Do You Know Where You Are?

7/1/97, Amsterdam, NED, Paradiso

SET 1: Ghost, Horn, Ya Mar, Limb By Limb -> Ain't Love Funny, Saw It Again, Dirt, Reba, Dogs Stole Things

SET 2: Jam -> Timber (Jerry the Mule) > Bathtub Gin -> Cities > Jam, Loving Cup > Slave to the Traffic Light

ENCORE: When the Circus Comes

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In the wee hours of July 1st, 1997, Trey and his close friend Chris Cottrell stumbled around the Amsterdam streets high on acid and ecstasy. While using one of the city’s public toilets, the pair were suddenly struck by a shared hallucination, seeing 100-foot worms swimming through the canals. “I looked sheepishly at Chris and sort of mumbled, ‘I think you know where you are…’ and he replied, ‘...you’re on the back of the worm!’,” Trey wrote in his remembrance of Cottrell, whose death inspired Ghosts of the Forest. By showtime, it had become an in-joke call-and-response, a mantra for two nights at Amsterdam’s Paradiso that would lock in the 1997 sound. 

I don’t know that 1997 necessarily needed an origin myth, and the timing doesn’t quite line up; we’ve been charting the gradual assembly of the New Phish for several months now. But the worm story fits so well. Up to this point in time, Phish’s favorite metaphor for their improvisational magic was a borrowed one: Santana’s theory of “The Hose,” music flowing through the musician and spraying the crowd with spiritual bliss. But there’s something about 1997 Phish that isn’t quite appropriate for places of worship, an earthiness, a snotty sensuality, and more than a hint of evil. Riding an undulating sandworm through the Red Light District like you’re Kyle McLachlan in both Dune and Blue Velvet simultaneously – that’s Phish in 1997.

The June Europe shows – festival appearances aside – inched ever closer to this vision. But it’s the first two nights of July, back at the site of the winter tour’s most visionary show, where it’s fully realized. It’s not a perfect split, but July 1st is more on the dance party side while July 2nd digs deeper into the dark. But between these four sets, available in all their SBD glory on the Amsterdam box set, the worm has officially turned on Phish’s reinvention, and there’s no going back. 

7/1 starts with the band’s realization that they don’t need to ease into their new funk persona, they can just dive right in from the start. For the first time, Ghost opens a show, and the song seizes that opportunity by flying past the 20-minute mark. It cycles through several flavors of funk jam, pausing at the 12th minute for a melodic interlude, then cannonballing right back into the funk deep end. After this performance, Ghost is no longer just one of the new songs, it’s a mission statement – they’ll give it the honor of the opener slot again in three weeks when they return to the United States.

Poster scan from Larry James.

The second set’s counterpart is Cities, the once-rare Talking Heads cover already getting its third airing in Europe this summer. Since the 80’s, Phish’s version of Cities has always been much slower than the itchy, anxious source material. But tonight’s version, coming out of a playful but sharp-edged Bathtub Gin, pours molasses on the song, a strut so slow Trey has time to fact-check his lyrical flub in the second verse and still stay on beat. It’s the antithesis of the New Haven Tweezer, a tempo challenge to see how long the famously hyperactive members of Phish can stay at this slowcore heart rate. Each and every note feels important, and they’re not blasting out of a hose, but in a slow, syrupy drip. 

In support of my springboard theory, it inspires 18 minutes of completely freeform jamming that have little to do with funk. It maintains that relaxed pace but takes it into outer orbit, Trey layering soft feedback and two-note loops pushing against the jam’s meter, Mike playing a bass solo, Fishman hitting cymbals and the rims of his drums. It gets darker and darker until Trey reveals this to be the back of the worm too, the fun, wiggly dance party turning suddenly into maggots feeding on a decomposing skeleton. It continues with a sequence of slightly demented, carnivalesque music that interpolates “When The Saints Go Marching In” and “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” naturally, then finishes up with a big rock-and-roll climax, unleashing the silo’s worth of tension that had been stored up in the preceding half hour.

And, I mean, this is it, right? It’s pretty much my ideal version of Phish, it’s all there. Occasionally, a reader will lightly chastise me for seeing everything in Phish’s mid-90s through the prism of what they’d eventually become in 1997, and they’re not wrong. But tonight’s Ghost and Cities are the kind of jams I hope to hear every time I see Phish, or hit play on a new show: jams with a narrative arc, that place irresistibly fun grooves next to abstract sonic exploration in a way that sounds completely natural. The thrill of spontaneous creation, of four musicians who know each other as well as themselves and yet keep surprising and challenging one another.

There’s still farther to go, and this show contains plenty of exciting easter eggs: in the gorgeous ambient jam between Limb By Limb and Ain’t Love Funny, the subtle infiltration of Reba by Page’s synthesizer, the decision to start the second set with Fish on electric piano (sounding like he’s about to bust into a Supertramp song), or the manic intensity of the Timber and Gin jams. All of these elements will be further embellishments for Phish to explore over the next three years. But for now, the foundation is finally finished, and the real building can begin, on the back of the worm.