Bonus Material

7/21/98, Phoenix, AZ, Desert Sky Pavilion

Nothing says “desert sky” like sitting under a pavilion roof.

SET 1: AC/DC Bag > Fluffhead, Roggae, Tube > Sparkle > Cavern > Frankie Says > Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Mike's Song -> Simple -> Bittersweet Motel > Weekapaug Groove, Brian and Robert, Ghost -> She Caught the Katy and Left Me a Mule to Ride > Funky Bitch

ENCORE: Sleeping Monkey > Rocky Top

Listen on phish.in

One of the defining moments of Fall ‘97 came late in the monumental first set at Dayton, when the band just couldn’t quit the groove established in Tube. So even though they brought the song to its normal conclusion, they just paused for a minute, conferred, then started to play it again from the good part. It wasn’t until the SBD release in 2008 that we could hear the conversation behind the decision (Fish: “You want to start that jam again?” Trey: “Start it over, just the jam.”) but it immediately felt like an especially transgressive moment on a tour full of them – improvisation spilling outside of the song container, breaking all the rules of concert performance. You can do that? Just the jam?

After that breakthrough, Tube settled into semi-regular rotation, fitting the cowfunk style like it was poured into it. But oddly enough, the Nutter Center Tube’s false ending has become sort of a regular feature of the song in Summer 1998, although not always in the exact same fashion. The song’s lone appearance in Europe on 6/30 got cut weirdly short, coming in at a 4-½ minute length that’s closer to its early 90s appearances; it’s even built around a Page piano solo instead of the modern-style clav and wah. Then the opposite happens in the wonderfully slow and humid version at The Gorge on 7/16, where Fishman starts playing the “wrap it up” drum signal at 5:49, but is ignored and/or overruled. Trey bigfoots it into a solo breakdown, and they squeeze three extra minutes of jam out afterwards.

Tonight it doesn’t stop completely after the final verse, a la Dayton, but after reaching the final verse they add on a coda that fast forwards through the 97 to 98 evolution. In just a couple minutes, it starts in standard cowfunk, falls through a bweeoooo portal, and comes out the other side to a creepy little riff over Fish’s bed of cymbals as Page fires synth lasers at Trey’s looping asteroids. It’s leading somewhere fantastic, only four songs into the show…but alas, Trey pulls the plug and diverts to Sparkle.

The extra innings are a fun quirk of this era’s Tubes, but also symbolic of a certain indecisiveness that has crept into the ending of Phish songs. Later in the show, there’s an even shorter promising coda to Frankie Says, but that quickly gets hijacked for Antelope – which itself fits in an extra long final section. In the second set, Mike’s skips right over the transition into the second jam (Page tries to start it at 9:00 but gets steamrolled), and Ghost keeps pushing after a natural peak into the 1,000+-show excavation of “She Caught The Katy.” 

And you can hear this ending weirdness earlier in the tour as well, even in the humorous moments, such as last night’s Poor Heart or the fakeouts built into Meat. There’s also the strange postscript jams in 7/15’s Horn and 7/19’s McGrupp, both cases where the song reaches its natural conclusion but the band tacks on several minutes more in the same general vein. 7/17’s masterful second set is the exception to these indecisions, but even in that suite there was audible disagreement about whether to keep Weekapaug going before Trey stormed into Zero.

At a time when the intra-band communication seems mostly pretty dialed in, these are odd hiccups. It’s not the same as the ripcords of 3.0, because sometimes Trey (or the others, but really, mostly Trey) insist that the song goes longer, the inverse of TreyDHD. But it certainly contributes to the inconsistent flow I’ve been stuck on for the last couple shows – these coda jams and mixed-up signals are typically obstacles to a naturally-developing set.

The pessimist view of this trend is that we’re seeing the beginning of the slow decline in band chemistry that eventually leads to the hiatus and the struggles of 2.0. The optimist says that it’s encouraging to see the boundaries between songs breaking down so early in a tour, and that the rough patches will smooth themselves out with time. The realist says that Phoenix is their sixth show in seven days and 1500 miles or so of road miles, after flying back from Europe and only getting four days off to recover from jet lag. But whether these awkward goodbyes are temporary blips or early symptoms, they’re providing more of what we want, for now.