Bweeoooo

7/26/97, Austin, TX, South Park Meadows

South Park Meadows during a Willie Nelson concert in 1984. It’s a strip mall now. Photo by Scott Newton.

SET 1: Limb By Limb, Dogs Stole Things> Poor Heart, Stash, Billy Breathes, Cars Trucks Buses, Dirt, You Enjoy Myself -> Izabella

SET 2: Timber (Jerry the Mule) > David Bowie, Harry Hood -> Blister in the Sun Jam -> Harry Hood -> Free, Waste > Johnny B. Goode

ENCORE: Bouncing Around the Room, Cavern

Listen on phish.in

The second night of Bob Gullotti’s sit-in has the same problem as the first; I keep catching myself thinking “too many drums!” like I’m Jeffrey Jones in a powdered wig. The busy percussion continues to cut off all attempts to keep working on the lean, mean, and clean Phish funk sound that they brought back from Europe, or to spring spontaneous group compositions like the bizarre and catchy YEM polka jam from 7/23. Instead, in this YEM, you get a hard rockin’ transition into Izabella – a worthy consolation prize, but still a digression from the year’s main narrative.

Yet constraints breed creativity, and in the second set, Trey gives up trying to force a funk jam and gets back to tinkering with the possibilities of his pedal board. Timber is business as usual for its first 5-½ minutes, and Fish/Gullotti resume their noisy conversation at stage left, limiting the ability to make any sudden full-band swerves. So Trey responds by playing less and less – not hopping to his wah pedal, as is his first instinct these days, or cranking up a big rock solo, but slowly melting away into textures. It culminates in a now-familiar, then-novel trick: Trey using his loop pedal to implant a whirling Doppler-effect siren into the jam. A “bweeoooo,” to use the scientific term.

It’s a little bit of deja vu for a similar frustration-to-inspiration moment in the 7/25 show: the late second-set Ghost, which can’t locate its groove amidst the untamed percussion. So Trey drops a “bweeoooo” into a song that will soon feature it as an essential part of its intro; it will even end up high in the mix on the studio version. The howling note arrives 11 minutes in, and makes the last six minutes of the Ghost jam more unsettling than any previous version that didn’t involve Trey abruptly yelling at us about a giant worm. Until this version, Ghost isn’t that creepy of a song apart from its lyrical subject matter; after this, it will gain a haunted undercurrent.

Timber, another dark song about a homicidal (though pro-labor) mule, also benefits from the disorienting effect of Trey’s off-sync loop. He lets it ride for nearly six minutes again, establishing a second, unaligned rhythm in orbit around the drummers’ frenzy, then getting weird with his harmonizer pedal until everyone else settles down into a soft drone. There’s a late, lonely spell on the wah pedal, but it sounds like a solitary funk guitarist playing to comfort himself during the final days of an apocalypse. After a return for Timber’s closing verse, they maintain this deep space into another verrry long Bowie intro, where Trey tries out some other non-bweeoooo loop ideas before they clatter with five wheels into the song proper. 

Trey’s been messing around with new uses of his digital delay loop pedal all year; I wrote about it back in Vienna. But these two iterations expand its potential, depositing the bweeoooo into one of its natural homes (Ghost) and showing its textural adaptability to the jams of other songs as well. It’s another unique element of the 1997 sound that’s coming into focus – jambands that play funk jams are a dime a dozen (though Phish’s 1997 surely increased their population), but few artists balance the dance party and the dread as well as Phish. They haven’t quite merged the two halves yet – it might have to wait for colder temperatures and indoor venues – but Texas and the adaptations made to accommodate their guest put the funk temporarily to the side and let Phish work on the spooky stuff instead.