Bouncing Tracks

7/13/99, Mansfield, MA, Tweeter Center

Posters have come a long way.

SET 1: NICU, The Curtain > Halley's Comet -> Roses Are Free -> NO2, Lawn Boy, Reba > Carini > Funky Bitch

SET 2: Wolfman's Brother > Piper, Bug > Mountains in the Mist, Run Like an Antelope > Possum

ENCORE: Tuesday's Gone

Listen

Phish’s “new album” released just before this tour was certainly an unorthodox release – nine abstract instrumentals carved out of studio improvisations and sold only through the band’s website. But The Siket Disc wasn’t Phish’s first attempt at direct-to-consumer sales. The year before, the band announced the official release of The White Tape, the self-titled collection of demos they used as a calling card in the late 80s before recording their official debut, Junta. Though it had circulated for years alongside Trey’s senior thesis recording of The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, 1998 was the first time you could buy a physical copy – ironically enough, on CD. 

The funny thing about The White Tape, as an origin story for Phish, is that the full band is only on four of the tracks: Alumni Blues, AC/DC Bag, Slave, and Dog Log. The rest of the record is made up of four-track experiments by Trey, Mike and early friends of the band, including Tom Marshall and briefly-employed percussionist Marc Daubert*. Most of the Phish classics on the tracklist are works-in-progress, with YEM, Fluffhead, and Divided Sky all represented by partial sections, likely Trey’s homework assignments for mentor Ernie Stires.

But though The Siket Disc and The White Tape are separated by a decade where Phish grew from dormitory weirdos to one of the country’s most successful touring acts, they’re siblings. The silly song sketches, noise collages, and lo-fi aesthetic of The White Tape suggest an alternate trajectory for Phish’s career, a world where they became something closer to Elektra labelmate eccentrics Ween and They Might Be Giants. That version of the band would never have racked up the same achievements as Phish did over the course of the 90s – conquering America’s largest music venues and inheriting the crown of the Grateful Dead – but they very likely would have been the kind of group that made Quadrophonic Toppling.

So it’s apropos that the Siket Disc tour brings us the first NO2 in over 350 shows, and the very first full version of the song as released on The White Tape (where it is, improbably, the longest track). That means it’s more than just Mike’s deadpan dentist impression over siren loops and vacuum, but also includes the acoustic outro from the original recording, the diegetic music our dental victim hears on the headphones. It provides a moment of quiet serenity after a torrid Curtain > Halley’s > Roses sequence, and while it’s more TMWSIY than My Left Toe, it works as an excavated ancestor to the post-rock chillout zone role that the Siket songs have been playing this summer.

Nevertheless, it is weird that this NO2 is the one piece of this show given a SBD release (on Live Bait 4, if you’re looking) when there are two other excellent Siket-informed moments in Great Woods night 2. The first comes close on the heels of that peaceful White Tape moment, with a unique Reba jam that stubbornly refuses to escalate out of its quiet early phase. Borrowing from the hazy bliss of Mike’s instrumental, it’s a slow meditation that comes nowhere near the typical big finish before Trey breaks the trance with the Carini chords. 

Later, the second set opens with a Wolfman’s that I would kill to hear via the board mix instead of yet another boomy AUD. If there’s a word for what the band is doing improvisationally in 1999, it’s “layering” and this jam shows why. Fighting through the amphitheater acoustics, it sounds like Trey samples his very first note of the jam, leaving it as a background drone while they move into the now-standard funk waters. By the 10th minute, they’ve settled into a dense groove that isn’t interrupted – as it would be in 97 and 98 – by breakdown theatrics. Instead it’s just relentless forward motion, Krautrock without the icy coldness, each member taking turns adding and subtracting small embellishments around the core – warbly Rhodes wash, some fight bell dings, funk-chord chirps that could either be samples or just metronomically tight. 

Eventually they subtract the funk itself, revealing a chorus of Trey loops that a soundboard would likely reveal have been there the whole time. The final segment snuggles into this bed of noise, again refusing to build to a traditional peak or the arena-rock release that would’ve punctuated a stretch of cowfunk a year ago. It seems to indicate an approaching 2001, but chooses the slow build of Piper instead, a good choice for a show that is in no hurry to switch things up.

For some fans, that patient inertia was a new, frustrating development. Back when they were last playing NO2 in 1994, Phish was still following it’s “hey” game rule of switching up every couple minutes, meaning a 21-minute jam like this Wolfman’s could hold maybe a dozen distinct parts. But the more deliberate Siket-y approach goes back to the very beginnings of Phish; after all, four-track recordings are made layer-by-layer, and Trey multiplying himself through digital loops isn’t too far off from how he made White Tape versions of YEM and Letter to Jimmy Page. The one-off revival of NO2 makes this connection clear, and pulls out the noise-experiment thread that’s always hidden deep within Phish’s sound, like one of Trey’s more subtle drones.

* - No offense to Mr. Daubert, but I’m terrified of the alternate universe where Phish kept him on and they fell victim to the fatal flaw of most jambands: The Percussion Dude.