Phish C/D

I get it that they are a live thing, but I love it when fans defend them but go on to say that they don’t really have any good songs or make good albums

The name could only be
The one, the only
The great and the knowlegeable

lol

i owned farmhouse when i was a kid and also loved billy breathes but have never seen phish live and prob know better at this point that to try to get into them again

regardless i do want to talk about how the story of the ghost is a really rad record

I loved SOTG back when I was a Phishhead. It was a huge record for me. I listened to it again recently to grade my original vinyl before selling it. It was pretty good! Guyute really didn't fit in, stylistically, and I have a personal aversion to all the circus imagery in Roggae, but everything else was solid. Particularly like the title track, Brian and Robert, Shafty.

i will say one of the very best things about the story of the ghost is that it tricks you into thinking the members of phish are good singers. crediting andy wallace with this

and i think "guyute" works on a record that also has, like, "limb by limb" and "water in the sky"

also it's possible "guyute" is so good that it asserts its place on that record for me regardless of sonic identity

i think... that for me, to be able to sit with certain aspects of phish's songwriting, to sit with the horror and disgust those aspects evoke in me, without dismissing them as being necessarily fundamentally grotesque and repulsive, while at the same time acknowledging the positive things about their songwriting, the ways in which their music continues to appeal to me... i think that this is an instructive and useful act for me.

Yeah, Guyute's a good song and all, but it's very much a throwback to 80s Phish - their longer, primarily instrumental songs like Divided Sky or David Bowie or You Enjoy Myself. And they actually debuted it in 1994, three years before the batch of songs that became SOTG. So just because I was listening to Phish extremely actively at the time, it kinda felt shoehorned in there and I guess my prejudices may remain.

I also remember preferring the more trad country version of Water in the Sky that they had debuted in 97 (available on the Walnut Creek show they released). Similarly, I still think I like that one better but am not quite sure.

that's really fair! i am of course completely disengaged from that kind of phish fandom, but i always got the sense fans didn't really like farmhouse because it's full of oddly-realized studio versions of what were by that time several-years-old live jams

i ended up downloading a show because i wanted to see what a 20 minute version of "ghost" was like (11/17/97) and wow this is really great :(((((

"hey this is pretty cool, who is this?" –me, to a bartender who was playing Phish off his iPod over the speakers

i ended up downloading a show because i wanted to see what a 20 minute version of "ghost" was like (11/17/97) and wow this is really great :(((((

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson)

yeah that's a fucking amazing show, they were killing it in fall of '97

This band’s saving grace for me is providing fodder for the very entertaining Analyze Phish podcast (R.I.P. Harris Wittels) — a must for fans and haters alike.

― the last Berry La Croix in the work fridge (morrisp), Saturday, July 27, 2019 7:54 PM (eleven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I second that^^^

― tobo73, Saturday, July 27, 2019 8:09 PM (eleven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i started this today! it's great. i hate scott aukerman but he's kind of the antagonist of this show anyway

went to their show at the garden on dec 30th and fell asleep during a 35-minute version of tweezer

my wife once fell asleep watching king crimson play "starless"

"starless" is a great song, but she was tired

and it was a seated show, which didn't help

xxp Cool! I’ve listened to the whole thing, several times thru (well, skipping the digression episodes in the middle that are about “Jaws” or something).

it occurs to me that i am one of, possibly, the few people on this board who would rather listen to phish play literally _anything_ than listen to a podcast

went to their show at the garden on dec 30th and fell asleep during a 35-minute version of tweezer

This is widely consider by lots of Phish fans to be one of the best jams of the bands current, 3.0, era.

step into the freezer
fall asleep to tweezer

tbf to me, it was widely considered to be one of the drunkest nights of my current approaching 30 era

xp

idk if it's just me but i feel like the song portion of this is much less obnoxious than that time in '95 they played the song for 45 damn minutes straight

i mean it's still a terrible song but it sounds less terrible somehow?

mind you if the "jam" portion has anything whatsoever to do with the "song" portion the relation is too musically advanced for me to be able to parse

