SET 1: First Tube > Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Fee, Bathtub Gin, Glide, My Soul

SET 2: Twist > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Tweezer, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Meatstick > David Bowie, Tweezer Reprise

ENCORE: You Enjoy Myself

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I’ve been writing semi-professionally about music for almost a quarter-century; closer to 30 if you count the rec.music.phish reviews that were practically my first foray into posting my thoughts online. It’s come full circle from hobby to a thing people improbably paid me for back to mostly hobby again. Along the way, I hope I’ve gotten better at it, or at least more mature. One of the things that I’ve learned, and increasingly tried to keep in mind, is that the musicians I’m writing about are real people, doing a job. Because music at its best can have such magical properties, it’s easy to forget that it’s produced through the hard work of human beings.

And if I’ve learned one thing from the last six(!) years of doing this newsletter, it’s that this shit is hard. On one hand, it’s ridiculous to compare typing on a laptop in my home to virtuosically performing for three hours in front of tens of thousands. But ever since I started the 25th anniversary publishing schedule, I’ve at least had a window into the performing cadence of what it’s like being in Phish. Doing the same thing 70ish times a year – 4 or 5 times a week during busy seasons – while staying creative and maintaining professional standards…it beats mining coal, but it ain’t easy either.

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I hold Phish to a high standard, but it’s out of respect. They built one of the most remarkable American rock band careers out of taking risks, and risks aren’t risks unless they produce some flops. It’s unfair and unserious to lambast them for every show not being as good as [insert favorite show here], but it’s also boring to just credit them with putting on an entertaining performance night in and night out. In order to sufficiently praise the times where everything is working, you also have to point out when they don’t.

At the same time, I want to treat Phish with empathy. The amount of shows they played in the 90s is pretty astounding, and I didn’t even cover the busier half of the decade. If you count travel, they spent close to half the year on the road up through 1994, lowering it down to a mere quarter for the remainder. In between, they were writing songs and recording albums, practicing and planning for the next big festival or holiday surprise. The work never stopped.

Once they built up a reasonable audience by fastidiously playing everywhere that would have them, they could’ve coasted. It would be far easier to just give the people what they want, and by the mid-90s, they had a roster of songs and a bag of tricks that could have kept a pretty large portion of the fanbase coming back for decades. They could’ve played peaky-dancey major-key Tweezers and emotional build Hoods and jumped on trampolines every night until retirement or death like a jammier Jimmy Buffett, resting on reliably profitable laurels.

Instead, it was pretty much precisely when they achieved that financial security that they decided to experiment artistically, challenging themselves in both songwriting and live performance to constantly find new territory. They spent the last seven years of the 90s continuously reinventing themselves, without alienating (most of) their following – a tightrope act that only a rare caliber of artist has successfully pulled off.

But constant evolution is exhausting, and by the time the calendar flipped over to 2000, the boys were burnt out. It’s tempting to speculate about stock Behind the Music reasons for why they needed a hiatus: Artistic differences! Substance abuse! The creativity-extinguishing curse of financial success! But it’s Occam’s razor that they were just running on fumes, unable to match the furious pace of work and regeneration that they could maintain in their twenties.

So 2000 doesn’t end in catastrophe, like 2004 does – it ends with a wheeze. This tracks; in 2004, they had to stop or someone would die, while in 2000, they just really, really needed a rest. Post-Japan, the whole year feels like an all-nighter that has gone on a little too long, occasionally throwing up second winds and useful delirium, but with lower and lower frequency. It ends with a four-night run that is mostly a squib, a heavy-lidded final mile before collapsing into bed.

Which is why it’s taken me so long to get to this “grand” finale, a historically significant but distressingly hollow show. They stuff it full of Phish classics – Mike’s Groove, Gin, 2001, Tweezer, Bowie, YEM – but maybe because there’s so many big numbers present, none of them individually get the space to do something unique in their farewell performance. When they do start getting interesting, like midway through the Tweezer, they get neutralized by Trey switching to keys and peter out, a very era-appropriate problem.

The YEM encore tries a half-hearted reggae swerve near the end, but all it does is confirm the fuel light is blinking furiously. There’s nothing sloppy or bad, it just might be the most unremarkable pre-2003 show on the LivePhish app, released for the chapter-closing milestone it represents rather than the music it contains. They didn’t just leave it all on the table, they left it all on a table several months ago, and kept going.

But I feel for them, because I’m exhausted too! This year has been a slog to cover, without the annual delivery of fresh ingredients that typically keep me going. There were barely any new songs or covers, the improvisational style essentially just extended what was happening in 1999, they played mostly the same cities and venues, they skipped the summer festival and their holiday traditions. I can only write so many times about how they’re tired – this essay is at least the third time this year – before it starts to get stale, even if it’s pretty undeniably the prevailing narrative of the year.

I love this project and I’m still happy I started it – as I often tell people, I was going to have these thoughts anyway, so it’s nice to write them down somewhere, and if people want to read them that’s just icing. But I do sometimes wonder if the full immersion has been a good thing overall for my personal fandom. I absolutely get tired of listening to Phish so much, particularly while covering a mostly static tour like this one. I worry that it creeps into my writing too often, and that my takes get too cynical as the shows pile up. This time around, I’ve felt stuck covering a low ebb of Phish’s past and jealous of everyone enjoying Phish’s vibrant present; though that there even is a Phish present, never mind a spectacularly successful one, is a great problem to have. I want to listen to Page’s surprise ambient release, not this dull-ass show!

Then again, that may have been the right frame of mind to cover Phish’s 2000. After fatigue, frustration is the other buzzword that describes that year; frustration about not being able to find the next phase, about being stuck in the same old formulas, about breakthroughs and euphoric moments not coming as easily as they used to. It’s an artist’s first instinct to try to push through that resistance; for Phish, the strategy had worked for years, until it suddenly didn’t. And I think it’s kind of poetic that we both arrived at the same conclusion at the same time: we need a break.

But like Phish, I won’t be going away completely. I’ll do a little coverage of the side projects that occupied them during the hiatus, just not comprehensively; sorry, I’m not listening to every Oysterhead or Vida Blue or Pork Tornado show. I also want to break from the 25th anniversary schedule and go back – way back – to an era of Phish that’s always been a blind spot. And I can’t help but be excited to eventually cover 2.0, a stretch that I’ve always been a little scared of, the time when the Phish experiment was at its most combustible. This isn’t the end, it’s only a pause. As I try to say every time a year ends – and it ends a little early this year – thank you for riding along on this obsessive journey, for what’s now a grand total of 2,179 days. Be safe, be kind. See you soon.

SET 1: Carini, Stash, Boogie On Reggae Woman, Mellow Mood, Maze, The Moma Dance, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Heavy Things > Down with Disease -> Spock’s Brain, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Rift, Cities > Sand > Golgi Apparatus, Brian and Robert, Bold As Love

ENCORE: El Paso, Chalk Dust Torture > West L.A. Fadeaway

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The third of Fall 2000’s guest appearances is the biggest and best of the three. But if you’ve been following along, that’s an extremely low bar, and it comes at an awkward time to boot. Tonight’s surprise adds more fuel to the theory that the hiatus was a last-minute decision; I’m pretty sure a planned-out farewell would not have included a very distracting drop-in on the penultimate night. As Phish was very slowly sliding out from under the shadow of the Dead in the eyes of the mainstream, closing off their first era by jamming with one of them was as counter-productive as it was poetic.

I’m talking, of course, about Bob Weir, a guy who knows how hard it is to escape someone’s shadow. If you want to hear my full, often conflicted, thoughts on Bobby, there’s about 100 hours of audio for you to hang with during this newsletter’s hiatus*. But to summarize, he’s a man of contrasts. I think he’s just about the greatest rhythm guitarist in the history of rock and roll, but also one who developed a tin ear for tone and an unhealthy slide guitar addiction. He’s a showman whose bottomless energy kept the Dead spry through some dark eras, but he’s also a ridiculous ham. The Dead undoubtedly wouldn’t be the Dead without him, but his stewardship of their legacy in the last decade has been as frustrating artistically as it’s been successful financially.

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The fact that he was a year late and second place to give Phish the Dead’s blessing fits with my mixed feelings. When Phil Lesh dropped by last year’s Shoreline run, I wrote “As the most consistently forward-thinking member of the Dead, it makes sense that Phil would be the first to recognize Phish as equals, not disciples.” In the Dead’s on-again, off-again divorce, Phil got custody of the band’s improvisational and experimental spirit, while Bob inherited the songbook – even if he didn’t write the more esteemed half of it. It’s fair to say that Phish was descended more from the first of those elements than the second, and despite the awkwardness of two bass guitars, jamming with Phil would always feel more natural.

Still, tonight’s encore mini-set is pretty good! If Phish has really been up for 100+ hours straight by this point, they pull it together enough to be professional for Grandpa Bob’s visit. And the 2000 edition of Weir hasn’t fully sunk into the somnambulant tempos and metallic treble guitar sound of today. He’s a good sport, avoiding the obvious Dead cuts and even, like Phil before him, playing along with a Phish original.

Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” might be the most adventurous choice of the bunch, given how rarely Phish plays straight country instead of its more hyper bluegrass cousin. But Trey’s solos are lovely, with a buttery tone and light touch that’s rare for the era – yet another example of how deftly he can blend Jerry’s singular sound with his own. Throw in Page’s pastel-sunset piano, and it’s the closest the song has sounded to its early 70s sweet spot since the Wall of Sound was hanging overhead.

Then there’s Chalk Dust, where Bob is, frankly, hanging on for dear life for the first several minutes, just tossing in the occasional twangy accent note. But when it hits the solo, he’s in his element, using weird chords to nudge Trey off his default routing. The result is a deliciously weird version that doesn’t hobble its usual manic pace to accommodate the elder statesman; I prefer it to the ramshackle Phil and Friends take, but that may be more of a Fishman upgrade than Weir scoring one over Lesh.

It’s so off its kilter, in fact, that it can’t find its way back to an ending before drifting into another oddball choice: “West LA Fadeaway.” As one of the late-era Dead’s sleaziest songs, it’s a good fit for Fall 2000 and Phish’s polished funk groove chops; as a Jerry-to-Bobby vocal conversion, it’s among the least distracting. The Trey-Bob interplay is more audible in the slinkier mix, and Mike gets more freedom to cosplay Phil’s busy low end without the man himself around.

All in all, it’s a successful sit-in, but a strangely routine one after the symbolic significance of the previous year, and one that was superseded by Bob’s more expansive return visit 16 years later. It also feels like a needless diversion in the middle of Phish’s last two dates for the foreseeable future, filling out a show that otherwise feels mostly perfunctory, like they’re checking off a list of songs they want to play one last time. With the limited hours remaining, for now, reestablishing their cred as the Grateful Dead’s heir apparent seems pretty unnecessary, relitigating a battle that was already won. Phish had only 48 hours left to be Phish, that should have been enough.

* - More on that tomorrow! It’s not as bad as you fear.

SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, Guyute, Wolfman’s Brother -> Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, Limb By Limb, Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown > Beauty of My Dreams > Axilla, Horn > Possum

SET 2: Drowned -> NICU > David Bowie, Halley’s Comet -> Walk Away, Piper > Character Zero

ENCORE: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

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Here’s the thing that bothers me about that quote from Trey I included yesterday, the one about staying up all week leading up to Shoreline because “we didn’t want it to end.” What, exactly does the “it” refer to? If Trey was referring to the experience of playing music with three of his closest friends, you would expect this final run of shows to be long ones, the band making the most of every pre-curfew minute they could. But they are decidedly not, with none of them coming close to the three hours of music you can usually count on today. The fact that, if taken literally, Trey’s week of all-nighters includes two days without a full show is also a disheartening indicator that the part of being in a rock band they were pre-mourning…wasn’t the performances.

I don’t really want to speculate about what they were doing offstage that was so fun during their extended Lost Weekend; I don’t want to know. I’m more interested in how often they sound like they’re enjoying each other’s company onstage, in the two-or-so hours of nightly audio evidence we have. And the answer, at least in these first two California shows is…not much?

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For all the moral flaws of Las Vegas, they certainly sounded like they were having a blast in Sin City, with all the usual signs: weird bustouts, inside jokes, silly covers, surprising segues, communicative jamming – maybe not so much the last two, unless you include Phoenix. But the dazed performance in Chula Vista possessed none of those qualities. Irvine is a relative improvement, but the occasional moment where the band seems to be genuinely enjoying each other’s company on stage just throws the rest of the workmanlike music into sharper relief.

The first bright spot occurs early, when the band navigates a modulation from Wolfman’s key to Sneaking Sally’s, a tasteful throwback to the Island Tour and one of the smoothest ->s in a segue-famine year. But the brief mid-tour ‘97 revival has mostly faded away, and a first set funk fest is off the table when Sally exits the alley without time to breathe. In fact, it’s a weirdly tight set all around, with one run of 4 songs less than 4 minutes. What is this, a Ramones concert?

There’s more time to stretch out in the second set, but not much more to say. Both Drowned and Piper are firmly in the 2000 style, jams where the band sounds like they’re at a bar party where you have to yell to be heard instead of engaging in witty repartee over a quiet dinner table. I’m sorry, I know I’ve listened to more of these shows than any reasonable person should, but it’s boring! And I find it hard to believe that they found it any more stimulating than I do, at this point in the year.

The exception in the middle is the Bowie, a surprisingly nuanced version in between the loudness wars. There’s a couple of minutes of free-floating space before the hi-hat comes in, and a smooth pullback in the middle of the jam, enabling a period of conversation instead of competition. Eerie lines from Page and Mike inspire Trey to seek out a complementary part, and even Fishman seems to be drumming melodically to match it. It’s the kind of completing each other’s sentences chemistry that used to be second nature for the band, instead of the awkward anti-silences that’s their current default.

There’s still time for one good inside joke, a Zero gradually slowing down to sludge metal levels while Trey hoarsely warbles Fast Enough For You over the top, producing a convincing impression of a dying battery. Maybe a bit on the nose given the state of the band at this point! Taken together, these are pretty slim pickings for moments where the band sounds like lifelong companions and collaborators, not just co-workers. Maybe all the touchy-feely stuff was happening offstage and out of public view. But for a band that has always let its friendship fuel its creativity, these final shows are largely stiff and formal occasions.

SET 1: The Moma Dance > It’s Ice > Bouncing Around the Room > Funky Bitch, Reba, Dog Faced Boy, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Rock and Roll > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Sample in a Jar, Gotta Jibboo, Bug > Harry Hood > Cavern

ENCORE: Loving Cup

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After a weekend of urgent desperation in Las Vegas and Phoenix, the start of Phish’s first “final” run doesn’t sound like a band headed for a break at all. It actually kicked off a day before this show, at a taping of the Jay Leno Tonight Show where they turned in a completely pedestrian version of “Twist” to try to squeeze a few more units out of the five-month-old Farmhouse. They look pretty dang ragged, and Trey later told Rolling Stone why:

“It was a real emotional time, but in a positive way,” Anastasio said. “I mean, the last week of Phish I honestly don’t think any of us slept at all. We just stayed up all night for, like, a week, as evidenced by our raspy version of “Twist” on Leno. But it was amazing, because no one was sleeping [because] we didn’t want it to end.”

That all-nighter (all-weeker?) daze is also audible the next night in Chula Vista, a barely two-hour show the band sleepwalks through, despite two days (mostly) off. Instead of the bustouts and inside jokes of the previous weekend, it’s a very vanilla setlist. There’s no hint of “is this the last time we play this song?” urgency either, everything is as standard as the International Prototype Kilogram. Pleasantly mellow saunters through Reba and Jibboo work fine, but the fatigue takes the edge of songs like Antelope and 2001.

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It all suggests that sleep deprivation was maybe not the best strategy for going out with a bang. But they were also handicapped by where circumstances found them at the end of their first era. California has never been Phish’s strongest territory, maybe because the Dead’s shadow is a little darker there – more on that in 48 hours – or maybe just due to the geographic reality of putting the west coast at the start or end of most tours. As such, it’s an awkward place for Phish to play such momentous shows, and further evidence that they didn’t officially decide on the hiatus until very late in the game*.

It’s in Southern California where these factors seem to really weigh on them, and that LA-SD sprawl is where they’re spending forgettable evenings tonight and tomorrow. My guess is that it has something to do with the proximity to the power centers of the American entertainment industry; Phish wasn’t ever a band that had to impress the suits, but all the hobknobbing with A&R dudes and celebs probably rubs off. It leaves Chula Vista feeling a lot like the safe version of themselves they put forward doing programs like The Mark and Brian Show and Hard Rock Live back in May.

That’s a year-long full circle the band probably isn’t proud of, going from biting their tongue and following the new album promo playbook back around to…doing the same thing by cheating on their buddies Conan and Dave with their archrival. There may only be two Farmhouse songs in Chula Vista’s setlist, but the rest of it plays like a “don’t scare the normies” sampler, a Phish live album you could buy with your pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. It’s an unfortunate consequence of the abrupt hiatus decision; if a break wasn’t so urgently needed, surely they would have held on to celebrate their legacy on friendly turf, instead of compromising it in a region and industry they never cared to crack.

* - Sometime during this final week, phish.com finally posted: “Phish has completed their touring for this year. There will be no additional shows in November or December, or immediately thereafter. Additional information will be posted when the band refines their plans for the future.”

SET 1: First Tube > Wolfman’s Brother, Back on the Train, Beauty of My Dreams, Vultures, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Billy Breathes, Llama, Lawn Boy, Runaway Jim

SET 2: Roses Are Free > Piper -> Guy Forget -> When the Circus Comes > Camel Walk, Driver, David Bowie

ENCORE: Waste

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It was a real gamble – no pun intended – to schedule a show the night after the big Vegas bender. The band actually sounds surprisingly fresh though; based on the audio evidence, I’d guess they were more hungover on 9/30 than tonight. Sure, they slip back into default setlisting mode early on, and Trey’s rendition of Inlaw Josie Wales here definitely sounds like his fingers are recovering from several birthday beers. But eventually a Fall 2000 realization kicks in: we don’t know when we’ll be playing shows again, so we might as well make the most of it.

While the band didn’t offer any reason to think they were breaking up for good, there also wasn’t a finite time put on the length of the hiatus. So with the number of remaining dates fading fast, they were running out of spaces to play the final (for now) versions of some of the catalog’s midrange rarities. Hence, a bunch of songs closing 10-20 show gaps: Vultures, Billy Breathes, Llama, Runaway Jim, Roses, Waste, all of which we won’t hear from again until 2002-04.

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It’s a move that spices up what could’ve been a sleepy show, particularly once they get to Llama, a much-needed jolt of the “put a plug up my ass” variety. Trey’s solo ascends into Thurston Moore territory, inspiring a round of mid-song band introductions and crowd instructions. It’s that zany, crazed energy from the end of the previous show, mixed with the sex/violence undertones of Trey’s dream as he tells audience members to slap themselves, slap each other, then get naked and “make love.”

But it’s after the break that they cross off their biggest bucket list item, finally handing an official debut to one of their most obscure songs: Guy Forget. Though it’s one of only two originals debuted over the course of the year, Guy Forget is a very old Phish song, a soundcheck favorite in the spirit of Dog Log or Shaggy Dog and a lyric without any set musical backing, like Kung or Catapult. But it’s even slighter than those juvenilia, just a cheery mantra of “I never met a man that I could not forget except for…Guy Forget!” over the jam of their choice. Hilariously, this composition* took five people to write, and it has, at times, made it into the lede of the tennis player’s Wikipedia entry.

Tonight’s premiere manages to freshen up one of the tour’s most tired songs, Piper, and it does a bang-up job, emerging as the jam loosens up from the initial build and giving another frantic jam some much needed levity. On the video (included as a bonus with the Live in Vegas DVD), they’re clearly cracking each other up with the deep pulls, and it’s very sweet – because they’re running out of opportunities to crack inside jokes with each other too. I swear it even upgrades the inevitable Trey keys segment, which he spends tapping out a playful melody on what sounds like synthesized wood blocks – the singularity point of Trey’s mini-kit and mini-keys distractions.

It’s a welcome dose of unadulterated Phish goofiness in the era’s final week, even if it sort of foreshadows similar maneuvers in the bizarre final set at Coventry. A normal band on the brink of a pause might get lost in its own navel, buckling under the weight of trying to pay self-tribute to its own history over the last run of shows. To be fair, maybe that’s what Phish was doing here too; it’s just that for them, summing up their musical contributions at the (temporary) finish line means finally unveiling the pun earworm about the Moroccan tennis player with the funny name.

* - As the phish.net song history extensively delineates, the “Will I dance on grave?” lines featured here were from a separate song entirely, though they do fit with Guy Forget’s spirit of glorious idiocy.

SET 1: Walfredo, The Curtain With, Maze, Roggae, I Didn’t Know, Mike’s Song > Simple > Saw It Again, Esther > Weekapaug Groove

SET 2: Timber (Jerry the Mule), AC/DC Bag, Colonel Forbin’s Ascent > Fly Famous Mockingbird, Twist > Sand > A Day in the Life

ENCORE: Emotional Rescue

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To further fan the flames of a weekend in Vegas partying with (still deep-sighing, 24 hours later) the “American Bad Ass,” tonight’s show fell on Trey’s 36th birthday. But what Trey apparently wanted for his big day was deep cuts and a webcast, broadcasting some of Phish’s oddest and least-played tunes out to cyberspace. Night two could’ve quite easily gone further down the road of last night’s frat-party rager, but an audibly (and visibly) subdued band instead builds on that show’s weird pulls of Spock’s Brain and Dinner and a Movie, providing parting gifts that lead up to Trey’s big announcement.

