the ten best phish songs

Nothing could be further from the truth. Just this past week was the first time I had listened to them in about 7 years.

This is funny because no one has ever made the connection between P.O.X. and the word "pox" before.

1) Tube
2) Suzy Greenberg
3) You Enjoy Myself
4) Fee
5) Fast Enough For You
6) Runaway Jim
7) Harry Hood
8) Sample in a Jar
9) Fluffhead
10) Golgi Apparatus

(I actually had to struggle to remember names of songs... so this is probably more like a POX that I can remember)

Billy Breathes
Down With Disease
Fast Enough For You
Fee
Free
Gumbo
If I Could
Llama
Runaway Jim
The Squirming Coil

train song
farmhouse
piper
mike's song
prince caspian
you enjoy myself
free
sample in a jar
it's ice
lizards

1. First Tube (studio is fine)
2. What's The Use (studio is fine)
3. Piper (live, esp. '03 and '04)
4. David Bowie (any period)
5. You Enjoy Myself ('94 - '97)
6. Mike's Song -> Simple -> Weekapaug ('94 - '00)
7. Harry Hood ('94 - '00)
8. Reba (any period)
9. Ghost ('97 - '04)
10. There could be another 20 songs that have great potential live (Tweezer, Run Like an Antelope, Maze, Fluffhead, Down with Disease, Guyute, Sand, Wolfman's Brother, Split Open and Melt, Carini, Twist, Stash, Tube, etc. etc.)

The thing is that Phish really could never write pop songs. But you listen for the jams, not the songs. The "composition" songs (YEM, Fluffhead, Reba, Guyute, etc.) are more interesting than any of Phish's attempts at pop.

The only Phish album I can recommend for people into non-jamband music would be The Siket Disc. It's the only thing I can slip in to people who HATE Phish and they'll get interested and ask, "Who is this?" Then when I tell them they curse my name. It's just a bunch of jams from the sessions that made Story of the Ghost. Great stuff.

This board is called "I love music". It's for people who love music to talk about music they love. What exactly about that concept is confusing you fools?

My choices (granted, as someone who stopped listening to them around '97):
Guyute
YEM
David Bowie
Mike's Song
Runaway Jim
Stash
Punch You In The Eye
Timber Ho!
Split Open and Melt
Slave to the Traffic Light

(It would probably be more fun to do top 10 live performances of songs, eg. Tweezer -- 3/6/93)

?!!?!?!??!?

!!!!!?!?!?

**!?!L#(!?#@LK

And ouch, Dude of Life? While we're at it, why don't we throw in some more lowlights from 70 Volt Parade on here. Or not.

Although I'll say that Surrender to Air stuff ain't that bad, although jazz isn't Trey's strong suit.

I do this with Farmhouse all the time. It depends on the kind of people you entertain, but I never have people over to listen to "zone out" music, which is what Siket is, basically. Come to think of it, I've done this with Story of The Ghost, too. That's some smooth, funky late night drinking sound that works really well as low background music.

Do you have Amy's Farm?

If not, shut it.

I'll agree w/ Story of the Ghost, too. Probably Phish's best-produced album. "Ghost" is so thick, and I think "Brian and Robert" is about as close as Phish could come to a good pop song (or rather a song that could appeal to ILMasses).

What are your favorite shows?

- Ian McLean's Farm

- 1989-10-13

- Amy's Farm (I just "remastered" this show to digital. It sounds like Cream... I think I was fortunate enough to have a copy very close to the original source)
- Arrowhead Ranch
- Red Rocks
- Sugarbush
- Drum Logos, Fukuoka, Japan
- big cypress - all 10 cd's, what a show!
- lemonwheel and lemonwheel soundcheck,especially
- great went
- Live Phish: vol. 9 from '89

There's a bunch more of course, but this is what sticks out in my head at the moment without unzippering my cases.

New stuff is god-awful, though. The opposite direction would be the best next direction.

So there is nothing worth checking out from any of them at this point then. That's a shame. Glad I found some cool avante jazz and rock stuff through torrent shares. Toshinoro Kondo is great!

