Defrost Cycle

7/15/99, Holmdel, NJ, PNC Bank Arts Center

SET 1: Punch You in the Eye > Ghost > Farmhouse, Horn > Poor Heart > Axilla > Theme From the Bottom, I Didn't Know, The Sloth, You Enjoy Myself

SET 2: Meatstick > Split Open and Melt -> Kung -> Jam > Bouncing Around the Room, Chalk Dust Torture

ENCORE: Brian and Robert, Frankenstein

Listen

The nice thing about starting slow is that you create lots of headroom to speed up. Phish wastes no time proving this principle tonight. The second song Ghost doesn’t waiver from a single melodic theme, it just gradually accelerates, from a spooky creep to a panicked sprint, over the course of 16 minutes. It lights a (very long) fuse that burns for the entire set, including surprisingly feisty versions of Farmhouse and Theme and a YEM that pretty much repeats the exact same downhill momentum trick. 

And if we zoom out, the first half of the second set kind of pulls the same slow-to-fast move at a higher scale. Three minutes in, Trey’s already apologizing for starting a set with Meatstick - “We’ve got a lot of music left to come, so don’t worry if I start talking very early in the set.” But after a quite lengthy explanation of their plan for the world-record attempt that weekend in Oswego, they take their newest absurdity for a long stroll, breaking it down to a gossamer funk threaded with synth and guitar drones before (you guessed it) steadily picking up the pace and dissolving into…

Well, was it supposed to be 2001 or Melt? For the first of two times this summer, Mike hijacks Fishman’s Billy Cobham drumbeat and throws down Split Open and Melt’s bassline instead. It’s a unilateral decision that changes the course of the show – a long, spaced-out 2001 would have likely steered it towards Charlotte’s stargazing mood. Instead, we get a Melt for the ages, one that applies all of the new sonic gizmos of the new year to a more aggressively weird purpose.

It’s an impressively disorienting jam. The band barely abides by the usual Melt jam rules, abandoning the three-note punctuation almost immediately. The intensifying tempo motif of the night so far suddenly cracks; for a couple woozy minutes around the 7th and 8th minutes, Fishman slows down and speeds up without the rest of the band following, to somewhat nauseating effect. After a rousing Kung, they chase that Camden Chalkdust dragon once again and get awfully close; Mike works very hard to bring it back to Melt but it never quite sticks*. Instead, the post-Kung jam is just pure open music, astonishingly noisy and deep.

If you want to hear what I’m on about with the “1999 SBDs are a revelation” point I keep making, this is the segment to listen to. Trey fills every corner of the mix with loops, on both guitar and keyboard, many of which are undetectable on the AUD. At 20:25, the attempted Camden reclaim collapses entirely to Trey synth, with all his favorite effects – the squeaky-toy noise, the drum machine beat, an 80s pop bassline – accounted for over a leftover guitar drone. It could’ve killed the jam cold like the ghost of his old mini-kit, but Fish will only abide TAB tricks for so long before bullying Trey right back into face-ripper mode. At 22:45, Trey samples his own feedback while the rest of the band plays simmering, sinister piano jazz; it’s Phish doing a giallo soundtrack.

Even if the set ends in a bit of a whimper, this Melt marks the third jam in a week that I’d consider top-tier Phish, after the Virginia Beach Fee and the Camden Chalkdust. Those are three jams of a very different character, and three that really don’t sound like they could’ve happened in any year other than 1999. Which begs the question: is the tour overall also tracking the slow-to-fast dynamic? By the band’s usual touring itinerary, it’s still spring training – this is the 11th show of the year, which puts it equivalent to late in both the ‘98 summer Europe tour and the winter Europe run in ‘97. 

In those years, they could tinker with the sound they were chasing before they got in front of home country crowds with higher expectations. In 1999, they had to work things out on the bigger stages, and I think that’s why we’re getting a lot of shows with single-dose highlights, but not a complete wall-to-wall classic along the lines of 7/17/98 or 7/21/97 right out of the gate. Perhaps if the summer schedule had been flipped and their Japan fling came before America’s turn, it would’ve coalesced faster. But if you have the patience to watch it come together in public slow-to-fast-motion, it eventually pays off.

* - That said, I would still designate this a 31-minute Melt > Kung > Melt; the liberal usage of “Jam” in 1999 setlists is too loose by my book.