It’s a counterintuitive night to go bustout mode, for both the Vegas revelers and the viewers watching at home (and eventually, the home video audience). It’s a show that starts with the band members on the wrong instruments and ends with a long, grinding noise jam while Trey and Mike do an extended pantomime that includes, at one point, them shooting each other with their guitars. In between, there are some rough performances, most notably in Esther – though I’ll always laugh at “She died. Dead.” – and when nobody remembers how to end Mockingbird. But if I’m going to criticize the band for getting swept up in the Vegas spirit on night one, I’ve got to hand it to them for swerving on night two. It’s pretty fun!

Tonight is also the night where Trey makes the hiatus official, spending half of his narration time in Forbin’s setting the record straight. “What we’re planning on doing, so that you get the message clearly from us right here, is taking some time and writing some music and kind of getting our home life back together and recharg[ing] so we can hopefully get another 17 great years.” After a few hiccups, we’re at 19 more and counting, so mission accomplished!

After thanking the crew though, Trey goes off into a digression: “this very strange dream I had last night.” Given that he had just announced that his band – the primary focus of his adult life to that point – was (temporarily) breaking up, this feels like a significant psychoanalytic window into Trey and the band as this first era comes to a close. So I’m dusting off the ol’ dream dictionary for an interpretation that could help us make sense of the tour so far and the future yet to pass.

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First, Trey talks about sitting in a field and seeing a crowd of people moving towards and joining him. He describes it pleasantly, but some loaded words slip through – it’s a “whole army” of people “surrounding” him. “Crowds emerge in our dream when we are looking for a place of peace and solitude,” the dictionary says, and it’s a pretty obvious message – the band needs to get off the road and away from arenas full of demanding fans and backstage sycophants. The crowd offers him an apple, the biblical symbol of temptation and loss of innocence, which is pretty apt symbology for Phish’s late 90s. Freud, Schmeud, this stuff is easy.

But then, Trey is unable to eat the apple because he finds that his mouth has no teeth. Psychoanalysts around the world perk up when they hear about teeth dreams, those chompers apparently being “enigmatic symbols that often point towards some sort of loss in our lives.” Yup. Other interpretations include insecurity, anxiety, or a lack of control, all fitting terms for the improvisational style of the last two years. A mode best displayed tonight in an excellent Timber, a milky jam that oozes out over the start of set two.

Dream Trey seemingly finds a solution when he sprouts a single giant tooth. That’s a pretty specific dental vision, and it’s hard to find an interpretation, but maybe this one from Freud fits: “Your subconscious might be conveying a sense of emerging potential or unanticipated changes.” It’s notable that Trey mentions “writing some music” in his farewell address, given that the year had only given us one new original, and a TAB leftover at that; the hiatus is already being spun as a necessary creative reset. But “unanticipated change” cuts both ways, and he quickly learns “you can’t eat an apple with one tooth,” disappointing the crowd – perhaps a premonition that 26 months off the road wouldn’t be enough to cure all of Phish’s ills.

Anyway, it all becomes moot when the Earth flies too close to the sun, shriveling it up like a giant raisin. Sun dreams are symbolic of “creative life force, consciousness, and spiritual energy,” but Trey’s telling is more apocalyptic: “My first thought was that, ‘oh no, the Earth is going to burn up and that will be the end of everything’.” Instead, everyone gets crushed into a big pile and senses get more vivid, but even that sounds more like the body horror orgy in Society than a utopian vision. “A huge pile of groping, a big groping pile of love. A slithering, groping pile of goo.”

Still, melting is “a positive symbol which is the stage before undergoing some sort of inner transformation.” If you squint, you can see a prophecy that this will all reach a happy ending eventually. But as an amateur interpreter, I feel like the words one uses to describe the dream are probably more important than the content of the dream itself. Trey is clearly trying to take the edge off his bummer announcement by weaving a classic mid-Forbin’s parable of band and audience symbiosis. In the tumultuous times of 2000, however, all that lovey-dovey imagery feels a bit passive-aggressive, hinting at what had become an adversarial relationship between the band, its fans, and its fame. After all, the difference between a dream and a nightmare is only a matter of perspective.

SET 1: Carini, Rift, Frankenstein, Mellow Mood, Wilson > Spock’s Brain > Bathtub Gin > Character Zero

SET 2: Dinner and a Movie, The Moma Dance > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Fluffhead > Meatstick > Walk This Way, Rapper’s Delight, You Shook Me All Night Long

ENCORE: We’re an American Band

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Oh boy.

I’ve dreaded covering this one since the very start of this project, but in a way, it’s the perfect rotted cherry on top of Fall 2000 – a more appropriate dark cliffhanger for the hiatus and the rest of the 2000s than any of the six shows that follow. This tour has been a lot of things – tired, formulaic, lacking in inspiration – but it’s not until tonight that it crosses the line into being offensive, on several levels.

While Kid Rock in 2000 wasn’t yet the reprehensible figure he is today, it didn’t take Nostradamus to see where his career and political trajectory was headed, and it’s not like there was Kanye-esque musical genius covering it up for a while. Inviting Bob Ritchie up on Phish’s stage at all, never mind for the full 4th quarter of a high-profile date, is a powerful indicator of the band’s broken instincts at the time, the kind of terrible judgment – made in the name of “fun times” – they wouldn’t have tripped over on their measured rise to success. And in collaborating for one night, there’s no surprising redemption to be found, it’s merely Rock dragging Phish down to his scummy level.

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There are dark clouds forming over this show long before the right-wing rapper comes out, picking up where they left off last time in Vegas – Trey’s previous mysterious mid-jam walkoff. Opening a Vegas run with Carini is certainly a signal of intent, both in its hard-rock stomp and its malevolent lyrics, and they double down on the former two songs later with an early Frankenstein. When they play Mellow Mood next, it almost sounds like mockery, the last two words you would use to describe a weekend in Sin City. Sure enough, they sprint through it to get to Wilson, where Trey’s already doing the guitar-wavey thing five songs into the show.

Amidst this aggro mood, it’s an absolutely bonkers time to bring back the forgotten Spock’s Brain after nearly 400 shows, but maybe they had swung by Star Trek: The Experience earlier in the day. Navigating the bustout’s twist and turns lowers the heat for Gin, which at least starts the jam with some restraint before slowly building back up to casino-floor overstimulation. By the time they hit Zero, they’re back in loud party mode – the main focus of a night with two 60-minute sets. It’s not that I’m fully against a high-energy show, even though they’re not my favorites. I’ve just spent enough time in Vegas to know that you’ve gotta pace yourself.

After another weird bustout with appropriately sinister energy, the rest of set two just feels like distracted time-wasting until Phish can bring their new buddy out. Even 2001 becomes mere disco-jazz vamping while the light show does the heavy lifting – a very Vegas formula, come to think of it. The final Fluffhead until Hampton 2009 just adds to the weird stats of this show, making it even harder for all of us to forget it ever happened.

And then, aptly introduced at the end of Phish’s song about their dongs, it’s time for (in the most depressed voice possible) Kiiiiiiiiiiid. Playing devil’s advocate, one could argue that Kid Rock is mining the same postmodern classic rock vein as Phish, giving the crossover some small shred of a justification for happening. Their chosen setlist backs that up, with three of the songs being FM radio staples that Phish can play with their eyes closed while Rock yells half-remembered lyrics. There’s always a certain charm to Phish playing lunkhead rock, in no small part due to the fact that they are asexual dorks play-acting and lovingly teasing the swagger of bands like AC/DC or Aerosmith. But Kid Rock doesn’t have that winky subtext, and as braindead songs like “All Summer Long” would later demonstrate, his version of playing with rock history is just making it dumber and swearing more.

“I’m jamming with Phish because I like FUCKING MUSIC!” he says. OK, settle down.

The silver lining could have been Rapper’s Delight, which at least gives Phish a chance to do a Chic jam for a few minutes. But it’s also the song that shows how commiserating with a dummy stains everyone. Future Bernie Sanders supporter Fishman’s attempt at freestyle rapping is both abysmal and insulting; I know the “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” cover has its own elements of cringe, but at least he took the time to write down the lyrics of that one. He tops it off with a horrible guitar solo and “funny stage antics from Fish, who danced on his knees like Kid’s sidekick Joe C.” Deep sigh.

It all culminates in a Grand Funk cover where Kid Rock references banging his model/actress girlfriend and Mandalay Bay strippers, then changes the chorus to “we’re coming to your town/we’ll pull your panties down.” Ugh! It’s a million miles away – straight down – from the Americana absurdity of putting Primus, yodelers, a gaggle of Elvis impersonators, and Malachi from Children of the Corn onstage just four years prior. The post-show music is “What’s Going On?”...I think the soundboard guys might have mirrored my disgust.

But maybe the most humbling thing is that the crowd absolutely slops it up. I can’t honestly say I would’ve reacted any better, because I would have been a 21-year-old in Las Vegas on a Friday night. But like a lot of things that happen in Vegas, what feels good at the time feels real bad to look back on. A little over a year earlier, Phish had managed to avoid the stench of Woodstock ‘99; Trey gave a whole big speech about it. Fourteen months later, they invited one of the main villains of that festival and all the toxicity it represented up on stage with them. It was a crystal-clear sign that Phish’s creative compass was broken, and that a break was the right move for everybody.

SET 1: Sample in a Jar, My Friend, My Friend, Beauty of My Dreams > My Soul, Limb By Limb, Dirt, Split Open and Melt, Horn, Taste, Cavern

SET 2: Piper > Gumbo > Ghost > The Mango Song, Heavy Things, Brother, You Enjoy Myself

ENCORE: Loving Cup

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It’s possible that one of the great sins of Phish’s late 90s was neglecting the state of Colorado, their honorary second home. It’s understandable that they were too big to play their actual home state for the last half of the 90s; Vermont is not exactly bustling with sports arenas and outdoor amphitheatres. But Colorado has an abundance of venues, indoor and outdoor, some of which Phish hadn’t even been banned from. After they were politely asked to never return to Morrison in 1996, they only returned four more times – twice in ‘97, once in ‘98, and this show. To put that 1999 omission into perspective, it was the first year Phish hadn’t played somewhere in Colorado in a decade…and they were pretty skimpy in 2.0 as well, with only a single CO stop.

Post-breakup, they have more than rectified this neglect, first with lengthy runs at Red Rocks, Telluride, and the short-lived 1st Bank Center, before moving into Dick’s for a Labor Day tradition that ran an astonishing 14 years (minus one interruption on account of global pandemic). As Sharing in the Groove details, Colorado is fertile jamband soil, with the college and ski town scenes, altitude, outdoorsy habits, and recreational drug permissiveness all nurturing bands like Widespread Panic, Leftover Salmon, and String Cheese Incident. Reestablishing the state in the 10s and 20s as Phish’s western US outpost has revived a pleasant tradition, which typically finds the band in a relaxed, playful, and experimental mood.

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Some time in the restorative mountain air is the precise prescription the band needed at this point in Fall 2000. But the itinerary only left time for a cursory visit to the Rockies, on a Wednesday night in a venue that they never played before and never have since. Fiddler’s Green sounds like a pretty idyllic place, with a name like a UK folk-rock private press record that costs four figures on Discogs. But social media pal and Denver venue expert QueenCityJamz informs me “It’s a big empty, vibe-less, roofless shed in a corporate business park four blocks off the interstate in a soul-less suburb.” Other issues include an early curfew, lack of shakedown, and a violent slant waging war on fan’s knees, Alpine-style.