Yeah, most Phish fans are rediscovering music now that they can't use Phish as a crutch (although there are always new SBDs being released, Island Tour being the most exciting).

It's ILM, not ILHH or ILP or ILM.

Sadly, none of them. Most of the mastered live releases capture it well (like A Live One and Slip Stitch and Pass).

This might be my new fave of the Live Phish series. Seems to be the perfect balance w/great sound!

That Live Phish is probably the one that I listen to the least for some reason. Some of the worst Live Phish releases have some of the best stuff - the Chalkdust from 7/10/99 is amazing (somewhere around the 9 minute mark everything clicks into some of the most beautiful Phish I've ever heard); the 7/8/00 Alpine show has an amazing Piper (probably the song that packed in the most post-hiatus). Lots of great, great stuff. It's kind of a shame that the vast majority of ILMers would never give this even a chance. I suppose it's fun to have a band that you can always kick around, and I can always see why Phish is kicked around, but hey, there is a lot to love, too.

Lawn Boy - There are interesting things about a lot of the actual songs, but they tend to be the more ornately composed, non-pop songs, which also happen to have the best improv sections (and also happen to be much of the older material - stuff from Junta, Lawn Boy, etc.). When I first started listening to Phish, I thought the composed sections were amazing; I still kind of do, but I don't get revved up about them like I used to. The jams have never really soured to me, no matter how much music I listen to (and I think there are musicians/groups who improv better, obviously, but I'm in love w/ Phish's style of improv). Sometimes I get hung up on the musical references alone - a little West Side Story in one jam, a Pavement quote in the next, KCrimson's "Starless" poking it's head out of SOAMelt, Loveless quotes, etc. etc.

I'd go on and on, but 1) I don't want to start proselytizing, which I kind of go out of my way not to do when I'm talking about Phish b/c I hate hearing other people try to 'will' me into liking a band, 2) The ILM Summary Judgement is pretty clear on Phish, and 3) there's no need to get too deeply into it on a POX thread.

Nickalicious - "Icculus." And yeah, geniunely funny, not "Phish" funny. And "God Never Listens" is "Lifeboy," which, along with maybe "Brian and Robert," is an admirable Phish attempt at pop.

1. Fluffhead
2. Harry Hood
3. Bathtub Gin
4. Run Like An Antelope
5. Divided Sky
6. You Enjoy Myself
7. Reba
8. Slave To The Traffic Light
9. Gumbo
10. Mike's Song > Weekapaug Groove

If the list was top 20, the next 10 would be from Ghost and Farmhouse, probably. They have so many songs competing for top 10, it gets pretty difficult.

that being said:

-Bouncing (the version from A Live One, I really like the polyphony)
-Cavern
-YEM
-Rift
-Harry Hood
-Prince Caspian
-Golgi
-Fee

Also, some bastard swiped my Live One discs about 8 years ago, so that was that.

It's best described as "hating everything about the band but the band itself", and the only album after Billy Breathes I've heard was Farmhouse, which blew goats.

Yes, that's The Velvet Cheese. Such a sappy song, although it provided a touching moment at Phish's last show when Page started bawling and couldn't get through the song. Which is really the only context that the song works - in any other case, it was a set-killer.

And Farmhouse was Ok. I think "First Tube" is one of the most listenable studio songs they ever did - instant pleaser.

And the ILM hatred is just kind of assumed at this point, I think. The only lame thing about it is that Phish fans tend to say a lot funnier and much more caustic things about Phish than ILMers ever could (well, not the evangelical Phish fans, who are never fun to talk to - "OMG PHISH TOTALLY BROUGHT DA FUNK ON 11/17/97!!! IT MELTED FACE ARGHGHGHGH")

Relatedly, the lyrics (I know, it's the jams you love) of those "songs" really are intensely shitty.

There are about a thousand other legit reasons for hating most Phish fans, too. They just tend to be kind of doltish. I've heard them get grouped into the frat thing, but I've never personally seen that - there tends to be more resistence to Nick and Buzz than an embrace.

Yes, but those are the best songs!

The mere mediocre-ly shitty lyrics approach standard fare and succeed in creating the same melencholia and ambivalence.

