SET 1: Theme From the Bottom, Dogs Stole Things, Beauty of My Dreams > Billy Breathes, Limb By Limb, Wolfman's Brother > Wading in the Velvet Sea > Taste
SET 2: Stash, Maze, Water in the Sky, Vultures, Slave to the Traffic Light > Chalk Dust Torture -> Ghost -> Olivia's Pool > Character Zero
ENCORE: Stand! -> Izabella
On Phish’s third trip to Europe in less than a year, they didn’t come to see the sights. If the 1996 tour was a tentative toe-dip into the European market and Winter 1997 was establishing themselves as a headliner abroad, Summer 1997 reverse-colonized The Old World into Phish’s remote office. Gone was the overly polite guest behavior of visits past; Phish had work to do, and it didn’t matter how exotic the locale or uninitiated the audience.
“We have about 15 or 16 new tunes over the last 8 weeks and we’re going to be debuting a lot of them tonight,” Trey says after Dogs Stole Things, the first of those debuts. “We’re pretty excited about it.”
But he doesn’t sound excited, he sounds determined. Seven of Phish’s new originals and two new covers get their official, stats-eligible debuts in this show, and there’s never a stretch of more than two familiar songs before the Dublin crowd is placed back on unfamiliar footing. There’s no more “Intro to Phish” on-ramping for new audiences, no trampolines or vacuum solos or instrument-switching gimmicks. It’s Phish playing for Phish, and if you were an Irishperson checking them out for the first time or an American that had dipped into your trust fund to “study abroad,” you just had to go along for the ride.
The newbies already sound more mature with only a week’s extra cooking, though it could just be that the band has been reunited with its proper performing gear. Dogs Stole Things nudges aside My Soul for one night as the bluesy warm-up, Limb By Limb already sounds at ease fluttering over its complicated rhythm and vocal interplay, and Wading in the Velvet Sea…interrupts a promising jam, as it will many, many times in the future. Set 2 brings in new songs still looking for their proper setlist home: Water in the Sky isn’t really late-show material, Vultures is a tough fit for flow wherever it lands, and Olivia’s Pool is the ripcord special for the second half.
But the sneakiest thing about 6/13/97 is that the most prophetic segments happen in old songs, not the debuts. In a nice bit of continuity, Wolfman’s Brother is first up and jumps right back in where they left off in Hamburg in March, riding a wah-pedal A-A-A-B pattern that will become a Phish improv default mode for the rest of both the year and their career. It supports Phish’s assertion that the Slip Stitch Wolfman’s represented nothing less than “a new era for the band” – they could only wait six songs into the next tour to try again, and push it even farther.
It’s contagious too, as shown when Chalk Dust diverts into funk territory in the second set, eschewing the usual guitar solo for a leering stroll adorned with synthy squiggles and someone toasting on mic. It turns out to be a sort of preemptive Ghost jam, announcing that song right away as the One To Watch for the summer, even if its actual jam is more aggressive and traditional Phish dynamics. But the cascade of 1997 is already established: the new, simpler songs and the desire for more textured, democratic jams infecting the older tunes and nudging them out of their auto-pilot zone.
In a show with a lot of new Phish, the Chalk Dust is the best evidence of a New Phish, the sound of the seven months to come. Those following via setlist back home would be fixated on all the unfamiliar titles, unaware that the more meaningful clues were dropping in songs taken for granted. But the renovation project that Phish came to do in Europe spared nothing in the repertoire and nobody in the audience; it was time to roll up their sleeves and work.
I knew I’d gotten extremely lucky when Phish added these two nights in Dublin to their European tour — I’d already booked my flights to visit my parents in County Carlow, I’d seen Jazzfest 96 and Remain in Light, so any chance to see this band was more than welcome. The venue was the most intimate I’d ever see them in: you could comfortably walk to the back and get a Guiness and amble back to the rail during, like, Dog Stole Things. Walking in, I had to push past some chatty dude blocking the doorway who I only a few steps later realized was Mike. Musically, I always compared it to whatever that Dead show with all the debuts was, Swing Auditorium 2/73 maybe? Didn’t know most of the songs and didn’t care because it was clear that we’d only understand what any of this meant years later, if ever. We were young and so was the band and maybe they’d play some of the songs we knew tomorrow night? Oh, and that last song was Hendrix, right?
Anyone going to be in CT on 24th?