Biased interpretation of sound: Are you a phan? Phish goes live in two-disc set
By Staff Writer

Go into a campus parking lot, pick up a rock, and throw it - hard. If you do, three things are guaranteed to happen: car alarms will sing to you, campus safety will soon be chasing you, and your rock will dent at least one car with a Phish sticker on it.

Such is the phan base for the Vermont-based quartet that has been playing college venues for years, and last New Year's sold out Madison Square Garden. The Phish sound could be described as rock-jazz-folk-pop-reggae-fusion, but isn't quite that confusing. Students will either tell you how visionary Phish is, before asking you to lock and towel the door, or tell you to turn that Grateful Dead-sounding crap off and play some Fugazi. Of course comparisons to the Dead can be made, the band likes long improvised solos and instrumental bridges and is rather tour-crazy. How tour-crazy? I've seen them eleven times in the last four years without going further than Chicago.

Which brings us to Phish's latest release, "A Live One." It's an attempt to capture the experience of a Phish concert on two compact disks. It includes six tracks unavailable on any of their five E.P.'s, which is not as exciting when you consider they could make several albums of songs that are concert standards. Enough cynicism, on to reviewing the music ...

First disc, first track, first single, we start in a good place. "Bouncing Around the Room" is a phan favorite for a lot of reasons It's fun, poppy, layered and somehow transcendent. In my opinion it is also recorded better than the original. The next song, "Stash," gives us a better representation of a show: long Zappa-esque guitar solos, members of the audience clapping out the "cha-cha-cha" drum clicks, the band letting them. From there we go to an unreleased track, "Gumbo," a mid-tempo song with well-rhymed surrealist lyrics. The cut ends with a slow dissolve to a guest horn section's Dixieland dirge. These tracks represent Phish at its best - musically adventurous, tight, dense sounds, self-consciously and lyrically ambiguous - the point being to show that the musicians know who and what they are.

There are, unfortunately, some dead spots on "A Live One." "Montana" shows Phish's ability to compose makeshift atmospheric funk on the spot, but seems to stop just short of a great groove. Worse than this, though, is when Phish over-plays. Prime examples are the 20-minute, mostly instrumental "You Enjoy Myself" and 30-minute "Tweezer." And even here there is much praise to be given - constant tonal shifts, use of dramatic dynamic swells and fades, and the four-way vocal improv at the end of "Y.E.M." I am of the opinion that a band whose songs sound the same all night and a band who seems to play the same song all night are on pretty equal ground. I also have to wonder what place such epics have on a 12-song, two-disc set.

I assert that tracks were well-recorded and chosen in that they reflect the feeling of a Phish show. I had such a strong sense of deja-vu during several tracks I would swear I attended the concert at which they were recorded. I also feel that the band excluded a large part of it's personality from this album - its sense of humor. This is a band that covers Dolly Parton and AC/DC on the same night, that jumps on trampolines during instrumental sections, that does a barbershop-quartet version of "Free Bird" that had me in hysterics the first time I heard it. Also conspicuous is the absence of the bluegrass interludes, where the band switches to acoustic guitar, banjo, upright bass and washboard.

Overall, I guess there would be no way to include everything that makes a Phish show what it is, and overall, this CD a good effort. It would also be a great place to start as a new phan, or good for a casual listener. But for a true Phish freak I would suggest trying to find bootlegs, which are encouraged by the band and available in some of the finer head shops in the Ann Arbor area.