Children of the Corn

8/10/97, Noblesville IN, Deer Creek Music Center

SET 1: Bathtub Gin -> Sparkle > Down with Disease > Dirt, Cars Trucks Buses, Billy Breathes, Split Open and Melt, Bye Bye Foot > Ginseng Sullivan, Harry Hood

SET 2: Cities -> Good Times Bad Times -> Rotation Jam -> Rock A William -> David Bowie

ENCORE: Cavern

Listen on phish.in

There’s a malevolence to the Midwest. Most coast-dwellers might not know it, usually coming back from their visits to flyover country with reports of how nice everybody was, and how quaint the surroundings appeared. It may be less of a secret now that many of these states have turned deep red, but the polite behavior and quaint country charm masks dark secrets, cruel intolerance…and snarky music critics.

Deer Creek befits this deception. Nowadays, it’s surrounded by suburban strip malls (a creepy setting of its own), but in the 90s, it was an amphitheater dropped in the middle of a cornfield, a Field of Dreams for people more into rock bands than baseball. When you entered the show, it was a pleasant, humid rural evening. But when you spilled back out four hours later, stumbling down the side road to your campsite, everything looked much more ominous. You remember that, in jamband lore, Deer Creek has been a cursed location since the Deadhead riots of 1995. Every rustle in the corn is a potential alien abduction, every passing pickup truck could be good ol’ boys hippie-hunting.

But until 1997, Deer Creek had mostly hosted pretty PG-rated shows. The SBD-certified dates of 6/19/95 and 8/13/96 showcase Phish at their straightforward best, no setlist shenanigans or atypical jams, just razor-sharp mid-90s playing. 8/13/96 even has an acoustic mini-set and Page playing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” Ah, the peaceful Indiana late summer.

8/10/97 would change that idyllic reputation, but it doesn’t happen immediately. Gin and Disease are both strong Type I first set jams, but there’s also a mellow spell with Dirt, CTB, and Billy Breathes. That’s all just to lull the crowd into complacency before dropping one of the most diabolical Melts ever, and one of the best jams I’ve ever witnessed in person. From note one of the jam, Trey’s using his octave/harmonizer effect, and that deranged sound will be the guide for the next 17 minutes of Frippian discordant shredding. It returns to safety, just to split brains all over again with a soaring “Third Stone From The Sun” tease. The crowd, me included, absolutely howls. 

Phish tries to calm things down with a gentle pairing of Bye Bye Foot and Ginseng Sullivan and a Hood closer, but even that goes awry. In the midst of a pretty but standard jam, Mike drops the usual chord progression’s D to a B not once but twice, throwing the song off its axis and producing an unusual finish. It’s more melancholy than frightful, but discomfiting all the same for being just slightly “wrong,” breaking the rules of a hundred Hoods that came before.

It only gets weirder from there. The band is 40+ minutes into the second set before they play a Phish song, and even then it’s the bizarre instrument-switching Rock A William in its sole U.S. performance. The opening Cities – still a fresh and exciting revival – moves through several jam passages: a slinky late-night funk jam, a triumphant peak at 16:00, and a post-peak boogie-rock progression that sounds halfway between the Doobies and Thin Lizzy before deciding on an exceedingly rare mid-set GTBT.

That’s the last time 8/10/97 will be a normal rock and roll show. GTBT breaks out into an evil circus riff and a theremin jam, Trey moves to organ, and the musical chairs begin – the final Rotation Jam and the best, in part because it’s the only one with theremin, and in part because Fishman refuses to budge from his drum stool for most of it. When he’s finally unseated by Trey, he puts his suit jacket on and sings the song with the titular line, drawing a huge cheer of recognition. And then Trey makes him pay for his insubordination by stretching out the Bowie intro to perverse lengths, over 8 minutes of unhinged loop layers until the song takes off, giving Fishman’s poor hi-hat foot the shin splints (he gives up on it halfway through).

It’s a four-song set that inspired the famous “Phish could urinate in its fans ears and tell them it’s music” newspaper review, and, uh, I guess that means I’m into some kinky stuff? The full review (½ a star!) is full of jabs: “mercilessly awful,” “awful pseudo-jazz,” “self-indulgent twaddle.” Trey’s charitable response, “If you’re gonna take a risk, sometimes you’re gonna play shit, you know?” 

It is very odd to have such an opposite reaction, but I loved, and love, this show – it undid all the damage of Tinley and then some. The critic, Marc Allan, finished up his review by wondering, “Maybe Phish, a band that loves to play games and see where it can take music, is trying to see how much it can get away with.” He meant it as a criticism, while I would use almost the same words as an overall thesis for this essay project. I finally (after four whole shows, lol) caught one of those transcendent nights where Phish set out to break their own rules, making music both dreadful and sublime, sometimes simultaneously. On this night, they successfully tapped into the darkness of the Midwest, the moonlit macabre of the cornfield, scaring off at least one writer and sinking their teeth into another.