Still, it produces a pretty solid show by this tour’s standards. It takes a while to bed down – the first set features a long succession of openers and a decent Melt before Horn, always a good thermometer on the band’s sharpness, gets absolutely massacred. When Set 2 goes straight to Piper, hitting the lyrics before the 2-minute mark, I was resigned to another 2000 slog. But once it gets past the initial sprint, the high altitude starts to work its magic.

It ends up being a lot of things that annoy me about 2000 Pipers, reconfigured into working. After setting a few loops in motion, Trey stays on guitar, a small decision that makes Mike’s typically inventive bassline feel supported instead of abandoned. When he shifts back to lead around the ten-minute mark, he’s using that “zoot-zoot” effect that’s been an irritating favorite of late, but here it’s shaped into a neat B-movie melody. It’s interrupted for a couple minutes by the inevitable keyboard fiddling, but for once Trey recognizes that’s not working and hops right back on guitar and back to the theme.

Before the relentless pace grows tiresome, they ease into Gumbo instead. It’s a great yang to Piper’s yin, a jam that gets progressively more quiet and spacious, lightly tracing a stop-start rhythm, reprising Minneapolis’ dark-sunglasses cool. The Ghost that follows splits the difference, and if the Mango doesn’t further build on the song’s unexpectedly expansive year, it’s still a nice change of pace – one that would seemingly eliminate the need for Heavy Things, but alas.

After a discussion so long it feels like an encore break, they break out the rare stuff: Brother, one of the few bustouts that pushes them sonically beyond just remembering how the song goes. It’s a bummer that they waited so late in this dense 2000 era to remember it exists, as the jam gives Trey a natural environment to live out his Adrian Belew dreams. They cap off the set with a YEM that’s palpably rushed; perhaps that early curfew, rearing its ugly head.

All told, it’s not a great set, but it’s a promising one. And it’s easy to daydream about what might have happened if they had stayed in their home-away-from-home a second or third night, letting the second set’s constructiveness compound in the chilly autumn air, recharging their batteries on friendly turf before the final week of shows. Instead, they’re right back on the road, headed for the last place in America that a wobbly band prone to partying distraction should visit, leaving the karmic wound of all-but-skipping Colorado unhealed for now.

SET 1: Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey, Down with Disease > The Lizards, Tweezer, Back on the Train, Water in the Sky, Bug, Julius

SET 2: Gotta Jibboo > Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Axilla > Harry Hood > Funky Bitch

ENCORE: Boogie On Reggae Woman > Driver > Tweezer Reprise

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There was a time when I was militant about not checking setlists. More in the context of current-day Phish – the ideal scenario was to queue up last night’s show on LivePhish in the morning having heard absolutely nothing about what transpired. This arrangement required some social media acrobatics, but hey, any excuse to put my phone down at night. The sensory deprivation was worth it to hear the show in pseudo real-time, not knowing what surprises or disappointments lurked around the corner.

Eventually, I loosened up, influenced in no small part due to Phish’s improvements as 3.0 went on. Somewhere around 2013, the setlists started revealing less information about the quality of a show, mostly in a good way. What might look like an uninspired or heavy-rotation selection on paper could turn out to hold impressive improvisational depth, with jams popping up in unexpected places or going deeper than usual. Suddenly, following along with the Phish_FTR account wasn’t as much of a spoiler as it used to be…except for those times when there was an unusually long gap between posts, or, say, six Tweezer Reprises.

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I’ve never been as strict about peeking at the older setlists in this project, mostly because it would be futile – after decades of skimming through my Pharmer’s Almanac and clicking around phish.net, I feel like I’ve seen them all at least once. But I had absolutely zero recollection of this show, and when I copy/pasted the setlist on top of my blank Google doc, it made me wonder why. That’s a pretty fire lineup, from the bustout of a White Album song I didn’t even know they played twice, to big boppers like Disease, Tweezer, Mike’s Groove, and Harry Hood all showing face, to the curious triple encore. Then I listened to it, and remembered that setlists can be deceptive both ways.

In retrospect, it’s to be expected, given that this show triggers one of my biggest bugaboos – concerns about the boys’ travel. Fall 2000 feels much more humane than some recent tours, and this is one of only two four-night runs all tour, with the other one leading up to the grand finales at Shoreline. But here, Rosemont to Minneapolis to Kansas City comprises a gnarly 830 miles of bus time over 48 hours – the latter leg a 436-mile drive across deepest, darkest Iowa.

So when they hit the stage with a very unexpected Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey, it’s understandably creaky. They do try to give it the same extended deep-cut treatment Cool It Down got the night before, but unless you’re The Feelies, it’s not a song with much unexplored depth on offer. Here, it just becomes Generic 2000 Phish Jam, though Fishman seems to get a lot of pleasure out of that bell-like noise; it will return a couple hours later in Weekapaug.

Disease then introduces the night’s theme: usually reliable jam vehicles that, tonight, for whatever reason, simply do not have the juice. Nothing is badly played, there are no Rosemont-esque moments where the band simply sounds lost or frustrated with audience demeanor. It’s just a whole lot of time spent in each respective songs’ default state. For Disease, that’s full-throttle group soloing with a space coda, for Tweezer, that’s generic hard rock, without even the throwback element of a slow-down ending. We take it for granted that fresh ideas will percolate from these environments, but that’s not the case here – the best Trey’s got is more “San-Ho-Zay” teases.

They’re still trying in the second half, opening with a Jibboo that pushes very hard on its boundaries in an attempt to recapture that July 4th spirit. When it fails to break free, they queue up Mike’s instead, and ever so briefly flirt with a second jam – but Fish too eagerly begins Hydrogen. Weekapaug tries to make up for it with a generous stretch of minimalist funk (it sounds more like the Feelies’ EGSTHEMAMM than the Phish version does), but it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. An okay Hood ends up in guitar groans that fail to deliver a definitive emotional climax and can’t get the set past the hour mark, so they tack on a Funky Bitch to pad it out.

Thus, a wishlist-fulfilling setlist on paper, a frustrating performance on tape. You could take a more charitable angle and call it an “old-school” show, with an early-90s structure and the accompanying, era-appropriate Type I flavoring. But the Phish of the early 90s was far sharper than the Phish of 2000, even if they weren’t bus-numb. A 93-94 show at Memorial Hall might have also featured a first-set Tweezer and a second set Mike’s Groove/Hood pairing, but each would have been played with inspiration and hunger. Amidst the struggles of 2000, a back-to-basics approach wasn’t going to be a magic cure…and loading up the setlist only papered over the real issues.

SET 1: Mellow Mood, Chalk Dust Torture, Back at the Chicken Shack, Sparkle, The Sloth, Divided Sky, Roggae, First Tube > Punch You in the Eye > Sample in a Jar

SET 2: Cities > Free > Ya Mar, Carini, Lawn Boy, Hold Your Head Up > Love You > Hold Your Head Up, Cool It Down -> David Bowie

ENCORE: Fire

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If the axiom about Phish always killing it in minor-league hockey arenas is fraying, at least the “never miss a Sunday show” rule is still holding strong. At the Target Center – briefly the home of a couple lower-tier hockey teams, but mostly known for pro basketball – Phish cranks down the thermostat from the sweaty weekend in Rosemont. There are certainly eras where a fevered environment suits the band, but 2000 ain’t one of those, and the combination of Sunday serenity and Minnesota chill helps soothe an increasingly reckless tour.

That said, they don’t immediately take the prescription set by another Mellow Mood opener. The first set is them turning a big dial that says “energy” and constantly looking back at the audience for approval, chasing the Marley with Chalkdust and the Jimmy Smith with Sparkle and Sloth. Then they settle in for the stargazing of Divided Sky and Roggae…before playing a closing trio of set openers like someone revving a hot rod through a pastoral scene.

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Fortunately, the urge to defibrillate is out of their system for the second set, which opens with one of the tour’s finest jams in Cities. The song pours itself out into a drowsy funk jam, the slow-ride tempo and restraint leaving enough oxygen for all four band members to contribute and avoid factionalization. In the 8th minute, there’s another crowd clap-along – man, they’ve been a scourge all tour – but it ultimately works to the jam’s benefit, as Fish mischievously moves off the beat he’d been riding from the start and opens up a new phase.

Unlike the ‘97 throwbacks that have popped up occasionally in this tour’s first two weeks, this shift moves the historical reference point up a year, to the funk-to-space transitions of ‘98. The jam’s second half swims gracefully in zero gravity, a solitary bweeoooo (instead of a full choir of effects) acting as the tether. It’s the most Siket Disc-y* piece they’ve played in quite some time, a hard reset to the far looser pre-TAB era. One jam like this in Rosemont, and I might have avoided my own personal decade-long hiatus.

It picks up a little steam to dock with Free, but cranks the recliner back again for Ya Mar. Then, it’s that other symptom of Sunday un-scaries, the band getting loopy: Carini (mid-transition from goofball rarity to regular) and frontman features for both Page and Fish. They’re so relaxed Fishman forgets to play his vacuum solo in Love You – he’s too busy scatting in lieu of all the lyrics he can’t remember – so he has to do it over HYHU instead.

The two threads combine for the big Sunday treat: the first Cool It Down since the Loaded Halloween set. That year’s album cover has the reputation of being the jammiest, but tonight’s VU selection gets three further minutes beyond its maiden voyage. First, it puts Trey in a slinky mood, interpolating “Spooky” and “San-Ho-Zay” within a few measures. Then, it eases back into another chillout jam, this time a little more grounded in Lower East Side chic, strutting on a bed of Rhodes and a dark groove.

Both the Cities and the Cool It Down are startling in their nonchalance, at a time when the mood around the band and the scene can best be described as frenzied. Phish tours tend to have a narrative arc, and they’re usually working towards or away from some big event. But the deadline of the hiatus isn’t like a Halloween show or a festival, and the build-up of energy feels less healthy, organic. That they could still open a release valve and get a little goofy and loose at the end of the tour’s third weekend is a familiar relief, a welcome sign that the Phish rule of law wasn’t entirely breaking down by the end of their first era.

* - Sorry, the now Pitchfork-approved Siket Disc? Never thought I’d see the day.

SET 1: Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown > The Moma Dance, Frankenstein, Halley's Comet > Fee > Stash

SET 2: Birds of a Feather, Tweezer > NICU > Scent of a Mule, Fast Enough for You, Piper > Character Zero

ENCORE: Sleeping Monkey > Tweezer Reprise

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Of all the places I could have seen my last Phish show for nine years, Rosemont was among the most depressing. The Horizon is a venue with a strong historical reputation among Phish fans, mostly on the back of Halloween ‘95 and one of the top 2.0 performances. But it’s not really a room with charm, a second-rate arena in a mobbed-up suburb surrounded by strip malls and one of the world’s busiest airports. It’s essentially a venue of convenience for bands too big for UIC Pavilion and too small for the United Center, a gap the city of Chicago has always struggled to fill*.

