Jeremy Levine
Happy 25th Anniversary to Phish’s first official live album A Live One, originally released June 27, 1995.
What’s the point of A Live One in 2020?
Phish’s music is best experienced live. If you can’t go to a show (limited by geography, time, or global pandemics), the next best thing is a live recording, rather than a studio album. But before 1995, if you wanted to hear a recording of live Phish, you had to send a blank cassette tape to a fan and wait for them to mail it back to you. The music wasn’t readily available for the casual listener—you had to seek it out.
A Live One represented the first commercially available recording of the band doing what it did best: playing to an audience. The live sound was no longer exclusive to those who could figure out the tape trees in fanzines or on the nascent internet—it was at your local record store. Finally, Phish in their truest form, available to the masses.
But in 2020, anyone who’s curious should visit the glorious website phish.in and stream one of over 1,600 Phish shows, legally and for free. If the selection there is overwhelming, or you don’t like listening to audience recordings and prefer crispy soundboards, you can find many of the band’s official releases on your preferred streaming service, or as a box set.
Most of those official releases—like the revelatory show from 2/28/03 or the manic three nights of Amsterdam ’97—contain full, real Phish shows. But A Live One is not even a real Phish show. It’s a patchwork of a bunch of different shows from the ’94 tour, strung together over two discs to simulate the two sets of a regular Phish show. As Walter Holland notes in his spectacular 33 1/3 book about A Live One, the album “sounds like a Phish show, but a fan would know right away that it isn’t one.” The mythical “setlist flow,” the narrative that develops from opener to encore, isn’t fully there.
You’re probably assuming that, if it’s not one full show, the tracks on A Live One must be some pretty spectacular Phish, right? Like, the best performances from that year? Well…
One of the great things about Phish is that they barely ever play a song the same way twice, which means that there’s no such thing as a “definitive version” of a given track. Each listener will have a set of preferences that may lead them to prefer one version of “Stash,” “You Enjoy Myself,” or “Slave To The Traffic Light” over another. This makes picking tracks for a compilation tricky business.
Some of the cuts on A Live One are undeniably standout versions—the blissful prog of “You Enjoy Myself” is perfectly executed; Page McConnell’s piano solo on “Squirming Coil” is one of his finest (which is really saying something); the apocalyptic calypso groove of “Stash” hits revelatory heights and garners a spectacular crowd reaction.
The elephant in the room is that 30-minute reading of “Tweezer,” which is…not my personal favorite. More than any other Phish song, “Tweezer” is an open-ended jamming platform; past the first few minutes of the song, absolutely anything can happen: maybe five minutes of straight rock & roll, maybe twenty-five minutes of collective improv with different tempos and moods, maybe something else entirely.
The “Tweezer” featured on A Live One, from Bangor, Maine, reaches nearly free-jazz places; it’s deeply improvisational and experimental. If that’s your bag, that’s great. Many people adore this “Tweezer.” But to me, this “Tweezer” is outdone by at least two other “Tweezers” from 1994: the 5/7/94 “Tweezerfest” that featured various “Tweezers” as segues between other songs, and the polar opposite, the multi-movement 11/28/94 “Bozeman Tweezer,” (a two-minute stretch of which is excerpted on A Live One under the name “Montana”).
The point of Phish is that every reading is different, and someone’s assessment of which jam they like most is usually more about the person than it is about the jam. The question of “Is A Live One a good representation of what makes Phish good?” isn’t answerable; it depends on what you think makes Phish good in the first place. A Live One was destined to not make everyone happy.
So if there’s no such thing as Definitive Phish, and A Live One can’t offer the energy flow of a real setlist, and we can find any Phish show that does meet our preferences on the Internet, then again, what’s the point of A Live One in 2020?
The other great joy of Phish is not Phish—it’s the audience. In the song “Stash,” there are two magical little beats where the audience claps along to replicate a woodblock sound on the original recording. The first time I heard “Stash” live, I knew exactly when to clap because I had heard people clapping on A Live One. I didn’t even have to think about it.
The dialogue between band and audience is constant at Phish shows—you can hear the crowd get completely silent so Trey Anastasio can play “What’s The Use?” as quietly as he wants, or hear them start to cheer the band on when the improv hits a particularly brilliant stride. At a Phish show, you’re part of something much bigger than your own individual listening experience; you’re part of the music itself. Especially now, that unity is not something to take for granted.
But because you can access 1,600 shows online and each show is so different, there’s no way of knowing who in the audience has heard the ones that form your foundational understanding of how the band works. No two people learn Phish along the same route.
Except most routes start with A Live One.
Because access to quality recordings was difficult in 1995, A Live One is the first live Phish recording a lot of people heard. It became a staple of the recommendation engine, the thing that you tell people to listen to when they’re just starting out, when the setlists and forums are too dizzying to make sense of. When someone is new to Phish, you steer them to A Live One—even if it’s not a real show, even if it’s not objectively even the best Phish on record. If you listen to that recording and it teaches you when to clap in “Stash,” then we’ll have learned from the same place. In a landscape defined by multiplicity, it’s the single node that ties together all 20,000 of those people.
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