Break It Down, Break It Down

11/19/97, Champaign, IL, Assembly Hall

SET 1: Julius, Bathtub Gin -> Llama, Dirt, Limb By Limb, Funky Bitch, Theme From the Bottom, Ginseng Sullivan, Fee -> Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Wolfman's Brother -> Makisupa Policeman > Taste

ENCORE: Possum

Listen on phish.in

If ever there was a show to provide evidence to yesterday’s theory that “less travel” helped unlock the magic of Fall 97, it’d be this one. Since the last show, the band (and likely more than a few depraved fans) drove 935 miles from Denver to Champaign, and to make it to the next stop in Hampton they’ll burn 823 miles more of gasoline. The University of Illinois campus was an unlikely Central Time Zone pit stop, skipping the Windy City entirely for the second straight tour. It almost seems incidental, like they just had to play a show somewhere to give the drivers a brief respite.

So you’d forgive them a phoned-in Wednesday night, but instead: this show rules*. It’s really the perfect follow-up to what happened in Denver, not replicating the moves of that pivotal show but fanning the flames of inspiration in surprising new directions. The first set looks like a reversion to the grab-bag openers pre-11/17, but the funk virus has started to infect unlikely victims – here, the last three minutes of Gin and Trey’s solo in Funky Bitch. Limb By Limb and Theme both get slightly unorthodox readings, before Fee provides the night’s most surprising Type II moment, a few extra minutes of delicate harmonics with Fishman sneak-previewing the Meatstick. 

But it’s the second half that is the most significant post-Denver development. After a few bold but spotty attempts at crafting dense, short, narrative-packed sets of 60-ish minutes and 4-or-5 songs early in the tour, Phish cracks the formula tonight with a quartet that is both aesthetically satisfying on paper and perfectly paced in practice. 2001 > Wolfman’s > Makisupa > Taste. What more do you need?

The key to why these 66 minutes hold together where earlier sets of song scarcity didn’t comes down to Phish sacrificing one of their most cherished qualities: multiplicity. In their admiration for chameleonic artists such as Zappa and Ween and their oft-confessed obsession with freeform college radio in their teenage years, Phish has always put a premium on eclectic taste and skill. From their earliest days to the mid-90s, their shows often felt partially like proud demonstrations of just how many genres they had mastered, moving effortlessly through rock, bluegrass, reggae, blues, barbershop, prog, and many other sections of the record store.

That approach usually worked just fine when they were playing 20-25 songs a night. But as setlists got shorter, the swerves felt more jarring. Dropping the intricate Reba and the minimal folk ditty Train Song in between the funk swagger of Tweezer and Ghost in Denver didn’t ruin the set or anything. But from a DJ-like perspective of keeping the party in motion by constructing smooth hills and valleys of tension and release, they were record-scratch stumbles. 

11/19 Set 2 solves this problem by eschewing the usual costume changes in favor of stylistic uniformity. The infrastructure of its first 56 minutes moves from space-funk to…funk-rock to…reggae, which is basically just funk on island time. It takes the last show’s cowfunk breakthrough and tries to build a whole set out of it, rather than falling back on old band habits of variety for variety’s sake. 

Champaign makes more sense on this map.

Instead of creating dynamics through genre, Phish falls back on a more elemental trick: shifts in volume and density. The inevitable 2001 in the concrete flying saucer of Assembly Hall begins with Fish teasing the drumbeat haltingly, leaving enticing negative space, and the unhurried run-up to the first peak at 9 minutes is a methodical, oozing accumulation of texture and sound. Wolfman’s seems like it will perpetuate that mellow groove at first before it abruptly explodes into Band of Gypsys hard-rock, eventually crossing the time, influence, and live album streams to deliriously imagine Hendrix, Cox & Miles playing the Stop Making Sense intro to Crosseyed and Painless. 

After nearly a half hour with the Wolfman, they feint at some blues (a narrow My Soul miss) then dial it back for Makisupa. I’m talking waaay back, in one of my favorite moments of the entire tour. Once a platform for dubby foolishness, this one would do Lee “Scratch” Perry proud, probing the style’s ambient and minimal extremes. After the “stink kind” codeword, they strip back instrument after instrument until it spends two minutes hovering in near-silence, just some distant guitar effects and the occasional synth croak. Then from 7:20 to 9:35 they execute a glacial, blinding crescendo, like the 2001 peak processed through one of those “slowed down 800%” videos, punctuated with a perfectly-timed “bwamp!” back to Makisupa.

After that galactic exhale, the rest of the show is gravy. Taste, marred by some of the same technical gremlins as last year’s Champaign show, is a strong if not thematically-consistent punctuation to the preceding novella, and a hefty Possum encore covers for anyone calculating their ticket value per minute. But the quantity over quality argument is on shakier and shakier ground as the tour progresses and the band makes just a handful of songs feel like a full meal. Like a lot of chefs eventually realize, the fewer the ingredients the better, and wild swings between courses aren’t as effective as a cohesive, flowing experience.

* - Trey sorta disagrees; in The Phish Book, he says “There were only two sets the whole tour that I didn’t like. The first set the second night in Albany and one of the sets in Champaign, Illinois.” But which set?!?