At the top of Mike Gordon's resume is his role as the bass player in Phish, a band that's earned its stripes with three decades of fiery, improvisational performances. But Gordon also has a vibrant solo career with four albums to his name. Beyond music, he's a filmmaker, an author, an artist, and a lover of visual tomfoolery—just check out his Instagram feed. He's a born trickster, and over the years, his deadpan sense of humor has bled into his stage performances. He uses the live concert environment to playfully confuse and confound audiences, like a Willy Wonka for the jam-band set.
So when the kids show up to his current tour in support of his newest album, Overstep, they may expect a rock gig. But Mike, being Mike, has surprises in store. If he has his way, the show will be something closer to an interactive art installation—albeit one with a funk-flavored prog-rock soundtrack.
"I like the idea of breaking down boundaries," Gordon says. "And that boundary at the front of the stage, the line between the performer and the audience, is not often broken. It's been done, like when Wayne [Coyne] from The Flaming Lips goes in the hamster ball and rolls across the crowd. But pushing it to the max would be letting the audience play the band."
Play the band, indeed. Of the theatrics and curiosities onstage on the Overstep tour, the centerpiece is an interactive piano-like instrument spanning the lip of the stage. At certain points during the show, touch-sensitive panels illuminate; by tapping on them, audience members trigger sounds and jam with the band as it plays. That's just one piece of the big wacky puzzle. Gordon and his team have spent two years (between Phish tours and other projects) designing a show that aims to amuse the band and the audience with audio and visual tricks, creating something truly interactive.
It all started with the stage design.
"I wanted to find a look that is very much not what you would expect from a jamband," Gordon says. He wanted something vast and minimal, something closer to theater than "band on stage." He started taking note of art installations and performances beyond the rock milieu. The biggest inspiration came when he saw Pina, Wim Wenders 3-D documentary film about the choreographer Pina Bausch.
"I saw it four times," Gordon says. "The sets they used in the movie mixed natural elements, like rocks and rain, and synthetic elements like sheets and curtains. I really liked how the things on the stage were minimal—and I mean in the Steve Reich and Philip Glass sense, where there's just a lot of something and it doesn't vary too much."
Gordon and his core design team—longtime collaborator Jared Slomoff, seasoned Broadway set designer David Gallo, and lighting director Jason Liggett—played with several options before arriving at a simple, relatively low-tech set piece. The band plays in front of three light boxes, each 8 feet tall. Each is fronted by a pair of mesh screens (think screen doors) arranged a few inches apart. In the back are arrays of multi-colored Philips ColorBlast TRX LED fixtures. When the boxes light up various colors, subtly shifting moiré patterns appear on the screens as they vibrate with the music or billow slightly as the air around them moves.
"I knew I wanted to incorporate moiré pretty early on," Gordon says. "I started noticing moiré patterns everywhere. In airports, in the wood slats at the local tea shop. It really stuck to the vision. Photos and videos don't do it justice, but it looks 3-D to your eyes."
Gordon even commissioned moiré instruments for himself and guitarist Scott Murawski to match the light boxes. The guitar and bass—crafted specifically for this tour by Ben Lewry of Oakland, California's Visionary Instruments—are hollow, with LEDs inside that make them glow, and moiré screens stretched across the front. The LEDs in the guitars and in the giant boxes on the stage are manipulated by lighting director Jason Liggett, who sits at the back of the venue and follows along with the band, swapping colors and flashing patterns in response to the music.
"Ninety percent of what I'm doing is improvisation," says Liggett. "There's a lot of lights up there, and it's a trick to make it all work together cohesively."
The result is subtly psychedelic—the musicians playing moving blobs of color, standing in front of a giant wall of shifting tones—and totally unlike your typical light show. The stage lighting is sometimes complimented by simple, monochromatic projections of organic shapes and patterns that lighting designer Liggett splays across the band. It all adds an ethereal, otherworldly visual layer to the proceedings.
The effect is enhanced by the fact that much of the on-stage gear common to a rock show stays hidden. Amplifiers are concealed behind the light boxes. Effects pedals are covered by hoods. The guitar and bass are outfitted with elaborate wireless setups, so there are no cables. Floor monitors have been eliminated in favor of in-ear monitors. Almost everything else on the stage is painted flat black: the microphone stands, the organ, even the congas. As a concert-goer, all you see are the blobs of color, the shifting patterns, the guitars with their flashing lights.
Speaking of flashing lights, there's also the EEL. This is what Gordon's team calls the massive digital keyboard stretching across the front of the stage, facing the audience. (EEL doesn't stand for anything, really. It's a Gordonesque play on words... moiré, Moray, get it?) It looks a bit like a piano keyboard—its 55 keys, when lit, appear black and white. But it doesn't play like a piano. It's closer to a MIDI controller, or a row of Function keys at the top of a PC keyboard.
