Cold Spike
By: Rob Mitchum
Tags: Music, Phish

10/10/94, Louisville, KY, Palace Theatre

There are multiple endpoints one could pick as the apex of 1994’s development, from the band’s first appearance at Madison Square Garden to the improvisational triumph of the 12/29/94 Bowie, even stretching so far as to June 1995 and the official release of the year’s highlights. But if you’re charting the path taken instead of the destination reached, the headlining story of the year would have to be the dramatic evolution of Tweezer.

It’s difficult to imagine now, when the opening riff of Tweezer is Phish’s most reliable indicator that something special is about to happen, but until 1994, the song was not yet a guaranteed highlight. From its debut at an intramural college hockey team party in 1990 until they started playing actual hockey arenas, Tweezer largely stuck to a predictable formula: the barely-a-song riff loop of the composed section, several minutes of funk-rock build, then a draining-battery slowdown ending. The homogeneity of “Tweezer So Cold” in its formative years is betrayed by the song length, which (as the below graph shows) sticks stubbornly to the 10–12 minute range despite largely consisting of improvised sections.

Tweezer median length by date, thanks Noah Lorang (@noahhlo)

In 1993, a couple outliers start to appear. On May 6th in Albany, in the giddy homestretch homecoming of their marathon spring tour, a Tweezer rides Sweet Emotion and Crimes of the Mind jams to the cusp of the 20-minute barrier. They fall just short of that marker again in the summer, as the August ’93 magic blesses Tweezer in Kentucky on the 15th of that month, a rendition that touches upon Cities and Cocaine. It’s a typical pattern of pre-1994 improvisation, where the lengthier jams are often padded by teases, recognizable islands in the deeper sea explorations.

A whole different beast rears its head at the Bomb Factory, one month into a spring ’94 tour that had been conspicuously light on experimentation. Here again was a Tweezer prolonged by pit-stops in other people’s songs, but that structure was stretched to the length of nearly an entire set instead of a “meager” 19 minutes. The initial Tweezer segment in Dallas by itself shattered the length record, clocking over 25 minutes before flailing headfirst into The Who’s Sparks, then returning to the song for two more 7-minute sections (by the LivePhish tracklist) before it was traditionally Tweeprised. It’s a version so anomalous for its time that Charlie Dirksen, the pre-eminent scholar of Tweezer Studies in the days of rec.music.phish, declined to even assign it a score from his 1–10 scale.

Few would have guessed that the Bomb Factory Tweezer was actually a glimpse at the future of the song, especially as the song drifted back to its normal boundaries for the rest of the spring and summer. But by the end of the year, Dallas started to look less like an outlier and more like the start of a trend, with Tweezers in Bozeman, Bangor, Salem, and Mesa juicing the song’s average timing. And as if to reinforce that these marathons weren’t just freak occurrences, the band decided to include the first of them as the centerpiece of A Live One’s second disc, a harsh hazing ritual for anyone first learning about the band from that release.

But the fact that this awakening didn’t happen immediately after the Bomb Factory also offers an opportunity to see the band more carefully charting what Tweezer could become. As far-ranging as the fall mega-versions are, they share an internal logic, one that mirrors how the band describes its practice exercises of the era: a mercurial restlessness, shifting from motif to motif every couple minutes, moving far afield from its beginnings, with ideas burbling up from any one of the four players and near-instantly elaborated upon. It’s incredibly ballsy to have the confidence to “rehearse” in this fashion on stage in front of an arena-sized crowd. It’s also a serious challenge to the listeners, a formalist approach primarily concerned with constant change and spontaneity, not neccessarily fluidity or narrative. Which is to say that I’m happy the Bangor Tweezer is on ALO, but I have rarely sat down and listened to the entire thing.

The early Tweezers of fall tour are a sneak peek of this frustrating and fascinating mix. Presupposing that sometime between summer and fall tour, the band looked back at the Bomb Factory and said “let’s do more of That!,” these early October versions offer a peek at what the band thinks That was, and struggling with whether That was even reproducible.

The tour’s first version, played late in the Bethlehem, PA opener, hardly suggests the journeys to come. Instead of the jam’s usual cocky swagger, it initially drifts in a more shadowy direction, Page’s piano anchoring while Trey tugs towards dissonance. But around 8:45 it clicks back into typical Tweezer improv, builds, and disintegrates, and slides into Lifeboy, just like old times.

It’s three nights later, back in Kentucky, where the training wheels come off. At 16:16, this Tweezer isn’t that far outside the norm, but it’s notable for attracting uncharacteristically harsh commentary from Dirksen at the time, garnering his “lowest ever” rating. It’s not hard to see why: like Bethlehem, it starts off in a melancholy direction, though Trey does more than just flirt with dissonance, he goes for an open-mouth kiss. By this point, playing the tension/release, dissonance/consonance game is old hat for Phish — it’s the gameplan for virtually every version of Stash of the era — but here it’s an ill fit, a sort of queasy and tentative morass. Some stop/start action provides momentary respite, but the following section appears to find the band uncomfortably sitting for the rest of the song between the gravity of Tweezer’s customary track and something stranger, never quite gelling with either path.

It’s a difficult listen, in much the same way that certain passages of the forthcoming mega-Tweezers would challenge even the most creative dancer, but there’s also something essential missing, a spark of momentum or effortless communication that electrifies Bozeman or Bangor even at their most avant-garde points. Eventually, this version claws its way back to the usual Tweezer ending, though with a strained peak that lacks triumph, a relief instead of a release.

Yet failures are instructive, and even this flawed version says a lot about the more successful versions to come. Lest anyone think improvising for half an hour is easy, this version shows what a tightrope it is to follow the kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting strategy of 94 Tweezers. Anything less than absolute confidence or a sharpened sixth sense for what the other band members are about to do, and the whole structure starts to crumble. Determining when a particular theme has run its course, selecting the right idea to hop to next, all while keeping in mind the developing superstructure of the song — that would be hard enough for one musician to do, never mind four at once. Just because they make it look easy (most of the time) don’t mean it is.

To be honest, heading into this era, I’m not even sure that the upcoming mega-Tweezers of Fall 94 (and Summer 95) could even be considered a “success” in and of themselves. My bias lies with the more cohesive, emotional Tweezers of 97–99 (and 2013!) over these monstrous versions, which in retrospect seem like they were themselves stepping stones to unlocking the true potential of the song. But there’s a thrill to watching the band explore the outer reaches of live experimentation, fully aware that they risk alienating a growing but still fragile audience base by slamming at top speed into a dead end in front of thousands. Pushing the boundaries further and further is messy work, but the space it leaves behind is fertile soil.