The inaugural Vegoose festival, which drew some 40,000 fans to Las Vegas this past October, was essentially Bonnaroo West: it was organized by Superfly Productions, the same team who throw the annual festival in Tennessee, and it featured many of the bands who’ve given Bonnaroo a reputation as white-boy-dreadlock haven. Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews, moe. — bands often berated by critics but loved by tens of thousands if not millions of fans who, as legend has it, are the rightful descendants of the Deadheads who once followed Jerry Garcia and company from coast to coast.
But along with those jam-nation luminaries, the Vegoose bill held some unexpected surprises — the Arcade Fire, the Flaming Lips, and Spoon, to name three. These are artists beloved by the other kids — the ones in vintage jeans who derided Death Cab’s Atlantic signing and look forward to the possibility of a reconstituted Elephant 6 collective. In the music-geek world, those bands aren’t supposed to be mixing it up with the dreadheads. But Vegoose wasn’t the first time the two tribes met (Beck played the original jam fest, H.O.R.D.E., and the Lips have played both Bonnaroo and moe.’s moe.down festival), it’s just one of the biggest.
Looking for someone to blame for all this? Try Phish, who broke up more than a year ago after a decade-plus reign at the top of the jam-rock heap. Thanks to Phish, jam rock’s philosophy of inclusivity is finally becoming a reality. If you’re looking for a reason, sample the three-disc Live at Madison Square Garden New Year’s Eve 1995 (Rhino). It shows the band at their best, flaunting an anything-goes attitude that pushed them into otherwise unexplored jam-band territory. Sincere songwriting? Check, thanks to keys player Page McConnell’s “Strange Design,” a lost-love ballad that with the right production wouldn’t be out of place next to a Coldplay cut. Silly theatrics? Well, there’s an amusing cock-rock cover of Collective Soul’s then-ubiquitous “Shine,” and the band’s running patter about the countdown to midnight culminates in an outlandish production (unfortunately heard and not seen) involving drummer Jon Fishman dressed, Wayne Coyne–style, as Baby New Year. And of course there are drawn-out jams, but here tight and sounding not at all gratuitous.
Throughout the two-set show, Trey Anastasio delivers guitar heroics and McConnell generates rotating chordal piano licks until it all coalesces. Phish don’t shy from risky experimentation: the end of a cover of the Who’s “Drowned” spills into a bevy of twisted guitar as Anastasio happens on the opening lick of his own “Lizards,” and during “You Enjoy Myself,” bassist Mike Gordon lays down a single-note groove that the band build on until it devolves into a spooky a cappella coda. In later years, wrong notes and missed cues often ruined these spontaneous epiphanies. But the MSG discs catch Phish before they’d begun to splinter.
