AFTERNOON SET: Chalk Dust Torture, Guyute, Wolfman's Brother, Taste, Punch You in the Eye > Waste, Hello My Baby
SET 1: Birds of a Feather, Sample in a Jar, Beauty of My Dreams, Stash, NICU, Funky Bitch > Ghost > Axilla
SET 2: Down with Disease, My Soul, Reba, Hold Your Head Up > Bike > Hold Your Head Up, Runaway Jim > Cavern
ENCORE: Julius
And four days later, Phish found themselves on the same bill as Rage Against The Machine and Limp Bizkit, 6,500 miles away from the site of Woodstock ‘99. The Fuji Rock Festival is Japan’s largest, and suffered a Woodstock of its own in its first year – bad weather in the 1997 edition led to rampant hypothermia and the cancellation of its second day. But it survived, and in 1999 the Fuji fest moved from its titular mountain to a ski resort in Niigata, where it has been held ever since.
At first glance, Phish was ignominiously booked early in the day on the festival’s featured stage, playing in the harsh daylight after San Diego punks Rocket From The Crypt and several hours before the night’s odd couple headliners, RATM and The Black Crowes. But that appearance was just the appetizer of a seven course meal the band played that weekend, with the remaining six sets taking place as mini-headliners on the smaller Field of Heaven stage. According to band archivist Kevin Shapiro, this setting was specially designed for Phish and featured “a beautiful backdrop complete with waterfall and lavender trimming.” Sounds a little nicer than Camden and Columbus.
This weird arrangement meant that Phish pulled double-duty on the festival’s first day, playing three sets across two stages. So 7/30/99 provided an unusual all-in-one synopsis of the 1996 and 1997 Europe tours, with both a festival set for an unfamiliar audience and a more typical Phish show for the diehards. And by the end of the 1997 visit, those two approaches had grown pretty divergent; just compare Glastonbury/Roskilde and Amsterdam.
A mere five days after that bonkers Deer Creek show, It’s quite jarring how quickly they snap back to opening act/multi-band festival mode in the afternoon set. For previous shows in that role, the band’s primary rule was generally “don’t frighten the normies,” and that’s expressed here by avoiding any song that debuted later than 1996 and minimal jamming. The only moments of note – besides a pretty good jam triggered by a stray bweeoooo in Taste – are the technical gremlins that plague Guyute and PYITE and when they have to shout down bleedover music from another stage for the closing a capella number. It really recaptures that 1996 feeling of “who is this for?” – a watered-down Phish experience that I can’t imagine convincing anyone to pursue more.
It’s a different story on the Field of Heaven stage, where Phish could be themselves in front of the already converted. But it’s worth asking: how many of those were actually there? For European tours, enough American fans could scrape together the funds to fill the small clubs Phish played between megafests. But the tourist presence in Japan seems to be dramatically lower – it’s hard to tell if the very subdued audience response between songs is disinterest or politeness. According to Shapiro, it was “mostly Japanese fans,” and the phish.com photos back him up. So this is not, like most Phish shows in a foreign land, a semi-private show for the wealthiest fanatics.
But with the ability to stretch out over their normal show format, Phish finally hits upon a useful compromise for unfamiliar crowds. They can play a largely remedial setlist – all seven of these sets look pretty humdrum on paper after the summer tour – but pack it wherever possible with surprisingly adventurous jamming, giving the rookies multiple tastes of advanced-level Phish. You get that tonight in Stash, which follows a discordant path to some very cool pockets of abstraction, and a 22-minute Ghost that is more ambitious than any they played in the States this summer.
In the second set, you can hear the band realizing what a special atmosphere they’ve found at Fuji when they bring the Reba jam down to near-silence, a trick they haven’t been able to deploy in years. Combined with the zoomed-in soundboard, the Field of Heaven stage becomes the Uncanny Valley, an odd mixture of the band’s massive late 90s aesthetics with the intimacy of their early 90s habitats. That’s a Japan-exclusive opportunity they won’t pursue to its extremities until the next June, but by the end of their first night playing in the Far East, they have already figured out that they need not fall back on their traditional festival false front.