Also, Tom Marshall wrote a few genius lines and I certainly enjoyed his wealth of imagery and bizarre choice of subject matter.

I just can't agree with this. Although Trey, left to his own devices, writes some of the worst pop lyrics out there, Tom Marshall wasn't anyting impressive, either. His sense of rhyme is awful, his "images" are bland, and his metaphorical language is as stale as could be.

i lived in ann arbor(Univ. of Michigan) from 1994-2004. It exists. Frat shirts with adapted Phish logos, etc.

Weird Al does parodies. And makes me laugh.

"i lived in ann arbor(Univ. of Michigan) from 1994-2004. It exists. Frat shirts with adapted Phish logos, etc."

Well there you have it.

And back to the stupid lyrics...

"Control for smilers can't be bought
the solar garlic starts to rot
was it for this my life I sought"

Sounds like a dude on acid, smiling and staring at some hanging garlic wondering about how he wastes away his time with idiocy.

"You're hands and feet are mangoes
you're going to be a genius, anyway"

Song about a waiter who does drugs, I reckon. At least, that's how I always thought of it when I was an acid-headed waiter in college.

"won't you step into the freezer
please her with a tweezer
uncle ebaneezer"

Scrooge McDuck? I welcome this sort of gleeful idiocy with open arms.

" What song of theirs would you REALLY like to hear with "good" lyrics? Think about it."

Well, take for example a lot of their covers w/ good lyrics from bands like VU, Talking Heads, or Beatles. If a Phish song w/ good lyrics would sound like their jammed-out version of "Sweet Jane," then it'd be great.

Golgi Apparatus =
Tweezer =
Contact =
Llama =
The Mango Song =
Reba =
Harry Hood =
David Bowie =

???

I just can't hear it. The silliness is inherent in the music. With serious lyrics, it seems the music would have to change.

I think one of the good fusions of silliness and moodiness would be "Esther."

But, I can see why they bother you. I personally hate the lyrics (or is it the singing/delivery?) to Mound, Lengthwise... in fact most of Rift. It is my least favorite album. The barbershop quartet thing is something they should've kept to acapella versions of "my own hometown" and that "hello my honey, hello my baby" WB dancing frog song.

Actually it's quite fathomable since I'm one of them. I thought that was obvious when I posted the initial question. And unless the members of Phish hate their own band, I'm sure they count for this as well.

I think Phish attracts bad attention to me. I feel like they're a polarizing band, and the people who hate are going to label me as someone with piss taste (I know, because I used to do that) while the majority of fans are people who generally annoy me. I think from here on out I'll just keep this to myself as a guilty pleasure or something.

I agree. A lot of the hate for Phish I think isn't based on their music but on their fans. There's a perception they're well-adjusted, well-off, well-sexed party kids, who like drive the cars their ex-hippie yuppie parents bought them to camp in Yellowstone and have orgies beneath the stars while listening stoned to Junta on their way to see Phish at Red Rocks. I'm jealous of that and so I listen to like The Birthday Party and other similar outcast balmy type stuff that distracts me from my bitterness and rechannels it into something resembling alienated celibate impoverished peace of mind.

However, I *would* wear a Forbin t-shirt in the Ford emblem logo. Or anything kind of coded like that so that any Phish fan would recognize and be cool to me, but your average jackass wouldn't have a clue.

Go make yourself a Forbin t-shirt at Cafe Press!

AHA! Now, weigh in: do you think Phish would have been better if all those songs that you liked enough to make them stand out from the rest of the jam bands had serious lyrics?

There is no right or wrong answer of course. I'm just curious what the concensus will be out of the few Phish fans we have on this thread. Suzy wishes they were more serious, haterz say the lyrics downright suck, and I personally like them just as they are. I just most of hate Rift; I have decided it is DEFINITELY the singing/delivery that is to blame for why I hate most of Rift and not the idiotic lyrics.

(hear it in your head, now!)

