A Tiny Espace to Move and Breathe

7/10/97, Marseilles, FRA, Espace Julien

SET 1: Dogs Stole Things, Limb By Limb, Ginseng Sullivan, Bathtub Gin > Llama -> Wading in the Velvet Sea, Jam, Olivia's Pool

SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Julius -> Magilla, Ya Mar -> Ghost -> Take Me to the River

ENCORE: Funky Bitch

Listen on phish.in

A recurring theme this summer has been the benefits and risks of Phish approaching total freedom and relaxation on stage, a few thousand miles away from the pressure and demands of their home audience. Here, in the final proper show of Europe ‘97, is the logical endpoint. In Marseilles, they meditate themselves into a pure state of jamband energy: leaving some songs unfinished, rewriting others on the fly, bantering with the audience, playing improv and audience participation games, attempting unrehearsed covers, and on and on. It’s Phish graduating from their study abroad program, finally at ease with their foreign surroundings and ready to show off their new cosmopolitan affectations back home.

Like the shows at the start of the tour a month ago, there’s a mess of new songs, five in all. But the renewed inspiration has officially spread to their older material as well; it’s the veterans in this show that find the most interesting spaces. It begins in Gin, which has slowed its pace dramatically from Murat-style sugar rushes. Halfway through this 21-minute monster, Phish puts this Gin through the funk filter, Trey unleashing a trademark “bweoooo” loop and hopping on his wah pedal, Page shifting to synth, Mike and Fish getting cozy inside each other’s pockets. It sounds more like Ghost, as we now know it, than the actual performance of Ghost later in the show.

Where Llama was a release to that potential energy in Amsterdam, here it’s just an interlude – after the final taboot, they’re right back to funking around, for a further seven minutes. Even Velvet Sea can’t poison this mood for long, as after the ballad they get right back to it, not even bothering to play a song first this time. Eventually, improbably, this unnamed Jam stumbles into the closing theme from Lizards, one of those songs deemed either too complicated or too dorky to appear this summer. It’s nearly an hour of extreme worminess, even if Trey doesn’t make any audible references this time around and they don’t re-invoke the demon Steve Miller.

The encore with members of the Son Seals Band, though oddly, not Son Seals himself. (Photo by Larry James)

Believe it or not, the second set is even looser. Trey spends the first three minutes rambling about Danny Bonaduce, Jimi Hendrix, and Hanson over an ambient wash before 2001 properly starts – the intro alone is longer than some of the first 2001s. They finally realize 2001 is perfectly suited to their new sound, then jam out Julius (!), then jam out Magilla (!!), then jam out Ya Mar (!!!). Okay, that last one only gets three exclamation points due to the nature of the jam, which becomes Trey shouting out combinations of instruments (“Bell and low guitar!”, “Crash cymbal and Rhodes!”, “Everyone foot stomping!”) for stop-start breakdowns. 

The Ghost that follows is a weird hybrid of the song with Ya Mar, played with the former’s chords and the latter’s rhythm – another sign that Ghost, in its infancy, was considered malleable material, almost closer in spirit to Catapult or Kung, where the vocals can be layered over a variety of backdrops. It’s a wobbly but fun experiment, and it winds its way into a very impromptu and half-assed cover of Al Green by way of Talking Heads, before 10 more minutes of “is this still Ghost?”. If there’s a place in the show where the creative looseness tips over into aimless self-indulgence, it’s here, but that’s forgivable after two hours of anything-goes with a high hit rate, and it’s still preferable to an auto-pilot Zero closer.

If anything keeps this show out of the top tier of Europe Summer ‘97, it’s that it’s almost too laid back; despite the Hendrix references in 2001, it lacks some of the firepower to offer contrast to the sparse grooves, a balance they got just right  in Amsterdam. It’s the fullest realization of small club Phish in 1997, a vibe that’s impossible to transfer unaltered to the 30X-larger venues where the band will spend the rest of their summer. But like a college student coming back from a semester abroad with an accent, they’ll do their best to try, and the result will be a lot less cringe.

[Apologies to Wally Holland for swiping his title; if you can’t wait for my fall tour essays, read his book!]