As such, my memory of this run is mostly concrete, rain, and highway noise outside, overcrowding and boomy acoustics inside. I remember not the music played, but my longtime tour buddy storming out of the first set of this show in frustration, and an absurd amount of glowsticks bouncing off the band and their equipment. These shows seem to have some following, with ratings that at least beat out the utterly forgettable 1999 visit. But they were a personal bummer at the time, the final nail in my fandom as it went into an almost decade-long hibernation.

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On paper, the gritty Rosemont Horizon environment should’ve been a boost, not a drag. I’ve often asserted that dingy minor-league hockey and college basketball arenas were Phish’s native environment, with the proof being legendary nights in Worcester, Hartford, Hampton, Providence, and other rundown 70’s sports palaces. But like a lot of Phish axioms, the evidence is getting weaker in the wind-down to hiatus.

Danny Whitten’s smack paranoia rave-up Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown is a fitting opener for Rosemont’s skeeze, but a nagging reminder that Phish is still scraping the bottom of the TAB jar instead of finding new cover material. A mid-set Halley’s shows promise, unwinding over a mellow chord progression and putting Page’s Rhodes in the front seat, but when it lands in a serene space, Trey quickly flips the switch to Fee. There’s a bit of deja vu when Fee’s harmonics jam gets stretched into a pristine clockwork miniature, but audience clap-alongs and mysterious loud noises derail it into Stash instead. General crowd unrest and glowstick clonks continue, and once they’ve wrapped Stash**, the band heads offstage at a mere 54 minutes.

Set 2 seems designed to give the rowdy people what they want, keeping the tempo high and bringing back Tweezer for the first time since July. And they serve up the king of the warhorses extra old-fashioned and crowd-pleasing, even restoring the original slow-down ending, now with the “Sunshine for Your Love” riff woven inside. It’s one of those shows where Fast Enough For You comes across as a pointed message to the audience, particularly as it introduces yet another white-knuckle Piper.

It’s possible this specific version I witnessed is why revisiting 2000 Pipers has been so triggering for me, even 25 years later. Its 19 minutes are about evenly split between hard rock and space, but when Trey switches to keys, it collapses down to dead air, a rare failure of Phish’s impeccable keepy-uppy skills. Though it eventually regathers for a final few minutes of sonic weirdness, it’s too late, the momentum is gone, and they resort to an especially wanky Zero and an undeserved Monkey encore to close up shop.

Maybe it’s a matter of perspective – if Phish had played this show in 1994 or 1995, when Horizon-sized venues were still a novelty, it may have landed better. But that first run through America’s AHL arenas was fueled by the giddiness of Phish graduating to big rooms and the challenge of adapting their sound to fill them. By 2000, those venues all sported bland corporate names and Phish felt equally compromised, chained in by the well-oiled arena rock machine they’d built and the party-time expectations of a large crowd. In less weary times, they might have subverted those limits and made inner ring wastelands like Rosemont feel like paradise for a few hours. But now, to paraphrase a Phish song, if the only tool you have is an arena, every show feels like a hammer.

* - Though I hear the new Wintrust Arena is nice, and Salt Shed has filled some of the lower-mid-size holes as well.

** - Trey changes a lyric to “always garlic starts to rot,” and it feels a little bit like commentary instead of accident.

SET 1: Down with Disease, Meat > Poor Heart > Wilson > Slave to the Traffic Light, Dogs Stole Things > Bathtub Gin, Heavy Things, You Enjoy Myself

SET 2: Tube > Reba, Ghost > The Wedge, When the Circus Comes, Meatstick, Run Like an Antelope

ENCORE: Bold As Love

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Phish’s hiatus came at an ironic time in terms of their mainstream perception. After a decade of every single music critic judging them through the lens of the Grateful Dead, the media had only recently started finally meeting the band on their own terms. It probably helped that Jerry Garcia had been gone five years by this point, and Big Cypress – while it may have been mostly ignored in the moment – gave the arts section hacks a new angle by the time Farmhouse needed reviews. And when they hit the road in summer and fall, Phish shows finally warranted featured arts coverage, not just the brief mentions or blurbs of the past.

You can see this media arc in the pages of my local paper – and for a couple weird years, my employer – the Chicago Tribune*. In those once-respectable pages, they scored their first brief profile and concert review for the Aragon Ballroom show in spring 1993; as expected, both mention the Dead in the lede and the review ends with a horrible “hook, line, and sinker” pun. From 1995 to 1997, shows in Rosemont, Tinley Park, and East Troy got write-ups filed by freelancers with a sometimes dismissive tone. Check out this horseshit about my first show:

While Phish's performance boasted some fine moments, it also confirmed the band's artistic irrelevance. Phish basically treads in the footsteps of previous bands rather than staking out its own stylistic turf. What made the Dead great was that it carved out an unprecedented and unique sound in the rock landscape. Phish, however, like some tidal effluvium, simply has rushed in to fill the niche the Dead left behind.

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But Phish turned a corner with the Trib in 1998. Another freelancer covered the first night of the UIC Pavilion run, and while Jay Hedblade was lukewarm on the show, he passed the “do not mention the Dead” challenge. Yet the big breakthrough came a few weeks later, when a 2000-word feature ran in the Sunday paper under the byline of Greg Kot.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Chicago music critic hierarchy, Kot was at the top of the heap, the Siskel analogue to Jim DeRogatis’ Ebert on the long-running (and still active!) Sound Opinions radio show. As the Tribune’s lead rock critic, he got first pick of the artists he deemed worthy of coverage, delegating the rest (like Phish before this point) to the stringers. The 1998 profile marked the band’s promotion to warranting Kot’s attention, and he treats them with respect, not mentioning the Dead until the ninth paragraph after he’s already name-dropped Cole Porter, Jane’s Addiction, George Gershwin, and Lynyrd Skynyrd (the setlist on 11/9/98 helped); later, he compares them to My Bloody Valentine, Pavement, and Ornette Coleman. This is a pretty good summation of their whole thing!:

Welcome to the world of Phish--one of rock's unlikeliest success stories. It's a musical flea market and an inside joke, a celebration and a satirization of the arena-rock spectacle. It's a world with its own mythology and private language, tucked inside fantasy lyrics and Tolkien-like song suites. It's also a community of millions worldwide, whose bond is the music of four virtuosos who pool their eccentric knowledge of musical Americana into a songbook consisting of more than 250 compositions, each of which mutates into some strange new shape every time it is performed on stage.

Over the next couple years, Kot was very active on the Phish beat, interviewing Trey on his solo tour, reviewing Bittersweet Motel when it played the Music Box, giving Farmhouse faint praise (“finds Phish once again making a jam-band album for people who hate jam bands”). And for this show in the venue formerly and betterly known as Rosemont Horizon, he files his first proper live review of the band. I’ll admit that I first tracked the article down with the intention of doing an old-fashioned Fire Joe Morgan fisking, but shame on me – Kot actually nailed it:

For most of Friday’s show, however, Phish slouched into trancy interludes that cried out for one of the boys to step forward and kick his bandmates into a higher gear. The quartet seemed almost too comfortable with itself, in contrast to its finest performances.

I’ll be damned if that isn’t my own reaction to this show – and the theme of so many essays this year. Later, he describes them as “dedicated improvisers whose arrangements whirl like serpentine amusement park rides,” and well, he beat me to that comparison too. Kot rightly points out that this is a show full of heavy hitters – the warhorses I was lamenting just one essay back – with Disease, Gin, YEM, and Ghost all showing up. But the jams mostly fizzle out without accomplishing much. Take it, Greg:

The band poked around the margins of “Slave to the Traffic Light” and “Bathtub Gin” in search of transcendence without ever breaking through to the other side, despite McConnell’s inventive array of keyboard textures.

Yep, no arguments here – and kudos for shouting out Page, the sign of a true Phish connoisseur. The opening Disease gives the show a serious head start, but after they get over the hump of the initial energy burst, they squander the rest on a boring chord progression. Gin and Ghost are both straightforward climbs, YEM, Reba, and Antelope are strong but standard. It’s one of those nights where there’s nothing exactly wrong, but not too much that’s special either. Or as Kot put it:

By the time the band urged the audience to “run like an antelope, out of control” on the evening’s penultimate song, it was too little too late. If anything, Phish had stayed too much in control, the monochrome mellowness of this set no substitute for the quartet’s usual kaleidoscopic merriment.

It’s easy to feel like a jaded vet going back through this tour, or to worry that I’m letting the bad times soon to come color my perception of 2000’s wind-down. So reading a major newspaper critic mostly agree with my assessment in the moment is a welcome sanity check. Greg Kot was definitely not trading tapes and tracking the band’s every move, but he was perceptive enough to notice that the band was creatively spinning its wheels in late 2000 – just in time for them to finally get the proper media respect they never had before.

* - Well, you could see it if their website wasn’t an absolute nightmare. Happily, I’ve got a University library with access to Proquest to get around that.

SET 1: Cars Trucks Buses, Wolfman's Brother, Gotta Jibboo > Mike's Song > Simple -> The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu > Weekapaug Groove, While My Guitar Gently Weeps

SET 2: First Tube > Limb By Limb, Dirt, It's Ice > Wading in the Velvet Sea > Sand, Guyute > Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, Drowned

ENCORE: Cavern

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I’d much rather have a short, focused, flawed, and awkwardly-finished show than tonight, a real disorganized shotgun spray of Phish music. If the Blossom story was a brave but futile fight against the band’s arc of dissolution, tonight is all about avoiding the elephant in the room, changing the subject whenever the conversation takes a dark turn. That means throwing lots of songs and lots of music against the wall, with very little sticks.

The unusual set construction also calls attention to a structural weakness of 2000 – the decline of the Jam Warhorse. Every era of Phish has at least a handful of reliable improvisation vehicles in regular rotation, to varying degrees of predictability. In the old days, you could rely on hearing at least one from the elite group of Mike’s Groove, Tweezer, and YEM every night, songs that took up a lot of space and let the band get down to serious business. Eventually, different songs cycled in and out of this core – Bowie and Disease in the mid-90s, Ghost and 2001 in 97-98, Sand and Piper as the decade closed.

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But in the year 2000, that core lineup isn’t so clearly defined. As of this point, we haven’t heard a Tweezer in 15 shows, one of its longest gaps outside of the brief 1997 “retirement.” YEM is also going through a relatively fallow period for Phish’s most played song, with unusual gaps of 7-10 shows happening across the year – and when they do play it, it’s not particularly expansive. Mike’s does show up tonight, but is squeezed into the middle of the first set, hardly a place where it is known to thrive. It’s given some interesting filler, including a skillful, clearly impromptu TMWISY spawning out of Simple, but the classical bookends feel rushed, as they often have of late.

