Burn Baby Burn
8/17/97, Limestone, ME, Loring Commerce Center
SET 1: The Wedge, Beauty of My Dreams, Dogs Stole Things, Vultures, Water in the Sky > Maze, Bouncing Around the Room > Tweezer -> Taste, Carolina
SET 2: Down with Disease -> Bathtub Gin > Uncle Pen, Also Sprach Zarathustra -> Art Jam > Harry Hood
SET 3: Buffalo Bill -> NICU, Weigh, Guyute, Dirt, Scent of a Mule -> Digital Delay Loop Jam -> Scent of a Mule, Prince Caspian
ENCORE: When the Circus Comes, Tweezer Reprise
Let me get the blasphemy out of the way right at the top: I don’t think The Went Gin is the Greatest Phish Jam Ever. My memory is spotty sometimes, but I don’t recall people talking about it nearly as much in the 90s as they do today; only after the 2009 return did I start seeing it discussed as an unanimous Hall of Famer. Don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent jam, with a thrilling and subtle chord progression shift and a powerful climax. But it’s also more Trey-centric than I usually prefer, and it follows a well-worn mode-change peak path that can be a cliche at times in Phish improv…maybe because of the template established here. Amar Sastry’s breakdown is brilliant, but it also describes tricks Phish uses often, if executed very, very well on this occasion.
Cancel me if you must. But most importantly, I feel it’s an injustice to dwell too much on The Went Gin when the set it is a part of is an absolute masterpiece. It’s like focusing solely on the Mona Lisa’s nose, or like Dudley in The Royal Tenenbaums identifying individual dents on a beater cab. The Gin jam is terrific, but it’s also just one chapter in the best set Phish had played so far in 1997, the one that pulled everything together just in time for the legendary fall run to begin three months later.
Obviously, they figured it out after yesterday’s flawed explorations of what the ideal Phish Festival set should be. My prescription at the end – “A couple big jams, a fan-favorite bustout or two, some new experiments in sound, organized narratively and in no rush to beat curfew” – wasn’t meant to call the shot, but it almost perfectly fits apart from the bustout, which they held back to open Set 3. In the middle frame, Phish found the Goldilocks zone: 95 minutes, 5 songs, 2 segments of free jamming, and a gimmick that doesn’t get in the way of the music; in fact, it probably enhances it.
But first, they try one more strategy in the afternoon that doesn’t quite fire: what if, after we sing our song that mentions limestone, we just play a bunch of our new stuff? And not like the stuff with jam potential such as Twist and Piper, but the one that sounds like Mound but worse and both Beauty of My Dreams and Water in the Sky? Whatever, it’s a good way to burn through a hangover, and the back half provides a diabolical Maze and the East Coast return of Tweezer to chew on during the orchestral interlude.
The gentle ease-in also allowed fans to conserve their energy for the main event. 8/17 II contains four monumental jams, but what’s really impressive is that each represents a different flavor of Phish circa 1997. In Disease, you get the hard-rock windmilling of 1995, but updated with a wanderlust that navigates fluidly through several distinct sections, flirting with cowfunk on multiple occasions but never fully committing. The Gin is pure joy, a laser-focused full-band peak. The 2001 is a perpetual motion machine, 23 minutes long and yet never dull, barely remembering to play the peaks in an endless dance party kaleidoscope. And then Hood is the religious experience, a spiritual possession that levitates 65,000. Uncle Pen is also played.
It’s miraculous that this set took place around a lot of “Art Tower” housekeeping, as each band member takes a turn painting their own contribution and the results are then passed over the crowd between 2001 and Hood. But somehow, the extra-musical tasks are the perfect distraction Phish needs to forget all the routines that get in the way of crafting a complete, narratively flowing set. The two songless jams, where Trey might normally be tempted to toss in a lighter song, are exquisite transitions – a quirky Trey and Mike (and eventually synthy Page) conversation that sits between Disease and Gin, and a gorgeous and glacial ambient wash that soundtracks the transfer of their art across the grounds. In 2001, Trey goes on his break after setting up a dense matrix of loop sirens, and it sounds so great you almost don’t even notice he’s gone. It’s a trick they’ll repeat for the next three years, no art required.
But as good as the Art Tower concept is at symbolizing, as Trey puts it, the “mutual energy between everybody, the four of us and all of you guys,” it’s perfectly Phish-y that a spontaneous, collective act trumps it before it’s even complete. After Toph kills the lights for the Hood jam, the first major glowstick war takes place, and while those plastic tubes would soon become the head-clonking scourge of show attendance, the debut is instant legend. Phish and co. meticulously designed a whole bespoke civilization of music, lights, art installations, fireworks, orchestras, hang-gliders, fire-breathers, mass nude photography, freeform radio, and late-night synthesizer freakouts. And yet the fans still surprised them, conjuring up their own special effects in a choreography that would be impossible to coordinate, beaming inspiration at the band in precisely the way Trey just tried to articulate. Absolute magic.
And yet, Phish managed to still irritate some fans even after what they had just been privileged to witness. With Mike’s Groove, Bowie, and Antelope still on the table for the weekend’s final set, they play…Buffalo Bill and Scent of a Mule, and a bunch of other left-field, obscure, or just plain unwelcome choices sprinkled around them. It’s textbook Phish, mischievous and unpredictable, and in this case reasonably so, since how the hell else are you gonna follow up that? It’s still fun, but The Great Went’s final set goes out as blank as a fart, and the encore burns the whole thing down while Phish plays a tremendous noise jam post-Tweeprise and denies a crowd chant for “one more song!”
Like New Year’s Eve ‘95, it’s absurdly serendipitous for Phish to play such a breakthrough show on such a momentous date. But it really is all the storylines of 1997 to date converging into one flawless set, six months of determined and often-frustrating experimentation in Europe and the U.S. coming to fruition in front of the year’s largest audience. The paradoxical intensity and patience of the music in 8/17/97 II sets the mold for the fall tour, when nearly every night will chase that feeling, and on many occasions, improbably, surpass it. The Great Went’s final act, a monument of creative destruction, was the final step in their rebirth. You couldn’t script this stuff.
[Thanks again to Professor Andy Giles and the University of Maine - Presque Isle photo archive! It’s been a great summer, and I’ll see you again in three months…]