The old man knows very well
Going down by the snowbank, there's a mound
A mound that an old man knows good
Look who raises his shoe all over this mound
Right over the world that's another rewind
And it's time, time, time for the last rewind
For a broken old man and a world unkind
He buried all his memories of home
In an icy clump that lies beneath the ground

--- AND ----

When you're here, I sleep Lengthwise
And when you're gone, I sleep diagonal in my bed

---AND ---

My glance is always darting, when I stroll the avenue
Avoiding all the obstacles that terrorize my view
If you are here with me, I trust you to lead the way
When you're not I follow you, and always go astray
Silent in the morning
Suspended in the trees
Lunch time comes you've found your voice
It brings me to my knees
The volume just increases
The resounding echoes grow
Till once again I bask in morning stillness, I love so

_----although....

I can still dig Rift. I'm just at a point now where I "get" the band enough to say, "okay, ignore that annoying shit."

I press on the elastic sheet, I'm breathing through a slice
'Are they worms or are the serpents?' bubbles through the ice
The source was quite invisible, the ever-present voice
While skating, both legs tracing different shapes, I made my choice
Mimicking the image in whose radiance I bask
I'm tied to him, or him to me, depending who you ask
None the less reluctantly reflections tumble in
I slide with all the other on the wrong side of the skin

All of these could've sounded just fine to me, but however they wrote the songs on Rift just inexplicably annoy me.

Crap did I say that? If I did, I didn't mean that. I wish to god that their lyrics were better, not more serious. In fact it's in their "serious" songs where they fall the most flat. And I'll reiterate, it's Marshall's sense of rhyme and diction (which is to say: everything) that I can't stand.

I think Lengthwise is the closest Marshall will ever come to a masterpiece - straighforward, evocative, no extra words to fill out the line in order for him to rhyme something ... and Fishman singing.

The middle section of "It's Ice" at Clifford Ball is pretty cool. Pretty blah song, though.

followed up by a total drop in quality of one guy who can barely sing: who knows very well

followed by the dorky barbershop quartet again: GOING DOWN BY THE SNOWBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK

back to the solitary douchebag: there's a mound

It sounds like fuckin' Larry Darryl and Darryl or something. Annoys the shit out of me!

-Sanity :)

... I can't explain it, but this song just fills me with glee.

A lot of those older songs which never appeared studio recording remind me of Camper Van Beethoven. I guess it was a ska hippy factor. Great happiness, though.

That was really hard

after giving them an honest listen, behold:

1) You Enjoy Myself
2) Guyute
3) Mike's Song
4) The Squirming Coil
5) Tweezer
6) Stash
7) Heavy Things
8) Reba
9) Bouncing Around the Room
10) Farmhouse

1.Divided Sky
2.You Enjoy Myself
3.Sparkle
4. Weekapaug Groove!!
5. Squirming Coil
6. Mike's Song
7. Maze
8. Down With Disease
9. Golgi Apparatus
10. Sample in a Jar (no one said this?)

I kinda hope this is the actual name.

6.)Meatstick(One of My First Phish Expierences)
I kinda hope this is the actual name.

-- Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 23 May 2006 21:43 (1 year ago) Link

hahahahaaaa

1. Down With Disease (1997-12-11 Rochester War Memorial)
2. Ghost > Down With Disease Reprise (1997-12-11 Rochester War Memorial)
3. Harry Hood (1993-12-31 Worcester Centrum Centre)
4. Sample In A Jar (1994-6-18 UIC Pavilion)
5. Dallas Jam > Tweezer Reprise (1994-5-07 Dallas, TX)
6. Simple (1997-8-16 The Great Went)
7. Ghost (1998-7-06 Lucerna Theater)
8. Roses Are Free (1997-12-11 Rochester War Memorial)
9. Stash (A Live One)
10. Meatstick (1999-12-31 Big Cypress, FL)

1.You Enjoy Myself
2.Rift
3.Harry Hood
4.Halley’s Comet
5.Golgi Apparatus
6.Down With Disease
7.TMWSIY>Avenu Malkenu>TMWSIY
8.Divided Sky
9.The Wedge
10.Cavern

for some reason its hilarious to think you came back from a self-imposed ban to post a phish pox list

I went off into the wilderness and found myself...what?