Without the old reliable standards at hand, they’re stuck looking for new inspiration. Sand is the card they pull tonight, yet it is sounding more and more tapped out, neither reaching the marathon trances of the previous year or charting a new direction. Piper is the other nouveau riche candidate, but I’ve been very vocal about how tiresome I find it in 2000, as it often quickly finds a loud and abrasive mode and squats there for the duration. It’s common for warhorses to reflect the mood of the era in which they’re dominant; in this case, both Sand and Piper nudge Phish towards their worst habits at the end of the 1.0 era.

The silver lining of not leaning on a steady shortlist is that it opens up the potential for surprises; one of the great things about modern-day Phish is that the night’s centerpiece can come from virtually any corner of the catalog. And if you squint, you can kind of see that happening in fall 2000 – so far, some of the tour’s best jams have come in songs like Suzy, Drowned, McGrupp, and Mango. That almost happens here as well, when It’s Ice dips below the frosty surface and never reemerges. It’s a fascinating jam that would’ve fit in well with the previous show’s entropy…until Page throws the band a life preserver in the form of the Velvet Sea opening chords.

After that bailout and Sand going nowhere, the fourth quarter gets filled out with odd decisions: yet another Guyute, an abrupt BBFCFM, a Drowned played too late to reprise its Darien Lake wanderings. It’s a great show for song-chasers and acronym lovers – I checked off WMGGW and BBFCFM from my personal scavenger hunt, already had a few TMWSIYs – and a disappointing one for jam-nerds. For that latter group, a little predictability ain’t so bad; whenever the band finds a muse, repetition can be rewarding.

SET 1: Carini > Sparkle > The Sloth, Maze, Guelah Papyrus, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own > Sample in a Jar > Rift, Sleep > Prince Caspian

SET 2: Boogie On Reggae Woman -> Twist, McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters, Halley's Comet

ENCORE: Axilla > Taste

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The main challenge of writing about Phish in 2000 is that it is so easy to give into vibes-based observations. I fail this test all the time, I know. But in my defense, them vibes truly were rancid, and I haven’t found too many people willing to argue otherwise in the comments or social media.

For the first time this fall, I can be my own primary source on this point – I attended this show and the following three, darting out from my Ann Arbor homebase on some irresponsible round-trip drives. The whole run didn’t sit well with me, and this show contained the most bummer moment of them all: Trey putting down his guitar and leaving the stage in the middle of a promising Halley’s jam, leaving the other three members, without warning, to wrap it up.

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It’s hard to put that memory aside, or to ignore that it left this show as one of the shortest two-setters on record, barely getting past two hours but for a generous encore. Given that I drove three hours each way to get there, it wasn’t a great value. And seeing the band so out of sync that they couldn’t even bow and leave the stage together left a bad taste in my mouth for the ride back. My sudden onset of Phish apathy in summer 2000 was starting to curdle into something more distressing.

But I want to ball up that negative experience and stuff it away with all the other traumas, because I think…this might actually be a pretty interesting show? If I hadn’t witnessed Trey’s quiet tantrum and didn’t fret the clock time, I’d pair it with the previous night as marking an intriguing trend for the tour. Instead of fighting against the tragic ennui of the band’s oncoming temporary break-up, both shows tap into the weird twilight feeling and produce a compelling, if slightly unnerving, jamming style.

The first set is neither here nor there, apart from a couple odd segue strings that mostly reflect Trey’s impatience between songs; hey, it’s better than milling about discussing what to play next. It’s the second set that finds a consistent theme, with four songs that all follow a similar path of slow decay. When covering 1998, I talked a lot about “entropy jamming” as the revolution of the cowfunk era started to deconstruct into ambient texture. Back then, it felt like a conscious decision to see how far they could push the atomization of their music. In 2000, it’s starting to feel like their default state, not entirely intentional.

It starts energetically enough with an extended Boogie On that continues the cowfunk revival of this tour’s midsection, but it becomes steadily more skeletal and disarrayed, the drumming flying loose from the groove, the tones getting weirder, eventually sinking into sonic goo to reemerge as Twist. The centerpiece of Fukuoka’s extreme entropy doesn’t get all the way back there in Cuyahoga Falls, of course, but it still leaves enough space for cold drafts to get through.

McGrupp would seem to be a more airtight vehicle, but even here there’s room for decomposition. Page’s solo goes a little longer and more chromatic than usual, the others nibbling around the edges, creating an eerie tranquility in the middle of a mostly disquieting set. It’s the only McGrupp I’ve ever seen – I wouldn’t have it any other way.

After a pretty quiet half hour, Halley’s attempts to bring the energy back up, and it rages thus for the first seven minutes after the vocals. Here, Trey seems to be resisting the set’s decay pattern; it starts to fray at the 12-minute mark, until he grabs the reins and drags it back to machine gun mode. But the gravity is too strong, and just before his walkout, Mike and Fish are gathering for another dip into the entropic waters as Trey hammers a single chord over and over.

Maybe Trey’s hissy fit was frustration over not being able to divert them from this path. Maybe it was built-up, boiling-over frustration at Phish not being able to find a new stylistic channel all year, or about how backstage struggles were playing out onstage. Yet maybe, like me, he was overreacting to the vibes. It’s never pleasant to go through an artistic break-up, but plenty of great art has been made from such circumstances – Abbey Road, Big Star’s Third, Shoot Out The Lights, basically every Fleetwood Mac record. On a chilly night in Cleveland, that tension produced some special moments…before it produced one that was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

SET 1: Guyute, Back on the Train, Bathtub Gin, Limb By Limb, The Moma Dance, Lawn Boy, Fluffhead, The Curtain With > Chalk Dust Torture

SET 2: Rock and Roll > Theme From the Bottom -> Dog Log > The Mango Song > Free

ENCORE: Contact > Rocky Top

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September is a real mixed bag for me. On one hand, the weather is usually dipping its toe into my beloved Hoodie Zone and it’s dark enough at a reasonable hour to get some quality time by the fire pit. On the other hand, all that outdoor time subjects me to the early phases of hayfever, combined with all the viruses the kids are bringing back from the new school year. As a result, I spend most of the month either sick or medicated, my head full of snot, fog, or often, both.

I don’t know the allergy status of the members of Phish – maybe I’ll ask them in an interview someday – but I think they’re equally susceptible to September sickness. Isn’t Trey a bit froggy on most of those Dick’s Labor Day weekend runs? And I’ve written before about how September is a weird in-betweener month for Phish, in an awkward position that’s not quite summer, not quite fall. Y’all know I don’t like to use drugs as an explanation, but maybe part of their autumn equinox disorientation is a Benadryl or Sudafed haze?

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It may be the fact that I’m in one of those very hazes right now, but tonight’s stop in Merriweather Post Pavilion resonates with my September state of mind. With an assist from a bleary-eared AUD, it’s a show where Phish feels just a little bit out of it, though not really in a bad way. Instead of fighting against the fog, the band mostly leans into it, which inspires some unusual jams as well as jams in unusual places. No wonder it’s the fall 2000 show most plundered by Kevin Shapiro; selections from it have appeared on three different compilations, despite stiff competition from Merriweather history.

There’s already a bit of a dazed feeling audible in the opening Guyute, which takes its sweet time with the creepy “newborn elf” lyrics. The Gin jam inherits some of the choogle from Back on the Train and rides it woozily for nearly 19 minutes, a restrained and cyclical jam that’s not without its charm, shimmying through the early autumn sunset. Limb By Limb bucks its recent delicacy like they’re trying to shake off the cobwebs, Trey turning on the afterburners instead of facilitating quiet quadrilogue. So too does the double dose of fussy 80s epics Fluffhead and Curtain feel like a desperate splash of cold water to the face, though the restored (and gorgeous) “With” ending is a cozy temptation to get back under the covers.

After one last attempt to shock themselves alert with Rock and Roll, they finally give in to the medicated mellow, letting it guide a singular second set. Once Trey triggers a loop at minute 12, the band enters a much more interesting space, the first of many over the next hour. With Mike high on his fretboard and Fish gently fluttering, there’s no risk of heavy groove oscillation. Instead it’s an ambient glow, music for airborne illness.

Similarly, the last few minutes of Theme stop fighting the funk and instead lean into it, with a subdued strut that Mike nudges into Dog Log. The band’s loopy mood is ideal for dusting off one of their silliest songs, and it’s played with as straight a face as it could possibly manage, a dumb-as-dirt song given arena rock gravitas in that special Phish way.

The same could be said for the one about mango deformities, which breaks containment about 10 minutes in and transforms into one of the year’s best improvisational moments – a darkly pulsing jam full of tasteful digital glitches and wondrously textured drumming from Fishman. That soft drumming touch and Mike relinquishing his anchor duties to join the atmospheric fun uplifts this segment beyond being just another pedals-and-keys jam; Trey is up to his usual business, but the surrounding package is so much more compelling.

It’s Phish back in the sonic laboratory of Japan, creating the kind of avant-garde music that nobody else would dare in a suburban Maryland shed. And if the band confessed to that Far Eastern tour’s experiments being at least partially substance-driven, I’m willing to give antihistamines and pseudoephedrine their speculative due for this one. Maybe I’m just desperately projecting for allergy-sufferer representation, but whatever the cause, it’s a show that perfectly captures that (congested) late summer feeling.

SET 1: First Tube, Gotta Jibboo, Corinna, Birds of a Feather, Windora Bug, Run Like an Antelope, Golgi Apparatus, Bittersweet Motel

SET 2: Piper > The Lizards, Tube > Jam > When the Circus Comes, Character Zero

ENCORE: Possum

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If you need a symbol for the final year of the 1.0 era, you could do a lot worse than the amusement park. I tripped into the metaphor this summer when I wrote “back in 2000, [a Phish show] had the unsettling thrill of being on an out-of-code rollercoaster throwing bolts,” and that was before I realized the fall would bring us two consecutive shows in the vicinity of actual thrill rides. Between Six Flags Darien Lake and Hersheypark – not to mention Riverbend a few days later – early fall was heavy on Phish dates where you could spend the day immersed in bumper cars and cotton candy instead of tailgating on a gravel lot.

Back in the innocent days of 1993, amusement park shows were a charming quirk, providing fodder for a legendary Forbin’s narration and low-stakes opportunities for Phish to dip their first toe into the amphitheatre circuit. In 2000, on the other side of their rise to jamband supremacy, it feels just a little bit chintzy – a Six Flags shed is also where Spinal Tap played “Jazz Odyssey” opening for a puppet show, after all. In the first year without a festival since 1995, it’s a little bit like Phish is outsourcing the extracurricular experiences to corporate partners. You can still ride a Ferris wheel on show day, but you’ll have to pay for an additional ticket…and you can’t camp overnight.

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Though it occasionally hosts high school football games, Hersheypark Stadium isn’t really a stadium in the concert sense, holding around 30,000 fans – the usual scale for outdoor Phish. Its primary novelty is the proximity to the chocolate factory and the persistent cocoa smell, elements that the band already riffed on in 1995 at the arena next door. So the show instead is influenced by proximity to classic coasters like Comet and SooperdooperLooper, mechanical versions of Phish’s treasured tension-release dynamics.

