Phish – The Clifford Ball 1996 Live (7 DVD set/Rhino Records)
Picture: C+
Sound: B- Extras: B- Concert: B
With
Phish reunited for the third time recently, materials from their archive
continue to find there way to market and Rhino Records has released what is the
grandest set yet in the 7-DVD Clifford
Ball 1996 Live set. No strangers to
this site, here is our previous coverage of the band in action:
Live in Brooklyn DVD/CD
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3994/Phish+-+Live+In+Brooklyn
New
Year’s Eve 1995 Live At Madison Square Garden
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3140/Phish+%E2%80%93+New+Year
Wetlands Preserved DVD Concert
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7164/Wetlands+Preserved+(2007/First+Run
From our past experience with the band, you can see they
are a real band who has talent, gives their audience a real show and creates an
atmosphere we used to expect from bands all the time. There are a few remakes in the following
tracks, but most of it is original material on the following DVDs, the first
six of which are nothing but concert footage:
They
include:
DVD 1 - Day One (8/16/1996)
Chalk Dust Torture
Bathtub Gin
Ya Mar
AC/DC Bag
Esther
The Divided Sky
Halley’s Comet
David Bowie
DVD 2 - Day One (8/16/1996)
Split Open And Melt
Sparkle
Free
The Squirming Coil
Waste
Talk
Train Song
Strange Design
Hello My Baby
Mike’s Song
Simple
Contact
Weekapaug Groove
DVD 3 - Day One (8/16/1996)
Makisupa Policeman
2001 Theme
Down With Disease
NICU
Life On Mars
Harry Hood
Encore: Amazing Grace
DVD 4 - Day Two (8/17/1996)
Old Home Place
Punch You In The Eye
Reba
Cars Trucks Buses
The Lizards
Sample In A Jar
Taste
Fee
Maze
Suzy Greenberg
DVD 5 - Day Two (8/17/1996)
The Curtain
Runaway Jim
It’s Ice
Brother
Fluffhead
Run Like An Antelope
Golgi Apparatus
Slave To The Traffic Light
DVD 6 - Day Two (8/17/1996)
Wilson
Frankenstein
Scent Of A Mule
Tweezer
A Day In The Life
Possum
Tweezer Reprise
Encore: Harpua
DVD 7 - Bonus Disc
The Clifford Ball: A Beacon Of Light
The Flatbed Jam
Soundcheck (8/15/1996)
An Interview With Jim Pollock
Chris Kuroda Split-Screen
Phish: On Jamming
Phish: The LG
They do
better on The Beatles’ A Day In The Life
than (once again) Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein,
but they are at their early peak here. I
was surprised how compelling this was to watch though and fans will be happy to
know that it is like being there, limits of analog video and older audio
notwithstanding. Fans (and Andy Warhol,
if he was still with us) would argue that only by seeing six DVDs worth of the
band in action non-stop is the bets and maybe only way to understand their
success, endurance and now, second revival.
I did not know what to expect but when all was said and done, I came
away with more respect for them than before.
We’ll see if their latest reformation is this good.
The 1.33
X 1 image across the seven DVDs is not bad for its age, but concert footage is
plagued by the limits of NTSC analog low-def video of the time and aliasing
errors more often than I would have liked, but color and relative clarity stop
that from making the picture worse. The
sound is here in PCM 2.0 16/48 Stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mixes, but
the problem here is that the soundmaster was not conceived for multi-channel
and has compression limits in either mix.
The Dolby is slightly more articulate than the PCM, but the PCM is
slightly richer. The combination is not
bad, but not spectacular. Good thing
they gave a good concert.
Besides
the loaded Bonus DVD, extras include a fancy gift box design and the slide case
holding the seven DVDs has added to it two more times that slide into the
case. One is an illustrated booklet with
text on the set, stills and illustrations on very high quality paper
stock. The other is a heavy paperboard
envelope with ten Phish postcards and a sheet of twelve Phish stamps. They are more like Easter Seals than postage,
but all are nicely designed. That easily
makes this one of the best music DVD sets we will see all year.
- Nicholas Sheffo
