banner marking the perimeter of the space). According to the formal rules of the song, the jam ends when Fishman plays a certain long drum fill that goes down all the tom toms, placed so as to break the ecstatic trance of the music at the moment when Trey is most deeply into it, and on this night he plays the fill as patiently and deliberately as a lazy cartoon John Bonham sitting at the center of a rainbow of white pipes or hollow tubes

Carini 6/14/00

The only time I went to the circus (I was 10) there was this spherical metal cage into which one, two, then three performers drove their motorcycles, dirtbikes with deafening small motors and black exhaust, their headlights tracing a shifting object in the darkened Civic Center (if you were trying to notate this kind of coordination in cave times you might have painted the three interlocking circles of John Bonham’s rune from Led Zeppelin IV (when Fishman is playing well he seems to be at the center of a slowly rotating dome (synaesthesia is also hearing space (listen for the shape of the dome implied by Fishman's descending drum fills during the final refrain of Carini from Drum Logos

Loop jam at the end of Ya Mar 5/23/00

I was totally absorbed in this video, literally slackjawed, before I realized it was from a show I had listened to and written off as under-jammed, and that it had grown out of Ya Mar, a song I usually skip after a few notes, believing it to always be the same. This is one of the blessings of Phish: the hidden jams you find when you don’t just fast forward to songs you know are going to be jammed out. Secret gardens of music can grow anywhere. A breath can animate a gesture performed a hundred times by rote, bringing it to life in the same way the Creator might if He had something to say to you about love and freedom in the universe and wished to say it in music, not waiting until the message is correctly prepared for and framed and labeled, but trusting that its difference and general radiance and rightness and amniotic familiarity will transcend whatever immediate, contingent circumstances produce it, for this message transcends its bearer in such a radical way that the bearer's ugliness only heightens the feeling of freedom (the freedom is in being torn asunder

Tracking

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

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.