SET 1: Poor Heart > Sample in a Jar, Split Open and Melt, Drowned, I Didn't Know, Back on the Train, Birds of a Feather, Theme From the Bottom, Golgi Apparatus
SET 2: Carini > Bug, Strange Design, Vultures -> Limb By Limb, Will It Go Round in Circles, Dirt, Run Like an Antelope
ENCORE: Reba, Bold As Love
When we’ve discussed how this fall tour acted as a sort of warm-up run for recording Farmhouse, we’ve mostly talked about the fresher songs that crossed over to the studio after this road test. That’s the group of songs debuted by Trey in May, either in his solo acoustic sets or with the TAB trio, which made up 7 of the 12 tracks on Phish’s final 1.0 record. But there’s another, overlapping* slate that also provided 7/12ths of the Farmhouse tracklist – songs from Trey and Tom’s 1997 hot streak of songwriting, collected on the demo collection Trampled by Lambs and Pecked by the Dove.
I’ve written about it before, but I find this document totally fascinating. In four weekends, Trey and Tom reinvented Phish; the material they wrote in various Vermont farmhouses defined the last three years of the 90s every bit as much as cowfunk. It’s Trey finding a new songwriting voice – not the theory-obsessed prog of the early days or the genre hopscotch of the decade’s first half, but a novel approach. There’s a lot of indie rock influence here – the album art and title could easily pass for a Guided By Voices LP – but it’s not so much mimicry as lifting the idea that you can break traditional song structures without getting overly fussy. That included leaving the Trampled By Lambs songs incomplete in the best possible way, with plenty of room for Phish to fill out their potential onstage.
Most of those songs debuted live in the pivotal year of 1997, and Phish could have easily filled The Story of the Ghost with selections from this bumper crop alone. But when those sessions evolved into experiments with group composition, they only picked five, leaving a lot of promising leftovers unreleased. So as the band spent Fall 99 working out what they wanted to put on the next record, there were several candidates from the Class of 97 to try out.
Tonight’s show digs into that roster – there are four Trampled By Lambs songs in tonight’s second set, and of them only Limb By Limb had already made it on to wax. Of the other three, Dirt feels like a no-brainer for LP8; it’s had three years to steadily bloom, and it’s a strong representative of the softer side of the band they planned to highlight. The other two are very different songs that don’t sound like they could’ve come from the same litter – testimony to the breadth of that creative burst.
Bug is the most recent to arrive on the Phish stage, but as I mentioned on its debut, it immediately suits Phish’s millennial sound. They improve it by slowing down and thinning out the demo’s EBow-laden haste, adding in Mike features and a stately Caspian-like outro to a song that’s much better than Caspian. Tonight’s confident version shows that it’s on the fast track to Farmhouse, and it might have even been a stronger choice for a single – the lyrics’ ennui feels particularly late 90s, the Neil Youngish riff before the jam gives it the spine that Heavy Things lacks.
The path isn’t so clear for Vultures, which was recorded and discarded for The Story of the Ghost, won’t make the cut for Farmhouse, and will just have to settle for being one of the band’s best unreleased tracks. I get it; the song’s oddball pacing and tongue-twister lyrics would have made it a jarring interlude on any Phish record post-Rift.
But that unique flavor is also why it’s always such a welcome change-of-pace live, and tonight it makes its longest-ever case for jammability, riding those crunchy power chords into an entropic space full of bweeoooos and anxious drumming. It’s not a great jam, but it’s an interesting experiment, even if it ultimately doesn’t help Vultures’ cause – the song is just too out of step with how Phish wanted to present themselves to the outside world at this point.
The same is true for an honorary member of the Lambs and Doves club that also gets played tonight: Carini. Though co-written by all four members as a goof on the early 97 Europe tour, Carini’s simplicity shares a lot of DNA with Trey and Tom’s writing style that year. It’s preposterous to think Phish would put Carini on a studio album that they believed had commercial promise – “it’s about our drum tech who tackles stage invaders” doesn’t really work in a press kit – and it still feels like an inside joke whenever it’s played in 1999. But with another strong version tonight it’s starting to prove itself as a reliable set opener and launchpad for acid-rock improv, a long tail that no one could see coming.
It’s a round of auditions that makes for pretty easy sorting: Bug and Dirt, you’re going to Hollywood; Vultures and Carini, you’re not what we’re looking for right now. But in Tucson, the latter two songs hint at character actor staying power that’s going to keep them prominent in Phish’s shadow discography for decades, even if exiled from the recording studio. That the Trampled by Lambs and Pecked by the Dove sessions were capable of producing both categories – the alternative-universe hits and the fascinating obscurities – is why it was such a fertile moment, and why Phish was still harvesting it in studio and out three years later.
* - If the math is confusing, Bug and Heavy Things are in the Venn diagram between both groups…which is probably why they sounded so wrong when Trey first debuted them with TAB.
An alternate history where Bug is presented as their single instead of Farmhouse is an interesting one. Either way, happy to see Bug get the nod as a truly great Phish song.
Vultures is such an underrated song. It has also been nice to see Bug come back out recently (both of my kids love this song), and Carini has continued to evolve. The 10/13/23 version of Carini that opened the United Center run last fall is a top notch jam with new types of guitar phrasing from Trey. So fun to track the evolution from moments like this in 1999. Great write up.