RR: 1993—suddenly, Phish is playing to 14,000 at the Centrum on New Year’s Eve. Were you thinking that the peak was reached, or it would keep getting bigger?
DS: Well, I had no idea when it was going to stop. Put it this way—do you know how I thought it was going to grow? That New Year’s run was the first ever mail order, and it was tapers’ tickets only. I had this really bad tape deck that technically recorded tapes. The heads were out of sync, so you had to re-record a second copy off of it before you could listen to it on any other deck. It only recorded in mono, and whenever the counter hit triple zeros, the Play button would pop out. You would sit there and constantly watch it, and when it hit 95, you’d hit the reset button, so it wouldn’t get to 100 and stop recording. It was really wonderful. This is the deck that you want to have in the tapers’ section to give you a lot of street cred. I actually mail ordered for that run just because I figured I better mail order for this to get an early mail order number because Phish is, obviously, getting big. I thought it was like the Grateful Dead mail order like the earlier you were in, the more tickets you get. But, obviously, they chose not to go that route. That’s a good idea of how it was looking like they were just growing and growing. It was obvious that this was not the peak; it was going to keep growing from there.
RR: And it was quite a show, too.
DS: Yeah. Yeah. The things I remember from that show—first, security was really rough. I don’t know if you know this or not, but getting into that show, I got into line the second doors opened, and I plugged in my deck about ten seconds before lights went out. They had separated lines into men and women, so suddenly you’d get close, and they’d tell you that you’d have to go into another line. At one point, Trey asked if everybody was in yet. That’s why. The 30th, obviously, was the highlight of the run. God, it was cold that day.
The weather story during that run. It snowed big time right before the 28th. People in Maryland can’t really handle snow. It was a good four-hour drive from my parent’s house in Baltimore to D.C., and a ten-hour drive from Baltimore to New Haven the next day—if you can picture taking ten hours to go from Baltimore to New Haven. And then in Maine and Worcester, it was just cold.
The main thing that comes to mind from that night were all the “Peaches [en Regalia]” teases. After Frank Zappa had just died, they played “Peaches” three of the four shows, and they kept on playing “Peaches” that night. There was also a jam on New Year’s Eve that no one knew what it was.
RR: Yeah, the “Down With Disease” jam.
DS: No one had ever heard this thing before. “What the hell is this? I don’t know what the hell it is, but I like it.” I was working at a radio station at grad school then, and the CD single came out. They had a rule that whenever an album came in, you couldn’t play the same track on it twice. The CD single with “Down with Disease” came in, and it only had one track on it, so they couldn’t do anything with it, and they gave it to me because they knew I was into Phish. That came out in March or April of 1994, but [on New Year’s Eve] no one knew what it was. Eventually, I think Shelly came out and said, “No, that’s called “Down with Disease.” That really blew people away—this beautiful jam with one of Trey’s signature licks that no one had ever heard, coming out of midnight. That was completely insane.
RR: Speaking of insane, suddenly, Phish played at Madison Square Garden on December 30, 1994.
DS: What made that so weird for me was that six months earlier, I was seeing Phish in the Moore Theater in Seattle and the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver, and all of these tiny, tiny places on the West Coast and in the Southwest, and, all of a sudden, they’re at Madison Square Garden. The contrast between the late spring tour and the winter—I think that’s very much a dividing line for me with Phish. After that summer ’94 tour is when Phish stopped hanging out in the parking lot after shows, having jokes with fans, and they had their guard up more. In the spring of ’93, there were about seven or eight people doing the tour. By summer ’94, there were at least a couple dozen. Small enough that someone could throw a party at the end of tour and we could all fit in someone’s house, but it was already starting to change. More people were starting to do it. By fall of ’94, that’s when the scene really started to blow up. It was before Jerry died, actually, where I make the divide.
RR: Yeah, the ’94 summer tour ended with a great show at Sugarbush in Vermont. Do you think the band also knew that a change in eras was taking place?
DS: I don’t know. I think for them the change may have occurred when they hit the East Coast on that tour. If you look at the venues, they change massively. It’s like theatre, theatre, theatre, and, all of a sudden, it’s the Mann and Great Woods. After that Mann show—which was the last show I saw on that tour; the next time I saw them was Halloween—it just felt much different. Halloween was insane; people were just breaking into the venue. So, yeah, Madison Square Garden, while surprising, it did feel like where they were going. The small venues were over, and here you go. I think that is why that whole “Wilson” was so powerful—the “Wilson” jam. It was like looking around, and realizing just how many of us there were.
Part II picks up from where we left off with a look at 12/31/94 as we cover the years between that date and the 2010 New Year’s Run with Jambands.com columnist, Mockingbird Foundation board member, and Phish statistician, David Steinberg.
No Comments comments associated with this post