“Better Quiet Than Nothing”

7/10/98, Barcelona, ESP, Zeleste

Turning the monitors around.

SET 1: Down with Disease, Dogs Stole Things, Divided Sky, Mike's Song

SET 2: Halley's Comet, Roggae > Sparkle, Mike's Song > Simple > Weekapaug Groove, Sample in a Jar > Good Times Bad Times

ENCORE: Brian and Robert, Taste

Listen on phish.in or watch on YouTube.

To be clear: as a whole, this show is a disaster. For some reason, the venue gave Phish an early curfew; it’s a Friday, so they probably had to make way for a DJ night. But the tickets still say “9 Noche” like the previous two nights, so Phish is watching the clock from the very beginning. And before they even play a note, the P.A. system is glitching – subtle at first, but untenable by the time they get to Divided Sky and Mike’s Song. After an early set break, they try again, only for the rude bursts of noise to reappear right away in Halley’s and interrupt a third song in Sparkle.

It’s a cursed evening all around, and you can’t blame Phish if their hearts and minds are already on the 5500-mile journey to Portland to start the American tour in (yipes!) five days. But funnily enough, the tension doesn’t entirely spoil Phish’s final night in Europe to date, and it may have even helped. Because despite only running just over two hours and Trey complaining “I can’t deal with this…it’s kind of hard to concentrate and get into a groove when I keep hearing that fucking thing,” this show contains two of the most fascinating jams of the entire mini-tour.

The first comes after they seem to have exorcized the P.A. demons in Halley’s, which drops initially into a stock funk jam while Trey yells at someone offstage. But after a classic “bweeoooo” is triggered, it descends into much murkier waters, progressing at a slow burble. Eventually Trey arrives at a familiar theme, weaving in the First Tube riff more than a year before it would officially break the firewall between TAB and Phish. And the jam itself also feels like a distant pre-tease, the kind of glacial, layered groove they would spend all of Fall and Winter 99 immersed in. 

If they had let that jam sink into 2001 like it clearly wanted to, this set might have presaged the prolonged spaced-out mood of Japan 2000 as well. But they call for Roggae instead, angering the P.A. gods and bringing about that final Sparkle intrusion. After that, they turn the monitors around to serve as an impromptu backup solution*, with Trey promising that the band would fight through sonic adversity to try and finish the tour on a high note. “It’s going to have to be a quiet concert,” he apologizes. “Better quiet than nothing.”

The second attempt at Mike’s is an awfully fierce choice to kick off a low-volume segment, but the ensuing Simple is lovely stargazing stuff, the band clinging to these last few moments of small venue magic and revisiting the serenity of the 12/9/97 version. But after dissolving entirely into primordial soup, it gets a jolt of energy, finishing up with an incredibly methodical (which I mean as a compliment) 9-minute riff development session. By the end, it’s worked itself into a King Crimson snarl that rips right into a feisty Weekapaug, capping off 45 minutes of Mike’s Groove that can stand up against anything Phish has ever played on this continent. 

It’s the happy ending this uneven tour needed, a last minute reclaim of the new approach they started out exploring in Freetown Christiania. The two jams provide two distinct flavors of what the band is capable of when they fight their impulses and stick with one idea for an extended period of time, patiently folding in new sounds and iterating themes at both hot and cool temperatures. It’s a last gift to Europe but also a souvenir to bring back to the States, and the technical issues might just have been the tension- and constraint-generating chaos agent to make it happen.

* - The same emergency solution was used at one of the best concerts I ever saw.