Cram Session

5/23/00, New York City, NY, Roseland Ballroom

Photo from This Day in Phishstory

SET 1: AC/DC Bag, Wilson, First Tube*, Ya Mar > Mike's Song > Simple > It's Ice, When the Circus Comes, Back on the Train*, Gotta Jibboo, Taste, Sleeping Monkey

SET 2: Punch You in the Eye*, Twist, Waste, Piper*, You Enjoy Myself*, Run Like an Antelope, Train Song, Bug

ENCORE: Boogie On Reggae Woman > Cavern*

* - shown on Hard Rock Live

Listen

Phish had a lot of multi-tasking to do at the Roseland Ballroom. As the final date on their promotional May tour, it was the last chance to generate some buzz around Farmhouse, which they did through the traditional surprise small venue gig. This year’s version doubled as a recording for VH1’s Hard Rock Live, the band’s first longform television appearance since Sessions on West 54th (two blocks north) in 1998. And the relatively cozy setting was an opportune warm-up for the tiny rooms they’d soon be playing in Japan, another step down on the 99% shrinkage from Cypress to Shibuya.

If you listen to this show’s soundcheck, there was a fourth item on the to-do list that likely dwarfed all the others: this is still a band that needed to reconnect. Don’t salivate too hard over that 18-½ minute Driver…it’s actually five consecutive performances of the seemingly simple ditty as they struggle with the electric arrangement. The same goes for Ginseng, a song they’ve played more than 60 times by this point, with Fish tensely complaining, “it always seems really hesitant” halfway through the first take. They do two blues covers – always and forever a sign of the band trying to get back on the same page – and the “Jam” at the end is just Mike practicing his Farmhouse part and exploring its “No Woman No Cry” copyright infringement. It’s not the free-flowing improv or inside-joke session of the band’s most beloved soundchecks, it’s the sound of four guys who haven’t spent much time together lately.

Some of that discomfort leaks over to the main set, in front of the crowd and the cameras. Ya Mar is the highlight jam of the night, but they spend the first four minutes of the song in the wrong key, and the lengthy, DEG-infused improv out of it feels like an apology. Trey mumbles through a whole verse of Cavern and tries to turn it into a dirty limerick before remembering VH1 is a family channel. Chasing potential highlights for the eventual viewers at home results in two long sets with choppy flow; they forget to play Weekapaug! Even the crowd seems out of practice, chanting Wilson out of sync with the duh-nuhs.

Most of this awkwardness gets edited out for television, of course. In fact, editing abounds. Besides all the hyperactive cuts and dutch angles of peak MTV, the show blasphemously excises about 2 minutes out of First Tube and PYITE, in total disrespect to tension-building intros. And yet they let all 12 composed minutes of YEM play out before dramatically truncating the jam, maybe just because they wanted to showcase the trampoline routine. Later, the show comes back from commercial mid-Piper-jam to show off some Trey shredding, and pretty convincingly engineers a fake segue into that flubbed Cavern. It’s good song selection for the true heads, but a worrying sign for the commercial power of the new record; just a week after the all-Farmhouse radio sessions, Phish’s lengthiest TV taping of this promo run is two-thirds old stuff by runtime.

Despite all the abridging, due credit to the producers for including that three-minute stretch of Piper, the portion of the show that best captures the friction of Phish playing a club date in the year 2000. The Roseland isn’t all that small a venue, holding 3,200 people – a little more than half of Radio City. But the last time Phish played the room, their setlist was full of fussy prog, genre experiments, and quiet-loud dynamics. The band’s progression from clubs to arenas changed their songwriting; you'd never catch them playing direct, simply-constructed songs like First Tube and Piper in 1992. It changed their sound too, making it loud and heavy enough that playing a show called Hard Rock Live doesn’t seem as ill-fitting as it once would have.

And it sounds pretty good on TV too. At the height of the TRL fan wars between boy bands and rap-metal, the jet-engine pyrotechnics of First Tube and the loud part of Piper were much more likely to find new fans than Trey and Mike wiggling their hips to The Landlady. But was the monolithic, arena-sized approach the right tone for the few thousand fans who lucked their way into the Roseland? Beyond the visceral thrill of squeezing the massive millennial sound of Phish onto a small stage, they’re not really capitalizing on the rare intimate domestic date.

A subtle, smoldering jam like the previous night’s Ghost would have played well in a GA hall, as would any of the more arena ambient experiments of 1999. Next month in Japan, they’ll use the even smaller venues to push that sound as far as it would ever go within traditional two-setters. But at the Roseland, it’s business as usual, apart from the layered loopiness of the Ya Mar. Maybe it’s not the room, but the crowd – VH1 keeps showing manic front row fans, crazed by their good fortune in getting in, while Japan’s club crowds will be famously quiet. Tonight, maybe there’s just too much going on to settle in, with an overflowing to-do list on the band’s last night in America and on the hard sell.