Abnormally Normal

10/4/99, Normal, IL, Redbird Arena

SET 1: Uncle Pen, Funky Bitch, Vultures, Runaway Jim, Jesus Just Left Chicago, Limb By Limb, Wilson > Down with Disease

SET 2: Ghost > Sample in a Jar, The Wedge > AC/DC Bag > Makisupa Policeman > Sand > Ya Mar, Character Zero

ENCORE: Rock and Roll

Listen

Speaking as a native and (almost) life-long Illinoisan with much love for the downstate regions, I have to ask: how the hell did Phish end up in Normal? The University of Illinois’ Assembly Hall, the site of excellent Phish shows from 1995-1997, is less than an hour down the road. The band’s next four shows are all in New York state, meaning they could have played this getaway day anywhere in the Rust Belt, or just spent another night in Rosemont. Were the combined student bodies of Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan really too important a market to neglect? Did they just want to make a bunch of (very 90s) NORML jokes?

If Phish had played Normal at any point in their career, I would have found it strange. That they played it in 1999, when they were arguably as big as they’d ever be, is totally mystifying*. I side-swiped this point earlier this tour when we discussed the inhumane tour routing this fall, but it’s wild that they booked shows in mid-size towns such as Boise, Las Cruces, and Tucson, never mind Ames (pop: 66,000) and Normal (pop: 52,000). Maybe it would make sense in the early 90s, when they were conquering America one college campus at a time, but three months before they played the largest New Year’s Eve concert on the entire planet?

Now, it’s objectively cool that they brought the Phish Late 90s Juggernaut to these out-of-the-way locales. But it’d be even cooler if they used these smaller dates like they deployed Europe and soon will use Japan – as low-pressure environments for aggressive experimentation. You know, reward the diehards who drove down I-55 on a Monday instead of setting out early for Long Island, and maybe blow the minds of a few curious Midwestern students while you’re at it. 

Instead, Ames (apart from its Gin) and Normal are exceedingly, well, normal Phish shows. They not only feel like environmental flashbacks to the college circuit days, they feel like the musical equivalent, just with an updated songlist. Back in the early days of this project, I used to talk about the Phish “calling card” show, where they rolled into an unfamiliar town and sprayed out everything they could do, shotgun-style, just hoping to find something that would grab each and every person in the crowd. Here for a prog epic? A classic rock or jazz or bluegrass cover? A build-to-peak jam? Music to dance to? Music for headbanging? A guy in a dress playing a household appliance? We got you, Phish said.

Those shows were both fun and effective, doing their job of converting new cult members a clump at a time. But it wasn’t until Phish stopped worrying about attracting new customers that their musical evolution could hit the fast track. There’s a comfort in knowing that you’re playing to a crowd that will follow you almost anywhere, and starting in late 1994, in most cities, Phish had that safety net. Accordingly, their music started advancing in leaps and bounds at the same time as their tours started to narrow in on towns and venues they had already conquered. 

Broadening out and adding some new pins to the map could have brought them back to that adventurous transitional period of the mid-90s. But returning to mid-major college basketball arenas from the other side of the venue ladder doesn’t seem to have reignited their earlier hunger. Tonight in the Teflon-coated Redbird Arena, like Ames, is a perfectly solid show, featuring minor pleasures such as an excellent, tight Vultures – if they ever did want to put it on an album, they could just use this version – another charming Limb By Limb and a creative second set segue train. It’s certainly eclectic, bookended by strange bedfellows Bill Monroe and Lou Reed. But it doesn’t offer anything new, which is frustrating for so deep into a tour.

Because with only four shows left, the progress made over Fall 99 has been as flat as the Central Illinois landscape. This show wouldn’t have sounded weird if it had happened in the first week of the tour instead of the last, and that’s not an observation you can usually make about a Phish fall tour in the late 90s. Compare Worcester ‘98 to the Las Vegas Halloween shows, or the Albany ‘97 run to Denver’s – there’s a pretty big progression over those similar-length tours, driven by a mix of road madness, nightly honing, and rapid maturation of new ideas. With one last weekend to go in 1999’s equivalent run, that difference isn’t as obvious.

Okay, I’m using a little selection bias – if you toss in the December shows as part of the late 1999 story, I think you can hear a more significant difference from starting blocks to finish line. But the second installment of the year’s tour trilogy should be the weird, ambitious one, the Empire Strikes Back that shakes up all the puzzle pieces and leaves them in precarious cliffhangers before the triumphant finish. Instead, we get normal nights in Normal, a band settling for the routine at a time they could get away with the strange and unusual.

* - There’s an obvious Dead parallel here to the DeKalb show in 1977, though that show definitively rips.