@Icculus said:

However, you really confused me by writing: "For the longest time it was enough to say that Phish couldn't do what the Dead did, and vice versa; for the first time, that's no longer entirely true. Phish have finally entered a phase where they can generate the kind of emotional intensity that the Dead naturally traded in."

What? (...)

That said, your statement that now, in 2011, "Phish have finally entered a phase where they can generate the kind of emotional intensity that the Dead naturally traded in" honestly shocks me. I feel like I must be misunderstanding you. You are talking about a band that, in the early 1990s, was routinely inspiring people -- much like the Dead had done -- to use-up all of their vacation time to go see as many of their shows as possible...

Charlie -

Thanks for the response. To clarify: I don't mean intensity of emotional experience in the listener, I mean the depth of emotion in the music itself.

Let's stipulate that in some ways Trey is a far 'better' songwriter/composer than anyone in the Dead, and in some ways he still lags Garcia/Hunter in terms of directness and timelessness.

I'd also say, without hesitation, that Phish's mid/late-90's music could regularly reach emotional peaks that really set them apart. The ecstatic release of the 5/7/94 HYHU > Tweeprise; the subterranean terror and blissful calm of 7/2/97; the heartbreaking solo in 'Horn'; the effortless beauty of 6/14/00 Twist > Walk Away > 2001; the cosmic even on 12/6/97 in Michigan. My god, they've moved me to tears at times. No question.

But for pathos, for yearning, for despair, for weary victory, for a sense of deep connection to the creaking brokedown countryside they yearly crisscrossed...you had to go elsewhere. Phish just couldn't do it. They were too smart for their own good, too invested in technique...

I think they broke through in 1997 and started to let their forebrains relax a little. Not entirely, but much more than ever before. At times totally. They stopped being a math-prog-energy-rock band and started living into the music. Things got dark and dangerous, and deep. Finally.

But y'know what? Tweeprise might well be the wildest, most wonderful three minutes of rock music ever played, but it's missing the extra kick that even a dopey, shambolic tune like 'Casey Jones' has. There's a universe of feeling and connectedness separating 'Won't you step into the freezer' and 'Trouble ahead, trouble behind / And you know that notion / Just crossed my mind.'

Phish have always known how to evoke certain emotions in their playing, but until recently they didn't usually communicate (to me) the passage of time, the onrush of all-ending. Y'know? To embrace simplicity and subtlety, and silence (not formally a la 12/9/95 YEM or the ending of 'Prince Caspian,' but emotionally as in 'Mountains in the Mist').

That's what I mean. I think 7/2/97 is one of the two or three best shows they've ever played, because of its silence, its delicacy, its restraint. They were There. And yet Trey's way of being There included BOTH that miraculous 'Stash' and his doofy 'Back of the Worm' story.

I don't anymore think 'bedazzled' is anywhere near as important as to have heard honest truth. But I remember thinking it, feeling it. Feeling I needed to be impressed. I think I used the phrase 'straight bullshit' before; it goes here too. I've stopped caring about being impressed by music. I think Phish have stopped trying. That seems...grownup.

Maybe this is partly to say that Phish have always had an infectious sense of humour that the Dead, as an ensemble, didn't themselves project. (If you can't laugh along with Garcia doing Good Lovin > La Bamba then you're dead inside, but still...) But I don't think self-seriousness covers it, nor is it just the lyrics. Maybe I mean Phish have always had kind of a synthetic edge to them? The Dead seem, maybe only in distant retrospect, to have fallen together and loosely held, like stardust. Phish have never lacked a certain machinic quality. Organizational. Sometimes it produces gorgeous things - 'Esther,' 'Eliza,' 'If I Could.' Mostly it's produced 'Dinner and a Movie,' the awesome-but-relentlessly-brainy 'Bowie' composed section, the rhythmic gags in 'Guyute,' the musical bric-a-brac that is 'Reba'...

Does this make sense? Even if you disagree, am I at least communicating a deep ambivalence (and a second level of ambivalence and guilt about feeling ambivalent at all!) which I've long had about this band I've long loved, desperately and foolishly?

I came late to the Dead, and that's coloured my sense of their music. But it always feels more adult to me. Well, not all of it. (Let's say: after Pigpen died. Death always changes things; it is change itself.) More...earthbound.

Partly it's style, partly time, partly just me. Partly the birth of my son, which has drastically changed how I listen to all this wonderful music, what beauty is, what art is for. Partly it's just late and I need to go to bed. He'll be needing me. And I him.