Phish, A Picture of Nectar

It's worth it to read the band's dedication to Nectar Rorris, the album's namesake beverage(ur), in which they gratefully acknowledge he "was happy to give us a gig despite our lack of experience, organization, or a song list long enough to last two sets." All that is true, and all that is reflected here with the possible exception of the latter. Indeed, this hippie gemisch of nonsense vocals and multi-instrumental brilliance ("whatever you do, take care of your shoes") doesn't really cook until somewhere into the third track ("Cavern," named for no good reason) and then it just takes off. Exceptional moments: the smooth, skillful guitar jam leading "Stash," the scatty imprecise jazz of "Magilla" b/w hot guitar licks and sweaty tropical rhythms in "The Landlady" (!), and rhyming "tweezer" and "freezer" in (what else?) "Tweezer" and its closing encore. On the low end, besides the first two weaker tracks, "Glide" is pretty dumb and the mercifully short "Faht" and "Catapult" just feel shoveled on to fill out that second set, but they're all balanced out either by the beautiful juxtaposition of graceful keyboards and agonizing drug withdrawal in "The Mango Song" ("your hands and feet are mangoes, you're gonna be a genius anyway") or the hard-driving indictment of how badly the educational system serves berserkers in "Chalk Dust Torture." Nectar was onto something. They were on something. But it all worked out in the end, didn't it? (Content: S-bomb in "Poor Heart," drug references in "Stash" and "The Mango Song.")

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Phish, Junta

The best summation of Phish's early days is clearly this kinda-sorta-double album, first as a shorter cassette and then as the more common expanded CD issue, largely because it mixes their incredible capacity for artistically complex jams with quality studio production. "Fee," the lead-in track, is kind of a throwaway, but the magic starts in earnest with the stupendously expanded and almost 10 minute instrumental "You Enjoy Myself" with its multipart movements and textured, radiant melodies. In fact, the instrumentals are the dominant feature, at least for the first disc: other than a couple shouted accent lines, the snarky "David Bowie" (UB40) and my favourite "The Divided Sky" make up most of the runtime and well worth it. "Dinner and a Movie" is a fun novelty with its sole repeated line over multiple themes and variations, but of the other vocal tracks (the amusingly nonsensical "Golgi Apparatus" and the uninteresting "Foam") the standout is the surreal and haunting "Esther," a beautifully performed and fully realized story of a girl, a doll and avarice. I wasn't as enamoured of "Fluff's Travels," which comes off as disorganized rather than daring, though its introductory vocal libretto (of sorts) "Fluffhead" is an amusing lead-in; what rescues the second disc is the earworm "Contact" and its whimsical merger of the open road, American car fascination and basic automotive repair. An amazing surfeit of musical plenty, there's pretty much something in this album for every preference, and while it's never afraid to be weird it's never less than good. The CD issue unfortunately adds three live tracks of somewhat questionable quality, including the egregious 25-minute "Union Federal," less a jam session than a root canal, "Sanity," allegedly some sort of Jimmy Buffett pastiche that seemed funnier to the audience than me, and the (at least amusing) shaggy dog nutball closer "Icculus" ("if only our children were old enough to read Icculus"). "Go home," shouts Trey Anastasio(?) at the audience at one point, and that sounds like advice they should have taken. (Content: a single F-bomb in "Icculus.")

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Phish, Billy Breathes

I bought this CD off the rack in Penang, Malaysia (for RM39.90, if you must know), with the "diimpot oleh Warner Music Sdn Bhd, KL" sticker still on the jewel case to this day; I'd already cut my teeth on the intricate insanity of Junta and the breathless frantic energy of Picture of Nectar, and as I sweated buckets in the equatorial humidity of that June I figured our ichthyoid jam band would be just the distraction I needed. The difference here is the production, by the great Steve Lillywhite, and the result is something a little less off in left field, a little more controlled, which makes the moments when they go off the leash jarring instead of charming: the tightness of "Free" and the mature, melodic undulations of the title track clang against the unsettling imprecision of "Taste," the drop-off-a-cliff ending of "Train Song" and the noodly meander of "Talk." And I could probably do without the last three tracks entirely, even "Prince Caspian." Fortunately, "Character Zer0" and "Theme From The Bottom" still hearken back to the energy of Nectar in the in-between moments, "Bliss" is an undiscovered delectable void of harmonious dissonance, and "Waste" is as tender and earnest as any lyrics they've written. Ostensibly, Lillywhite wanted this to be Phish's great "stoner album" (apparently except for all the other ones), and while my solicitor advises I can't attest to that I can say that his production largely made genuine order out of what had previously been serendipitous chaos. And that got me through a lot of endless, sweaty nights in Asia. (Content: no concerns.)

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