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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bringing the Live experience to beginner's ears, 13 May 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: A Live One (Audio CD)
Any Phish Phan will tell you, Phish is a Love band more than a studio band. This album puts together some of the bets pieces performed during 1994, and captures the intense energy of the shows perfectly. It contains both easy-listening and heavy jamming to please both beginners and veterans alike. Perfect to make the jump to live shows this album is the 10-step lesson to appreciating the long jams that might rebuff casual listeners. Look out for a very experimental Tweezer, a near-perfect You Enjoy Myself (THE Phish song by excellence), an aboslute gorgious Slave To The Traffic Light and the Harry Hood to end all Harry Hoods.
Candy for your ears
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic .... surprisingly so, 28 May 2009
This review is from: A Live One (Audio CD)
All sorts of wierd notions surround a band that, like the Grateful Dead before them, became a cultural phenomenum, not the least being that they had no really decent material...
Well, this is a fine place to begin listening to Phish. Culled from an autumn 1994 tour, this 2 disc collection captures the beguiling variety of a band that displayed in equal turns intelligence, humour and very tight interplay.
If you are a Deadhead, inured to rambling post-hiatus jams and plodding beats, the "fast-as-a-speeding rocket" twists and turns of Phish songs/jams will come as a jolt. Dull, this is not.
Although there have at least 50 live Phish albums released in various formats, this contains best-ever versions of various epics. Check out "Harry Hood's" raging, feel-good finale, the beautiful unstated lyricism of "Squirming Coil" (excuse the crass lyrics) and the sheer bonhomie of "Bouncing Round the Room" - a track Phish fans traditionally dislike but which is hard not to warm to.
Released around the time of Jerry Garcia's death, there was a definited sense of passing the baton from one cultural icon to another. Phish went on to explore funk, ambient trance music, and ran into their own problems of too much fame and fortune. But all this was ahead when Phish recorded this album. Trey Anastasio is a wonderful guitarist, far more tonally inventive than Garcia and a master of the electric instrument, and he is ably supported by the other three, especially Page McConnell on keyboards.
What lets the band down are, inevitably, the lyrics. Whereas the Dead produced songs of real power, rooted in Americana and often suffused with melancholy, Phish tended in the early years at least to go for a sort of frat-boy humour. It was only in later years that their songs became genuinely able to stand up in their own right and not depend on quick time signature changes, flashy arpeggiated passages, abrupt stops and starts etc.
If you want to explore Phish, and are looking how to dive in however, this is a very accessible starting point. Like the Dead, their studio albums tend to be far more feeble and lacking in energy than the live shows. But this has youthful energy, a certain strut, and... an overlong "Tweezer" aside... is great value.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Phish - A Live One, 24 Oct 2003
This review is from: A Live One (Audio CD)
This was my first exposure to Phish. I had seen a documentary (still can't find it) on them, and decided to check them out. I got home, put on my headphones, and was absolutely blown away. This was the birth of what is still today, an ever expanding universe of musical appreciation. I own many other Phish recordings, most of which are live, but still drag out 'A Live One' every now and then to relive my discovery.
Bouncing Round The Room is a great song, albeit short on complexity. The crowd surge puts hairs on end, and gives an accurate glimpse into the pre-show anticipation and release we all know and love.
Gumbo gives me a jazzy-south feel with the horns and loose-but-exact rhythms. Page's keyboard work is funky as hell, and Trey (as usual) rips into his solo.
You Enjoy Myself - what can I say...perhaps THE Phish song, and a great version ta-boot; colorful, funky and alive. Check out the many others for a good comparison.
This Slave to the Traffic Light is my favorite. Such raw emotion, from the early danceability, to the intensely introspective and layered slow section, and climaxing with the overwhelmingly beautiful and powerful guitar work that is unmistakably Trey, and unmistakably genius. Complex subtlety with full-throttle energy. I feel the tragedy in humanity, all of us slaves to the traffic light. I feel the guitar lashing out it's pain, and with Trey's complicated set-up (tube screamers, compressors, etc...)the guitar breathes with each declaration. After the song's end, you'll feel emotionally spent.
Disc 2 has a monster Tweezer. This insane piece has a lot of what many tenured phans like, plane old nasty jamming. Maybe a bit much for the newcomer, but once you start to get into it, you'll be jonesing for more and more. Look for a slow build of energy, peaking to frenetic pace, with teases of climax, and then the real thing...oh you won't mistake it for a tease! That blaring, screaming note will pierce your soul; you'll have forgotten about teases, bills, mortage payments and everything else. You're in the moment.
Simple is, well, simple. This version is without the improvised jam that you'll find in many others, so I tend to skip it. Look for extended Simples though...every single Simple-jam is beautiful. This comparison should be done with all Phish songs, by the way. The end product is all the more enjoyable when framed with seemingly infinate variety in improvisation. This is the spirit of Phish.
Harry Hood on A Live One is also a favorite of mine. Mello, complex, and rocking...all in one song.
The piano solo in Squirming Coil is excellent. At first, I thought the 'release' was a blatant bite of a another song that didn't come to mind. But after more and more exposure, I am realizing that many of the phrasings I hear as improv may seem familiar because they are musical manifestations of truth.
So if you don't have this dbl live set, go get it! It doesn't matter what kind of music you like. I guarantee it will not leave your cd player for weeks.
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