It’s Tuesday morning at quarter to seven and I’m traveling south on SR 19 from Elkhart, Indiana to Napanee. The landscape is dominated by cornfields lit dimly by ashen skies. And I don’t even have the music on: innately, the title track from Phish’s 1996 “poppy” album Billy Breathes seeps into my head, like vapor, like a gaseous element expanding to fill all of time. The feeling is unparalleled.
Well, let’s rewind a bit. These are long-haired, hippie goofballs from Vermont. This stuff isn’t supposed to COME from them. This stuff is supposed to come from New York or LA, Interpol, The Eagles, U2 — you know, bands that take themselves more seriously. For a set of hooks and melodies to emerge as so stalwart in the forefronts of our minds and of the musical canon is no insignificant event. Certain rubrics have to be in place.
In looking at the contemporary critical reception of this album, we see what’s apparently an identity crisis on the part of the press and mass media, but also, a four-star (out of five) review from Rolling Stone and the same from Allmusic and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (wikipedia.org). In light of this, in a way it almost seems crueler that this stuff is so unknown outside of the hippie circles of America. (Judging by NME’s 3/10 review, I can from a distance glean the general British view of this stuff… indeed they’re notorious Dead-haters, incidentally.) For all I know, MTV treated it like the plague, more or less, and these tunes never cracked the stratosphere of what’s albeit the corporately owned stations here in Northern Indiana, to say nothing of, perhaps, WXRT in Chicago, et. al.
Actually, so maligned has this album’s trip to relative embrace and reverence on the part of the general public that I even remember Phish fans, of which I was sort of casually one in the early 2000s or so, dismissing Billy Breathes as too “poppy,” not having enough jamming on it, and maybe even a stab at radio. So it seems it was in that troublesome territory of being too namby-pamby for the Deftones/Stabbing Westward camp and too structurally conventional for the counterculture spheres.
One thing I see in Phish is an inferiority complex — they feel the need to foster something like 300 different songs in their catalogue, to have some of these stretch into 15-minute territory, et. al., and to play three-hour concerts, at four consecutive nights per venue. Still, the cult following is undeniable, and so the lack of initial impact of Billy Breathes certainly stands as a funny lesson in our culture. This being said, these days, pretty much every fan of folk rock agrees that this album is a classic, I hear the songs played in public (in commercial kitchens, more times than not, as it were) and “Prince Caspian” has become a sort of mythical figure in our society, as he well should.
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Addenda 1: this “from a melody standpoint” motif unpacked.
Just to be clear: I don’t think Billy Breathes is the best ALBUM of its decade, nor even the best rock album. The reason, basically, is that it could have come from the 1960’s. It’s basically a really good Beatles album, perhaps with even less studio wizardry rampant than with Martin and crew — these are just good, catchy, hearty songs to sing around the campfire, like Peter, Paul & Mary, Supertramp or whoever the culprit might be. Nevermind and OK Computer, on the other hand, do way more for forging new styles in rock music that would thereafter become standard, hence my inclination to rank them ahead of Billy.
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Addenda 2: My Top 10 Albums of the ’90s from a melody standpoint.
1 Phish – Billy Breathes
2 Nirvana – MTV Unplugged in New York
3 Oasis (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
4 Beck – Mutations
5 Steve Earle – El Corazon
6 Supergrass – In it for the Money
7 The Verve – Urban Hymns
8 Counting Crows – August and Everything after
9 Morphine – Cure for Pain
10 Soul Coughing – El Oso
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