That up-and-down pacing is particularly important to manage as set shrinkage continues; once again, the band barely gets past the hour mark in both halves tonight. Unlike Darien Lake, where they quickly entered jam mode, tonight mostly modulates the energy through song selection. First Tube goes back in the leadoff spot and Gotta Jibboo makes it a TAB double-dip, followed by a serene Corinna – the first since Cypress – to provide an early breather. It’s continued jagged lines from there, with the intense downhill screams of BOAF and Antelope intercut with the lazy rivers of Windora Bug and an obligatory but misleading Bittersweet Motel (If Hershey is halfway between Erie and Pittsburgh on your map, you got scammed).

Set 2 also starts with one of Phish’s most coaster-like songs, Piper, though the climb up the hill ain’t as long as it used to be. Unfortunately, the payoff is diminished as well. After a few minutes corkscrewing through a heavy peak, it goes lateral for a quarter-hour – less a roller coaster, more a train. The sonic restraint is welcome compared to some of the overloaded summer Pipers, but it’s also plagued by long stretches of Trey keys and pedals without the inventiveness, cohesion, or narrative of the night before.

The show’s other highlight taps into a different aspect of the theme park experience: weaponized nostalgia. Nearly every American amusement park poses as an imagined golden age of yore, featuring old-timey boardwalks and main streets and frontier towns, duly sanitized and updated with modern-day amenities and prices. The Phish version, tonight, is to harken back to the halcyon era of 1997 in Tube, the second revival of cowfunk in as many nights. It’s a fine jam, maybe a little less fresh and inspired than Darien Lake’s Suzy, but it crosses the line into fan service when it brings back an old trick: the Tubeprise, as seen at Dayton ‘97 and Salt Lake City ‘98.

It’s 9 minutes of bonus jamming, picking right up from Tube’s gooey middle, and like those two earlier jams, it steers the funk flight path into something more cosmic. But it’s again hamstrung by Trey switching to keys, dipping back into the feel of the preceding Piper jam as much as the Tube. One could debate whether Phish was consciously and cynically referencing earlier Tubeprises with the move, but either way, the comparison to those legendary versions doesn’t do this one any favors.

That’s where the amusement park metaphor for Phish in 2000 isn’t very flattering. The whole concept of those attractions is controlled and formulaic fun, and while they’re often effective, it’s still an experience that’s predictable and somewhat hollow at the core. Phish in fall 2000 isn’t quite going through the motions, but there’s a growing sense that they’re on rails – the familiar climbs and dives, still potent, but the same every time you ride.

SET 1: Punch You in the Eye > Reba, Albuquerque, Carini, The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony > Suzy Greenberg > Jam

SET 2: Drowned > Crosseyed and Painless > Dog Faced Boy, Prince Caspian > Loving Cup

ENCORE: Driver, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Sample in a Jar

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When Phish released its first batch of Live Phish CDs in September 2001, Volume 3 bore a heavy burden as the most recent show. If Volume 5 (7/8/00) established their pre-hiatus baseline and Volume 4 (6/14/00) represented the atypical outer limits, Volume 3 covered important middle ground – a “regular” great show with all the bells and whistles. And given the band’s uncertain status at the time, that job carried the additional pressure of making an important case: Phish might be on a break, but they’re not done yet.

It’s a mission well accomplished. This is a standout show, in the dual contexts of the fall 2000 tour in and the Live Phish series. If those CD releases were meant to paint a more complete representation of the show/tape experience, Volume 3 is an excellent representative of a particular kind of treasured performance, one powered by jams in unexpected places and expansive takes on classic rock covers. But as a stop on Phish’s final pre-hiatus tour, it’s almost as much of an anomaly as the show in Japan three months prior, presenting a rose-tinted picture of Phish at the end of their first era.

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Important for a show that’s less than 2-½ hours of music, the band gets started early with delicious, oppositely-flavored jams in Reba and Carini; the latter being Trey’s odd reason they selected this show*. But it’s the Suzy where the show achieves liftoff and perhaps justifies one of the possible use cases for the much-maligned Volume 5* – setting the bar low. That show had a Suzy too, and was a bit of a bustout for the fan favorite that became a rarity in the late 90s. But the Alpine version is so perfunctory that they forget a verse, whereas here, they just can’t stop playing it.

It finds its legs in a style that Phish seemed to be consciously avoiding by the year 2000: good ol’ cowfunk. It was always a little ironic that Suzy went largely MIA from 97-99, given that it’s such a good candidate for a stripped down dance-floor makeover. Here, in an extended breakdown between the second and third verses, they finally fulfill that promise – or at least three quarters of the band do, as Trey goes missing on his keys while Page clavs it up and Fish hammers the cowbell like famed producer Bruce Dickinson is in the wings.

Fortunately, at the point where the copyright-gaming “Darien Jam #1” starts, Trey is back on board, hitting those scratchy funk chords he had been denying us. At 2:30, he delivers the bweeoooo that fully completes the throwback, even flirting a bit with a “Superbad” tease for extra veracity. And like those 1997 jams, the funk isn’t the endpoint, it’s a launching pad for a frenzied full-band peak that sounds far more effortless than the prolonged, heavy assaults they preferred in 2000.

If ending the set there feels a bit abrupt**, they happily keep the feeling afloat across set break and a rusty run-through of Drowned. Once we’re back in “Darien Jam” territory, it’s top-notch Phish improv, now freed from the cowfunk protocol but also avoiding the typical 2000 jamming style. The factionalization of two days ago is nowhere to be heard; most of this jam features all four members fully present, listening, communicating, evolving. In the Phish discography, it’s the longest jam released since the A Live One Tweezer, but it’s a far more digestible listen, progressing patiently through new themes instead of abruptly shifting gears.

There are still stumbles, for sure; it sounds a lot like it’s running out of calories 9 minutes in when it collapses to Page’s piano and frantic Trey scratches. But it’s deployed as an opportunity to darken the jam, swimming in dissonance for several minutes. It gives Trey an excuse to reach for his keyboard, but without the rest of the band locked into a repetitive groove – and with the sonic benefits of a SBD mix – it’s a novel usage, a noisy extension of the preceding jam instead of an aggravating cul de sac. When a deranged slot machine loop wraps around Page’s sinister piano and Mike’s charging bassline in the 18th minute, it’s another moment where you can hear what Trey imagined the 99/00 sound to be.

As it starts to drift back into more typical tiresome 2000 territory, they pull out a brief ambient jam then another deep cut cover. Here, the split out into yet another “Darien Jam” is a bit misleading – this is a pretty normal Crosseyed by modern standards. But since it’d be another year and 12 more volumes before the Remain in Light set got an official release, it’s the first officially released demonstration of Phish’s ability to capture and extend that pivotal Heads/Eno sound.

The best shows of a tour are always a bit dishonest, capturing the band at an elevated level that wouldn’t be possible to reach every night. That’s part of the reason for this project, to listen to all the in-between shows that reflect the flawed, fascinating hard work that sets up the all-time classics. But like Fukuoka, Darien 2000 almost feels like a fraud – it’s much closer in structure to a “typical” Phish show, but it also features high-end, democratic jamming that was becoming increasingly hard to find at the time. As a live album, it’s a perfectly fine choice to show where the band landed at the end of a torrid decade. But as a promise for the future, it may have offered false hope that Phish’s present-day health was higher than it actually was.

* - He told Relix: "It’s a complete metal meltdown. It’s the bass and drumming in the background that I really liked. It’s really strange. Nobody’s playing the beat at all. Those guys are playing in quarter time and the guitar and keyboards are just creating this wash of color on top of this heavy booming."

** - In this case, it was due to a storm, not potential bathroom difficulties.

SET 1: Wolfman's Brother, Scent of a Mule, My Soul, Ginseng Sullivan, First Tube > Divided Sky, Wilson

SET 2: Down with Disease > Heavy Things > Split Open and Melt, Hold Your Head Up > Bike > Hold Your Head Up, Also Sprach Zarathustra > Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove

ENCORE: The Squirming Coil

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By the time the fall tour started, it was all but confirmed that Phish was about to take a break. Trey will make it official from the stage in Vegas in a couple weeks, but the lack of new tour dates announced beyond the Shoreline tour closer was enough evidence to settle any lot debates. And as I wrote at the end of summer tour, it felt – even at the time – like a healthy decision. In hindsight, it seems obvious that Phish had been running on fumes since Big Cypress; in Mike Ayers’ new jamband oral history Sharing in the Groove*, tour manager Brad Sands says “I always felt like, and I think the band might have felt this way, that’s when we should have taken the first hiatus. But we had a new record and all that.”

In the summer, I called out the warning signs when I heard them, most notably when the band performed like they were absolutely gassed. But Phish, even in this diminished state, rarely ever played an obvious clunker like that night in Raleigh. Instead, the fatigue, interpersonal conflict, and substance issues that were causing issues under the hood manifested in a much more subtle symptom: disconnection. The four-way hivemind that had powered the band through the last decade of stylistic evolution was starting to fray, not completely absent but also not as strong or consistent as it had been just a year or two prior.

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One tiny way you can hear this decay is when the band forms internal factions. Basically any group of people larger than two is going to occasionally fall prey to team dynamics, familiar to anyone who has played sports, worked in an office, or existed in a family. When things are going right, the team feels like it’s sharing a collective brain, moving the same direction with no friction at all. But when circumstances are less ideal, that cohesion is lost – people take sides, gang up, and generally waste energy on squabbling instead of progressing towards their goal.

Because musical improvisation is such a vulnerable and sensitive process, it tends to be an open window to the amount of internal harmony or strife between the participants. I think most Phish listeners can tell the difference almost subconsciously; I know I felt the positive version of this sense in certain moments this summer, when the band’s communication was absolutely free of resistance. But when Phish isn’t operating as a seamless foursome, it’s equally apparent, even if it just manifests as an itch of wrongness at the back of your mind.

Like a lot of shows in 2000, night two at Great Woods sets off that itch, despite a loaded second set and one of the longest Diseases ever. It’s there from the very start, when a promising Wolfman’s sputters out into Mule – notably, the Phish song that features a literal duel between band members. And it’s present at the end of the first set, where a very strange, rhythmically fragile Wilson brings the first half to an early close.

But it’s most noticeable in that honkin’ 26-minute Disease centerpiece. When I’ve talked about band dynamics recently, it’s mostly to complain about when Trey goes 1v3 against the rest of the band, either dominating them with an endless, noisy solo or isolating himself in his synth and pedals workshop. Both of those things happen in this Disease, but the internal battle lines are much more complex and fluid than I usually notice.

The first 13 minutes are what you expect from a Disease of this era, with Trey at full sprint and the rest of the band clinging on for dear life. There’s an important enabler though, and it’s the guy that would normally be setting the tempo in a rock band: Fish. I wrote a whole post in the summer about Fish’s impressive stamina in both the years 2000 and 2025, but that can cut both ways. When he sides with Trey and the duo decide to go hyperdrive, it can very easily squeeze out the other half of the band – most notably, Mike, who is constantly throwing out interesting melodic ideas that fall on deaf ears from those to his left.

