If you want to understand Phish's place in the improvisatory-rock continuum then you have to hear jams like this otherworldly 50-minute Tweezer, which makes the 5/7/94 Bomb Factory Tweezerfest seem like a drunken joke-a-thon. This is pure unadulterated dig-in-your-heels psychedelic rock from the 1994-95 period when Phish was wringing every last drop of energy from Every Single Goddamn Song. The rest of the show is just summer Phish of fine vintage, but the Tweezer is essential Phish. It's instructive to compare this cohesive improvisation, with the whole band creating new music at the level of both structure and measure-to-measure content, to spacey and much more rhythmically-chaotic early-70's Grateful Dead jams. This is thoroughly modern music, though Phish was alone in playing this kind of rigorously free music on this scale in those days.

Go download this show, or at least the Tweezer, immediately. Turn out the lights, throw on the headphones, and go wandering to places unknown. Take a trip with the 11/28/94 Tweezer for comparison, while you're at it - and maybe dig out your old copy of 'A Live One' for some sweet 11/2/94 Tweezer action. That'll nicely fill two hours of your life, and echo well beyond. For contrast, try the 6/14/00 Twist - equally 'psychedelic' but qualitatively different in style - or the recent, more closely related (and nicely synchronous) Seven Below > Ghost from 11/28/09 in Albany.