Deprogramming

10/29/98, Greek Theatre, Los Angeles, CA

SET 1: Julius, Roggae, Llama, Limb By Limb, Driver, Sleep, Frankie Says, Birds of a Feather, McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters > Character Zero

SET 2: Possum > The Moma Dance > Reba -> Walk Away -> Simple > Albuquerque, David Bowie

ENCORE: Something

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After a month of new-album campaigning and unusual show formats, Phish finally made it back to more comfortable turf. But this is a weird in-betweener of a tour opener: the only outdoor show on an otherwise indoor tour, at a smaller-than-demand venue (around 6,000 capacity at the time), and scheduled in front of the hotly-anticipated Vegas Halloween run. If it wasn’t for the historic and intimate setting, it might have been an older twin to the famously under-attended show in Salt Lake City on the other side of the Sin City stop.

Even in front of a “normal” crowd for the first time in 2.5 months, it takes Phish a while to shake off record promo mode. In the opening set, they play four songs from Story of the Ghost and two of the Bridge School acoustic debuts, as though it were a reshoot for Sessions on West 54th. What’s more, all of them are played well within the box – don’t be fooled by the double figures on Limb By Limb, it’s only that long because Fishman skimps on his solo outro and Trey asks him to do it again while he fetches his acoustic. 

All that playing to TV and multi-band festival crowds has painfully condensed most of the Story of the Ghost songs, and it turns out that economy is hard to unlearn. Birds of a Feather is the poster child for this phenomenon, making a startling decline since its Island Tour debut, the inverse of the usual Phish song settling-in. The first two versions in Nassau and Providence were expansive and challenging right out of the box, playing a central role in defining what appeared to be the band’s next direction.

But then the song backed off, punching the clock with a bunch of 6-8 minute versions over the summer and tightening up even further once it was designated as the Story of the Ghost single and played every couple shows. While Trey’s solo still offers an opportunity for some bite-size Belew, it never threatens to spill over its container, and thus loses some of the paranoiac fear the song was born with. BOAF will start to recover by the end of this tour and recapture its infant charm the next year, but around this time my tour friends and I dreaded those rat-a-tat opening chords almost as much as we groaned over a second-set Caspian. 

It’s all starting to feel like we’re a long, long way from the Island Tour in general. But halfway through the second set, the band remembers they’re playing for the already converted and can take a few risks. Midway through the Reba jam, they let the bottom fall out – Fishman drops the beat, they all stay on one chord, and Trey seeds a garden of loops. It sounds like a prolonged stretch of tension waiting to release by returning to the regularly-scheduled Reba jam, but it refuses to go back, drifting through the fog until rebuilding darker and heavier than Reba’s usual stew. Freed from going through the motions, they blast into the first Walk Away since the Bomb Factory Tweezerfest, and toss in a nifty, power-chord-driven -> to Simple as dessert*. 

Those seven formless minutes in Reba represent one of the main themes of the tour to come, and the rest of Phish’s 90s: entropy. If a main contributor to the 1997 transformation was Phish stripping its improvisation down to the atomic level, 1998 pushes that deconstruction one step further, into the quantum realm. It’s dangerous territory, particularly when it isn’t accompanied by the downhill momentum of Fall 1997 to keep the crowd moving and energized. But it’s about to be the driving creative force of Phish’s next two years. 

So The Greek, in its indecision, sets up the central conflict of the tour, with dueling impulses of celebrating their new album while also further exploring the experimental processes that created it. To put it another way, the Fall and NYE 98 runs are the only Phish shows between the release of Story of the Ghost and The Siket Disc, two LPs sourced from the same sessions but with extremely different outcomes. Swinging between those two poles will produce some frustrating shows and some fascinating moments, and The Greek’s abrupt transition from the order of October to the occasional chaos of November puts that tension back in play.

* - How this segment hasn’t been released on a Live Bait, I don’t understand…it’s not like the bench of great Phish L.A. moments is particularly deep!