When they finally ease off the gas, there’s a stretch where the full-band chemistry seems to be healing, not coincidentally when Fish’s allegiance shifts from Trey to Mike and he slows down to sync up with the latter’s Weymouth-like groove. But it’s quickly lost when Trey shifts to keys at minute 14, and we’ll barely hear his guitar for the next 7 minutes. It splits the band again, though it’s not exactly Trey versus the world – it’s Team Groove and Team Atmosphere, with Page joining Trey in focusing on color and texture instead of melody.

The AUD mix doesn’t do this segment any favors; whatever Trey is doing is barely audible, and the rhythm section is very front and center. But that just amplifies the creative stasis of the jam, with nobody stepping up to provide a central theme. With Trey off on his own adventure, the remaining power trio should have plenty of creativity to thrive on their own, but Page is too passive, nobody’s following Mike’s leads, and Fish just seems focused on keeping the energy up and away from an ambient collapse.

When Trey returns to his primary instrument, it almost instantly improves. Something as simple as him hammering a power chord and letting it drone out rouses Page and breaks the rhythm section out of their locked groove, and after they close out the song, there’s a compelling two-minute coda where they’re all exploring Japan-like space together, instead of separately.

And after a poorly timed Heavy Things, there’s an excellent Melt that doesn’t do anything too innovative, it just demonstrates that the band is still capable of merging into a single brain with eight arms. Listen to the up-and-down theme Mike introduces at 9:09 and how the rest of the band immediately follows and repeats; that’s exactly what it sounds like when they are clicking instead of clashing.

In 2000, those magical moments were increasingly scarce, and I can’t help but feel like it can be traced back to one particular decision: the stage rearrangement debuted in June 1999. We’re now 15 months into Trey setting up far stage left, and the balance has felt off ever since in ways that track with what I’m describing above. It makes it all too easy for Trey to bubble off into his own experiments, makes Fish the rope in the tug of war between Mike and Trey, leaves Page on the periphery and maximum distance from his closest melodic partner.

My belief that where they all stand matters was only emboldened by the successes of summer 2025 after they moved back to original positions; dipping back into 2000 is a reminder of the opposite effect. Of course, there were more complicated factors afoot in 2000 too, a long list of contaminants to disrupt Phish’s previously robust team chemistry. And by fall tour, those internal fault lines were easier to detect, even if the band could still keep it together on the surface.

* - An excellent read that just so happens to include a few thoughts from me! Pick up a copy at Mike’s site.

SET 1: Roadrunner > The Moma Dance, Rift, Brian and Robert, Vultures, Horn > Beauty of My Dreams > Ya Mar, Stash

SET 2: Chalk Dust Torture > Twist > Piper > What's the Use? > You Enjoy Myself

ENCORE: Good Times Bad Times

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It’s a common observation that cultural decades don’t always line up perfectly with the actual calendar. How people generally imagine the Sixties is really just 1966-1970, and you can make a case that the 80s got a head start during the dying days of disco. And it turns out the same claim can be made for the much longer time scale of millenia as well. The 20th century and the 2nd millennium may have officially ended when the year’s odometer rolled from 1999 to 2000, but it seems apparent now that the 21st and 3rd installments didn’t really get substantially rolling until September 11th, 2001.

This show – the last where its particular dateline would just be a random day in the liminal space between summer and fall – feels very apt for that 21-month holding pattern. The obvious theme of the year for Phish has been “what next?” after the triumph of Big Cypress, but there were a lot of people asking that same question at the same time. For decades leading up to it, the year 2000 seemed like it had to be a milestone, the end of the old world (literally or metaphorically) and/or the dawn of a new one. Then people woke up on January 1st, 2000 and realized neither the Y2K bug nor the other myriad prophecies had come to bear – it was just another day, the only difference being the numbers you wrote on your checks.

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It’s fair to say that left people feeling weird and unsettled. If you weren’t in a swamp all night with your favorite jamband, there wasn’t a cathartic release of all the energy that had been building up in anticipation, no clear chapter break to signify that the future had begun. When I try to remember notable events from the year 2000, I mostly just think of the Bush-Gore election; an event that, in retrospect, put us on the dark timeline we’re in today, but one that at the time just felt like the same old political squabbles.

So maybe it’s unfair to have expected Phish to break out of the same rut the whole dang world was in. Yet it’s still facts that tonight’s show could’ve happened any time in 1999 with no anachronisms, from the song selection to the jamming style to the choice of a pandering – but no less awesome for being cheap – localized cover in the opening spot. Even beyond what’s on paper and tape, the mood is a dead ringer for the year before, with the same pre-millennial anxiety still present and undissipated on the other side of the calendar.

The band does its best to chase away those demons with this year’s choice of Boston music tribute. “Roadrunner” is a potent blast of rock and roll joy, a love letter to the commonwealth penned by one of the most earnest souls in music, Jonathan Richman. It’s a surprise reminiscent of the Summer ‘98 jukebox tour, and the mere selection of it papers over what’s a pretty stiff rendition.

As usual with any punk-adjacent material, they’re just too over-qualified to play it convincingly, and in a rare whiff, Page gets the keyboard tone all wrong, opting for a thin, whiny synth instead of the proper “Sister Ray”-biting heavy organ. But as a way to fit in some easy “hey, that’s the state I’m in right now!” crowd cheers and inside lyrical references right away, it’s a fool-proof opener.

That the remaining first set highlights come in Vultures and Stash indicates that the vibe shifts away from Mr. Richman’s usually sunny oeuvre. But he might ask “how in the world are they making that sound?” in Vultures, where Trey gets pretty deranged with feedback and overlapping reverse delay effects. Stash, meanwhile, drifts slowly into darker and deeper waters, its unresolved tension compounded by it closing the set.

When they return, Mike does his damnedest in Chalk Dust and Twist to nudge them back into uncertain territory. But Trey and Fish just want to play real fast, dammit, and that eventually results in another exhausting Piper operating at white-knuckle, teeth-clenching intensity. Just as Fish finally backs off and Page and Mike fill out a funky strut, Trey goes MIA in his keyboards, leaving them adrift. It only congeals when they disintegrate into a swirl of industrial hums, establishing the soundbed for a very welcome, meditative What’s The Use?.

In that pre-WTU stretch, there’s a moment where the crowd breaks into a spontaneous clap-along; some of them may be chanting “Yankees Suck” too, but it just didn’t get picked up by the taper section. It’s a meaningful moment of disconnection – the band searching for a sound, the crowd searching for something else, everyone going through the motions but misaligned.

Improvisational music, at least the good stuff, is always going to be sensitive to the environment in which it’s played. And Phish in both 1999 and 2000 reflected the uneasiness of the times, equal parts anxious and debauched. But in ‘99, with a clear target in sight, all that mania can build towards a New Year’s resolution. If it still lingers afterwards, the uncertainty can start to feel sickly, like a neverending hangover. That’s not a bad way to describe 2000, whether we’re talking about Phish or the greater zeitgeist.

SET 1: Possum, My Friend, My Friend -> Jam > Gumbo -> Maze, Boogie On Reggae Woman, Roggae, Guyute, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Gotta Jibboo > The Curtain > Sand, Makisupa Policeman > Cars Trucks Buses > Funky Bitch > Cavern

ENCORE: Harry Hood

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Night two picks up all the promising threads from the previous show, providing a first set crackling with dark, indoor energy. Just two songs in, there’s a short but satisfyingly haunted ambient jam out of MFMF, an anxious Gumbo and intense Maze, and an especially lovely Roggae to take the edge off. Tom Marshall does the Antelope lines, as custom decrees, and all feels settled in Phish world as they head into their final run of confirmed dates for the time being.

Then, in the first of three loaded Fall 2000 guest appearances, it all goes off the rails.

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Michael Ray has an unimpeachable track record, featuring decades-long, simultaneous runs with both Kool & The Gang and the Sun Ra Arkestra, two significant – and wildly different – institutions of American Black music. In the 90s, he rode the jamband wave with his own Cosmic Krewe and found himself frequently intersecting with Phish, playing in the Cosmic Country Horns and Trey’s Surrender to the Air troupe. But tonight is his last of seven appearances with the band, and it’s not hard to see and hear why.

Things are already a little unstable even before Ray comes out; Jibboo is a little too hopped up, The Curtain is sloppy and reverts back to its Without form for the last time for a decade. Sand starts out in double time – or maybe it’s supposed to be a First Tube tease, as phish.net claims – and doesn’t quite crank down to its normal prowling speed before the vocals come in (watch Trey tell Fish to chill out at 18:33). I don’t know if it was always the plan to bring Ray out during Sand, but it takes 14 minutes for it to happen, and in the interim the band is mostly spinning its wheels with Trey at the keyboard; like all the most frustrating 1.0 Sands, everyone is waiting for something to happen.

And unfortunately, Ray isn’t up for providing the spark they’re chasing, at least not musically. He plays a pretty sick solo in Sand, enhanced by some pedal effects, but it’s also less than two minutes, and he spends the rest of the song dancing around the stage, leading the crowd in clap-alongs* as the band resumes its locked groove. It’s like they’re getting a cameo from Bez instead of an R&B/jazz legend – all told, Ray plays his instrument for maybe 10 minutes out of the 45 he’s onstage.

Makisupa was a good call for Ray’s dubby trumpet tone, but it’s again played very briskly, and Ray doesn’t deign to offer more than the occasional toot. Cars Trucks Buses reprises Ray’s guest turn with Phish at Jazz Fest, and it inspires his most extended stretch of playing, but his memory of the song’s head is spotty. They attempt to simplify things with a 12-bar blues that produces a decent Trey/Ray skronk battle by the end, but when they start up Cavern, Phish’s most trumpet-friendly original, he just sort of…wanders off? It’s weird to long for the solid professionalism of Carl “Gears” Gearhard with a Sun Ra sideman on stage, but it’s the awkward hand we are dealt in this show.

Yet when the band returns for the encore, Ray is still there, kicking balloons and sitting on the drum riser for the complicated bits of Harry Hood, then pulling fans onstage when he gets bored during the quiet part of the jam. It’s a needless distraction, and the band is demonstrably affected across the entire (eventually, literal) sit-in; there’s many moments where Trey, Mike, and Fish are all looking at Ray instead of attending to their own business, and Trey spends a big chunk in the middle of some songs whispering in his ear. At the end, Trey thanks the crowd members for hanging with Ray “when he couldn’t find his horn,” and I’m sure he’s joking, but it’s got a little sting to it.

As just one third of one show, the chaos isn’t a big deal, and it’s not even the most embarrassing guest appearance at a Phish show this month. But coming early in such an important tour, after three sets where the band sounded pretty dialed in, it’s a foreboding sign. If the tension of the past year was between the revels backstage and the quality onstage, Ray bringing more party than performance sets a bad example for a band that was struggling to focus. Space would’ve been an ideal place to end the band’s first era, but instead, it spaces out.

* - I’ve put a lot of work into being less of a curmudgeon at shows, but I’m forever annoyed by crowd clap-alongs, particularly for bands that improvise.