I saw the 58-minute Runaway Jim at Worcester 97. It was flat-out amazing to dance and be high to, but much less captivating when I finally got a tape of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n-lLrqcfJY

The recent super long (38 minutes) Phish jam that I've really felt earned it's length was the "Ruby Waves" from Alpine Valley last summer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI6xUJ4fmDk

i am listening to fukuoka 6/14/00 and this is prob the phish show i’d try to convert someone with (ha fat chance). i am very stoned right now and listening to it is like floating through interstellar clouds

Ah, that takes me back. Had a roommmate that played that one a lot. One of the official live releases, right? Never been a huge fan of the band but a few songs on there (Twist, and uh, I forget) are undeniable.

Phish is the ultimate “What is this record you’re playing? It’s awesome. Oh.” band.

...except for their songs that sound like someone soloing over a cross between the Sex & The City theme song and the Will & Grace theme song. This was the barrier I was ultimately unable to cross

Oh, you mean The Landlady.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ckN45Z-ykQ

xpost - yeah, it is one of that first batch of Live Phish archival releases they did in the early 2000s. Sadly, I was one of those people that kept them in those stupid foldable binder pages they came in, so my entire run of those releases had the discs ruined by the adhesive.

i also really love the fukuoka jam on "gumbo," very subtle, small movements that suggest vast inner galaxies of psychedelia, very floyd imo

i have spent so much time listening to the denver "ghost" > "fire" this week lol

which. maybe the "johnny b. goode" > "denver jam" is even better. fishman is totally playing a motorik beat for most of it

Did they ever release a box set of the IT festival? I remember hearing some of that and liking it, especially the stuff they played on that tower thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNJhQn5N0D4

oh this is so rad. i love this show (4/4/98) sooo much, bunch of phish songs i think are legit great ("taste," "limb by limb," "birds of a feather," "ghost") stretched out as far as they can go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0lpSBuNd7E

real mindblowing inner space funk jam they get out of this ween song. wish this upload had the "piper" ending though

just listening to "harry hood" on a live one today and thinking man, phish is so good

this and the 420 thread are parallel explorations of personal growth and unlocking hidden potential, love it

A Live One is the only Phish album I own and I've never had any desire to explore further but the stuff from the Island Tour Brad linked to is making me reconsider.

island shows are all worth hearing, like i think they're even better than the canonical phish shows i've heard (denver 97, fukuoka 00, nye 95). 4/4/98 is the peak imo but they all have something to offer, they were in a very exploratory mood. my friend pointed out that they only repeat one song over four separate nights ("birds of a feather," which was brand new)

I was a huge Phishhead in middle school at the tail end of 1.0 and saw them twice back then (5/21/00 Radio City Music Hall and 9/22/00 Rosemont, IL--the latter was KILLER). I drifted away from them after that but the 2017 Baker's Dozen spectacle pulled me back in in a big way--just a huge achievement playing 13 GOOD consecutive concept shows with no repeats and packed with thrills like the live debut of End of Session after 19 years.

They have so many great songs and jams, but what I keep coming back to is the Reba jam. The song itself is fun, zany prog-mode Phish, but the way they ride those two blissed-out chords in the jam section is like heroin thru the veins for me. So currently vibing to Reba 12/7/97--Page getting properly spacy on the Rhodes with tasty, delicate leads from Trey. Brad otm re: Story of the Ghost upthread; that's def where they peaked studiowise. Guyute is their Terrapin Station

Is it generally accepted that people who like "Farmhouse" are posers? Like the equivalent of a Touchhead? Because I think I really like "Farmhouse."

Gonna check out the rest of the Island tour shows today. Damn you all

I like large swaths of Farmhouse, but I absolutely loath both "Heavy Things" and "Gotta Jibboo" (though the later has gotten some decent workouts on stage), so I can never fully embrace it. The opening and the closing run from "Dirt" to "First Tube" are both great.

It's weird, I don;t know if there is any real general consensus on Phish studio albums. There's a sizable contingent these days that seems to essentially ignore the studio records and don't care about them at all, but I do know of quite a few fans that dig Farmhouse and look at it as their Workingmans' Dead/American Beauty (i.e. super distilled version of one particular thread of Phish songwriting, that happens to lean more heavily towards a folk/country sound in parts - though the comparison isn't precise).