The concept is simple. At certain points of the show, the EEL illuminates, catching the attention of dancing, air-drumming and Instagramming concertgoers in the front row. Then, the long box goes mostly dark, but specific keys stay lit, indicating they're active. The fans instinctively touch the lit keys, and when they do, they hear a sound come through the venue's sound system. A bass note, the blat of a snare drum, the plink of a piano. They start to tap the various keys, and the sounds spill out in rhythm with the song being played on stage. In a matter of seconds, a passive observer becomes part of the show. The stoned kid in the front row gets his huge Oh shit moment he'll talk about for years: Remember the night I jammed with the band?. The EEL only affords him 30 seconds to tap out a few melodic phrases, but his grin stays there all night.
Gordon calls for the EEL to be switched on a few times per show, whenever the band feels like getting playful with the crowd. "For two bars, we're playing, then for two bars, we go quiet and the audience plays, then for another two bars, we play something that compliments what they just did, and so on. We're having a duel with the audience."
The crowd is given zero instruction. "It's supposed to be like the game Myst, where you don't know what the goal is, you just have to figure it out," Gordon says.
The sounds coming out of the machine are controlled by audio engineer and programmer Greg Davis. He sits at the back of the venue, hovering over a computer and a video feed that stays fixed on the front of the stage. His laptop is running Max MSP, a software program popular among electronic musicians and sound designers. Greg's Max banks are loaded with all the samples the band will use on the EEL: notes he's sampled from the band's instruments, and various spoken phrases and vocal ticks he captured from the performers. He can also capture loops as they're played on stage and map those to the EEL's keys.
Davis keeps a small keyboard at his station so he can find the key the band is currently jamming in and program the EEL to only play the notes that match. He also taps out the tempo of the music—if the person playing the EEL has no rhythm whatsoever, Greg's software can quantize their performance on the fly, re-mapping their off-beat thwacks to the nearest 16th note. Every amateur ends up sounding like a pro.
"If things start getting chaotic and everybody's flailing away on the thing, I have the ability to contain and shape what the audience is doing so it's more pleasing," Davis says.
All the stagecraft, all the technology—the programmable LEDs, the moiré effects, the projections, the interactive instruments—are designed to blur the barrier between audience and performer, to alter perceptions of what a rock concert can and should be. So does it end up being a moving experience? Or does it just come across as a novelty?
The show I saw, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, didn't command a rewriting of The Book of Rock and Roll Theater, but it did bend more than a few minds.
For the first couple of songs, the band is lit by traditional overhead spot lights. The people move and groove to the music, but the stark stage bathed in white offers minimal visual stimuli. A few songs in, the moiré light boxes come to life, glowing pink and blue, later shifting between golds and yellows. The crowd grows warmer. A song later, with the band in the middle of an intense atonal jam, the LEDs inside the guitars start flashing in time with the music. The moire boxes shift colors to match the LEDs on the guitars. The crowd whoops with enthusiasm, now totally charged.
Between two songs in the first set, the sounds of chimes and gongs erupt from the stage, as though a recording of a gamelan orchestra was suddenly being piped in. Those watching closely will see the band tapping their microphone stands. This is another little visual trick—the stage is rigged with several contact mics, and Davis has programmed various samples to be triggered whenever they're tapped. This time, it was metallic percussion. Later in the show, the taps produce bird sounds, and a chorus of coughs and giggles.
Near the end of the first set, the cue is given to wake the EEL. As it comes to life, the kids down front stop dancing and huddle closer. Some of them immediately start tapping (they must have done their homework on YouTube). When the smaller sections light up, the fans quickly figure out the rules. They're tapping little ditties and drumming out rhythms. The band stops and starts, giving the audience their 30 seconds of fame. Everyone in the first three or four rows is laughing and high-fiving, or at least heatedly Facebooking. The rest of the room, however, is mostly oblivious. They just dance along to the stop-start beat.
Gordon is aware that the EEL's interactive charms are only apparent if you're within reach of the flashing lights.
"Most people in the concert can't see it, and it's only obvious if you're in the front," he told me before the Fillmore gig. "We had the idea that we'd project corresponding rectangles of light above the set pieces so everyone could see it. But that wouldn't really show people what's going on because they wouldn't see the hands. So we just accepted that if you were at the back of the room, you'd hear the interesting sounds, and maybe people would talk about it between sets or at work the next day. But now, there's been a lot of talk on tour that it would be nice to show people what's going on. So I think we'll end up doing some video projections and show it while it's being used. We'll probably end up throwing in the towel on that one."
He says they've also discussed placing additional instruments around the venue so more of the room is involved. Like on any well-oiled traveling show, the crew is constantly experimenting and adapting the setup. They're on the road for another two weeks, and everyone on the crew expects the last date to be very different than the first.
The EEL makes two more appearances during the show, so maybe two or three dozen people in total get to play with it. The majority of the thousand or so show-goers will shuffle out unaware they missed their chance to jam with the guy from Phish. But at least they had a great night filled with challenging but buoyant music, strange noises, trippy light effects, and the camaraderie of the throng. Sometimes, that's all a rock and roll show really needs to be a success.
Mike Gordon's tour hits Vancouver on Saturday, then Boston on March 28. Dates throughout New England and New York fill out the following week, with a stop at Carnegie Hall in New York City on March 31. The final date is in Burlington, Vermont on April 6. The new album, Overstep, is out now.
