Choice Paralysis

9/10/99, George, WA, Gorge Amphitheatre

SET 1: Farmhouse, First Tube, Twist, Divided Sky, Ginseng Sullivan, Carini, What's the Use? > Will It Go Round in Circles

SET 2: Down with Disease > The Moma Dance > Piper, Fee, Gotta Jibboo, Saw It Again, Split Open and Melt > Cavern > David Bowie

ENCORE: The Squirming Coil

Listen

Now this is the kind of show you’d expect from a typical band promoting its new album. Opening with the title track, Phish goes on to play two more songs from their new LP, then returns to the tracklist in the second set to select two more of its heavy hitters. One of the latter songs even receives its live Phish debut, starting its journey away from the blueprint laid down on its studio version. Record sales have never been the purpose of a Phish tour, but relatively speaking, this is the kind of promotional setlist the suits back at Elektra will love to see.

Wait a second *puts hand to earpiece* I’m being told Farmhouse didn’t actually come out until eight months after this show? Phishcrit management regrets the error. But that future record’s heavy representation at this show and tomorrow night’s – which will debut two more of the album’s tracks, including its Hit Single – reveals another purpose for this in-betweener tour. After it ends a month from now in Albany, Phish will retreat to Trey’s Vermont barn to start sessions for what will become Farmhouse, and thus it’s logical to assume that they had their next album in mind as they played these 24 shows. “This album’s from our last week’s concert” reprised, now stretched to a full month.

But the finished Farmhouse would end up a disjointed mish-mash of an album, splicing together Fall 97 selections that didn’t make The Story of the Ghost cut, songs written with acoustic sets in mind, and fresher tunes from the first TAB tour. Its wood-grain cover art and folksy title suggested an American Beauty swerve, but that concept is corrupted by the groove-heavy Jibboo/Sand/First Tube trio, while Heavy Things promised radio listeners a light pop sound that fit in neither camp. For all their flaws, each record in the run from Rift through The Story of the Ghost managed to establish an internally consistent mood, while Farmhouse, despite all its prep time, feels curated by randomizer.

Tonight’s opening trilogy reflects this volatility well. Two years of playing Farmhouse have sanded its original beardy charm down to MOR brevity, and it sounds like the obvious choice for the band’s next single…24 hours before its usurper debuts. First Tube, appearing for the second time in back-to-back nights, is a tightly-scripted instrumental more suited to an action movie score than an album track. Then Twist is a skeletal composition, three repeated chords meant as a launchpad into deeper zones but kept on leash tonight. These are three very different kinds of Phish songs – a range that’s not unusual to hear in juxtaposition on stage, but not a recipe for a cohesive album. The opening suite’s haphazard pacing is only outmatched by the set’s closing three songs, which veer from an extremely metal Carini to the post-rock bliss of What’s The Use and then a funky Billy Preston cover, another TAB loanee.

With all the focus on the new/new-ish material, the old stuff sports a layer of neglect. Some rough patches in the composed parts of Divided Sky and Melt belie the idea that the short layoff between tours would give us a warmed-up band from the get-go. And just as the band seems indecisive about the direction of their next album – a waffling that will never resolve – there’s not a clear improvisational mandate either. 

Apart from a pretty micro-jam on Fee’s tail (sadly shrunk back down after 7/8/99), there’s no Siket-y space to be found in the second set and a lot of songs that fail to evolve past their first idea. By the end of the set, Melt coalesces into agreeable cosmic jazz and Bowie gets a deliciously long loop-fantasia intro, but a year after they pitched a perfect set at The Gorge, those are small triumphs for the return. Instead of a further sharpening of summer’s experiments, fall tour seems to be starting back at square one, with Phish thinking a month into the future but unsure of the more immediate path.