I came on board with Rift and still think it's pretty enjoyable and compelling. The sequencing is smooth, the production is crisp, the performances are energetic, a phenomenal batch of songs.

Hey y'all, bona fide Phish head here. First off, it is a treat to see them getting some love on ilx. I definitely fall into the category of Phish fans whose defense of their lyrics, singing, songwriting, scene, etc. is often feeble and apologetic. So really nice to see people from other corners of the musical world appreciating what they do.

I was at 4/4/98 and it is indeed awesome. I think most Phish fans still recognize the Island Tour as pretty close to their peak -- all the adventurousness of their playing in 1997 with the added jolt of the freedom that came from scheduling 4 off-the-cuff shows just because they were itching to get out in front of an audience again. The second set of 4/3/98 is the pinnacle for me; as Brad mentioned, in addition to the looong, patient jam out of Roses are Free, do check out the Piper that followed it. Equally patient and subtle. For those who are novices checking this stuff out, I also strongly recommend Twist from the first night, 4/2. After some pro forma jamming it really gets to an amazing place.

Studio albums: it seems like the first 4 or so have come to be regarded by fans as classics, and the longer the band exists the more fans seem to rate all of the albums from the 90s, but I think there's more than a hint of nostalgia/distance driving that reappraisal. It's weird to me that anyone would see Farmhouse as their masterpiece, as half the songs are leftovers from the songwriting explosion that led to the previous album, SOTG. And I agree with you jon, Heavy Things and Gotta Jibboo back to back in the middle of the album is just so dire and really kills it. I think what it has going for it is that they sort of hit on the ideal sound for studio Phish, but the song selection and sequencing negates that for me.

Personally, I stan for Junta, Rift, and Billy Breathes, and never reach for any of the others. Junta may be hard to take for non-fans because there's a lot of silliness in the lyrics, but there's something super charming about the clean, basic production on these long proggy songs that you get used to hearing in the high octane live environment. With Rift I have never really been able to hear the criticisms. To my ears the production sounds a lot richer and fuller than all their previous albums, they were writing more ambitious lyrics and actually hitting on many of them, the complex/proggy songwriting is toned down such that it serves the songs better, and the eclecticism of the previous 2 albums is smoothed out just enough for the whole thing to feel cohesive (previous album Picture of Nectar is the antithesis of cohesive). Billy Breathes was long regarded as their "masterpiece" as it were, but that does seem to be slipping somewhat. I think it is still probably their most successful album, but it is also maybe the one least representative of what the band's overall thing is. So.

Happy to make additional personalized recommendations if people are looking to dip their toes into this band. I guarantee a better job than Harris Wittels RIP. and I'm always looking for ways to justify the embarrassing amount of space the Phish live catalog takes up in my brain!

Here's the one performance I'd recommend to anyone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzLuQXUeh0

xpost glad you agree on Rift, peace, man!

Sounds like a pretty good testimonial in the album's favor, imo!

Nice post Lavator. I would definitely throw Billy Breathes up as my favorite studio record, it's the one I go back to the most. SOTG would be a close second, such a weird, knotty record.

xp Lavator that Ghost from 5/22/00 is fantastic! I was at the previous night's show at Radio City, which I found kind of underwhelming at the time. Looks like I picked the wrong show of that run.

I was kind of disappointed by Farmhouse because it was such a sharp turn away from the deep funk of SOTG and Slip Stitch and Pass, but it's held up pretty well. If Phish has a "Workingman's Dead/American Beauty" I'd say it's Billy Breathes

I can see that, but I really feel like Farmhouse better fits the WD/AB mold because it was the one to break out with a wider audience. I think I caught "Free" once or twice on alt-rock radio back in the day, but "Heavy Things" and "Back on the Train" were inescapable on AAA stations when Farmhouse was released. That felt like the point where Phish was being most widely acknowledged by more mainstream radio at least.

But, yeah, Billy Breathes is most definitely the better album of the two.