Bred in Captivity

11/23/97, Winston-Salem, NC, Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum

SET 1: My Soul, Theme From the Bottom > Black-Eyed Katy, Sparkle, Twist > Stash -> NICU, Fluffhead > Character Zero

SET 2: Bathtub Gin -> Down with Disease -> Low Rider -> Down with Disease, Bold As Love

ENCORE: Julius

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11/23/97 is the weak link of the Hampton/Winston-Salem ‘97 boxset, which is the faintest of damnation. But I’m also not as in love with this show as some, particularly the second set and its featured half-hour Gin, which tips too far into dense maximalist Trey-wank for my taste. I adore the very evil first set Stash, and this time through grew smitten with the unusually synthy Theme, but that second set lacks subtlety compared to the layered pleasures of the two nights preceding. 

Still, every post-Denver Fall 97 show is somebody’s favorite, so I’m not going to spend this essay alienating the Lawrence Joel loyalists. Instead, I want to gamble my goodwill on a different hot take: it’s time to talk about Black-Eyed Katy, and why it troubles me. Thus far, Katy has shown up in 4 of the first 8 shows, and the frequency is only increasing – tonight’s version is not only the second in back-to-back shows, it’s the second in eight songs. 11/22 was even a bit of a Katy-fest, with heavy teases in the show-opening Mike’s and in Tweezer before the full segue bloomed. 

That omnipresence will drop off soon, with only three more performances before it metamorphs into Moma Dance next year. Yet it’s still a no-brainer to call BEK the theme song for Fall 1997, all the more special for only existing during those two treasured months. If you need a shorthand for what Phish sounded like at this exact moment, the song’s progression from clenched groove into cocksure solo is your go-to girl.

And in my memory, the community (me included) flipped out over it. Long before we had Just Jams, it was like Phish had finally fulfilled our wish for a song that skipped right to the “good” part, without any compositional foreplay. Though it was greeted with confusion at first – was it even a song, or just “Jam”? How did we even figure out the name? – it typically won the crowd over by the end of its 7-10 minutes.

Black-Eyed Katy was in fact the first thing fans heard from the fall Bearsville session that produced The Siket Disc and a huge chunk of Story of the Ghost. It was also the first product of Phish’s new policy of not thinking too hard and just letting things happen – “a philosophy of nothingness,” Trey calls it in The Phish Book. There, they also talk about its spontaneous birth: the song “was literally the first thing we played when we sat down and plugged in,” says Page. “It just happened while we were jamming and no one was paying attention.” 

That’s a cool origin story, and jams-that-become-songs – as we heard a week ago in Timber and three months ago in Theme – are always fun. But something about the way Black-Eyed Katy tried to capture the spontaneous innovation of 1997 in the bottle of an actual song has come to bug me. Because while the song does reflect the dominant Phish modes of the season, it does so in basically the same way every time; the biggest change from Las Vegas to Madison Square Garden is that it gets slower and slower. 

Turns out that first part isn’t the “skip to the jam” cheat we thought it was, it’s just as composed as any Phish song, only lacking (for now) lyrics. And as a “what comes after the funk” launchpad, the second section doesn’t ever really take off, providing a Trey-dominant solo section that gets a bit longer – particularly in today’s version – but never jumps the fence. As Moma Dance, it will grow safer still, with only a handful of Type II versions in its future – a letdown, for what seemed like the purest of Phish improv at its debut.  

Part of the disappointment, in retrospect, is the company it keeps here in Fall 1997. It’s a noble goal to come up with a groove worthy of a “Pt 2” J.B.’s b-side and then try to faithfully recreate it onstage (almost) every night. But Phish, by this tour, was an infinite funk groove generator, producing multiple variations on this type of jam every show. Many a jam in these shows follows the same structure as Black-Eyed Katy, but does so spontaneously. By comparison, the one that is written down and rehearsed feels like releasing a tamed animal into an enclosure with its wild relatives.

I admit that it’s possible that you couldn’t have one without the other; in all but two appearances, BEK shows up very early in shows, perhaps as a necessary warm-up to stretch those cowfunk muscles for later. And its jam-to-song conversion is also a test run for a later batch that I like very much: Siket Disc tracks such as What’s The Use and My Left Toe, which will live very productive lives onstage. By contrast, Katy’s short existence never transcends its role as a symbol, with its final performance on 12/30 feeling like a last fling with an experiment that had served its purpose.