Subject: review of antelope 8/28/93
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1998 11:05:21 -0500 (EST)
From:  Brian Allen Lipson 
To: dan@archive.phish.net

        Last summer, a friend of mine, who's been seeing Phish since
about '91, knocked on my bedroom door and handed me set II of this show,
praising the antelope as the apogee of Phish jamming.  After about forty
or so times through the tape deck, I agree with Jeff: this is the one
you've been waiting for.  
        The intro comes in the wake of Rift's ending, so, like most
antelope intros, it's pretty hard to hear at first.  This intro is not
outstanding until about halfway through.  First, Trey and Page mimic each
other on a nice group of ascending melodies, before a telepathic pause,
and then, the next time around, the whole band (even fish) jams a little
on the "brady bunch" theme, a tease unique to this antelope. The tease
gets quieter and quieter, until the opening just BURSTS out at you.  When
Trey plays the Brady Bunch theme again in this section, you just know this
is not going  to be a typical version.  The whole band is ON, Mike and
Fish are especially tasteful, Mike even alters his line a little to
complement Trey's brady bunch tease, and then comes the change to E minor.
        Unlike most renditions, where the band sort of jams freely a
little to start this section, on this one, everybody's listening to, and
mimicking, everybody else.  The first jam sounds a lot like one of the
sections of Tweezer from A Live One.  The band goes way out before coming
back to Em to go into second gear, they even change key a couple of times.
But the real fun is right after, about 4 or 5 minutes in.  Page starts
repeating a melody, speeding it up a bit each time, and fishman and page
send the band careeening through hyperspace.  This turns into one of the
single weirdest jams I have ever heard, one of those "how are they going
to get out of this one" jams.  When they finally do build up the tension
to shift into 3rd, Trey is at his distorted best, leading the band higher
and higher before a sudden digression to a more spacey realm.  floating,
floating, what's going on here, and then the simpsons' language when you
think no one is even playing anymore. Now Fishman and Page get the tempo
back, and Trey, Page and Mike start to figure out how they want to get
back to antelope.  Slowly at first, and then all at once, the dissonance
builds, and builds, Trey does that weird, ascending noise you now hear in
every antelope, and fishman kicks into double time.  Now, all four of the
guys are just going insane, especially Trey, who's just raping his
Languedoc.  Rising and rising, how long can they keep this up?  Trey holds
one note, high G if you're
keeping score at home, for about 8 seconds, and then pushes up to the
single most disgusting,
tense and dissonant note I have ever heard. If you're not cringing, it's
not loud enough.  Then, with a blink of the ear, it's
all over, and we're at that funky place every antelope goes, but this
time, like 8/20/93, everyone but Page stops and he lays down this
groovin, latin-sounding, percussive organ sound that makes my jaw drop
every time I hear it. Then you get the standard ending, which my
girlfriend says is also also cooler on this version, ending my absolute
favorite version of the song.  I know 8/20/93 gets all the hype, but this
one proves that August '93 was just totally sick.  More people should hear
this tape.