Dream Weavers

8/3/98, Noblesville, IN, Deer Creek Music Center

SET 1: Rhinoceros, Halley's Comet > I Didn't Know, Ride Captain Ride, Cars Trucks Buses, The Moma Dance, Strange Design, Character Zero

SET 2: Gumbo, Axilla > Limb By Limb, Meat > Hold Your Head Up > Bike > Hold Your Head Up, Tube > The Wedge

ENCORE: When the Circus Comes > Run Like an Antelope

Listen on phish.in

The second night of Deer Creek has several notable happenings: 

• the debut of Rhinoceros discussed yesterday, 

• a rare Double Nancy; one of only two times it’s happened in two consecutive songs, with the other being a 1988 Goddard show featuring Richard “Nancy” Wright himself, 

• Further 80s throwbacks with the revival of Ride Captain Ride after nearly six years and Bike after two,

• Which meant…two vacuum solos! After only honkin’ on the Electrolux once in the first 7 months of the year. “Some nights you can’t get away from the vacuum…”

But personally, 8/3/98 is most memorable for including my favorite jam of the entire summer tour. Yes, there’s a jam I like better than the Alpine Tweezer, though one is definitely apple-flavored and the other an orange fruit. To my ears, this jam is the best summation of most of the improvisational threads I’ve heard all year: the further evolution of cowfunk, the focus on repetition and iterative melody, the optimization of the band’s four-way communication. 

It’s testament to the excellence of this show that I could be describing two different performances, both of which have received the SBD track release nod. I’ll show my cards – it’s not the 20-minute Halley’s Comet that comes in hot on the heels of the Smashing Pumpkins cover. That is a superb jam, moving through several distinct sections and moods. But my preference is for its second set partner, a jam that is shorter and more direct, with absolutely no fat on it.

I guess I did figure out the title of “Rhinoceros” (if not the spelling)

I’m talking about the 8/3/98 Gumbo, one of the most interesting Phish jams based on how little ground it covers. Once the initial solo is done, Trey quickly arrives at his favorite lick of the summer — I’ve heard it everywhere this tour (though I’m bad at keeping track) and it even shows up earlier in this very show in both the Halley’s and Moma. phish.net labels at least one instance of it in this jam as a tease of Manteca, but I think that’s purely accidental. Instead, it’s an original ten-note melody, 1-2-3-4, 123456 — listen for yourself at 5:30, and get ready to hear it about 200 more times. 

Ok, that’s not precisely true; this isn’t a jolly version of the locked-groove Worcester Wolfman’s. But Trey never strays far from the initial lick, playing a hundred variations on it – adding an embellishment, returning home, adding notes, subtracting, reassembling. At 9:13, he inverts the melody and stays within that new lick’s parameters for several minutes, but you can still hear the original line in the negative space. At 13:25, he finally jumps ship to a new, more contemplative melody while Mike stays rooted in the flipped riff. Then, just when you think the jam is going to leap into a completely new direction – BAM, back to the original riff, louder and faster and octaved up until a finish so clean that it sounds pre-written.

That’s a pretty amazing display of restrained, inventive guitar. But it wasn’t until the unfogged lens of the SBD came out on Live Bait 7 that I realized what Mike is doing, and my love of this jam grew three sizes more. There’s that old saying about Ginger Rogers being underrated because she did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards in heels. Well, in this jam, Mike is Ginger Rogers, and the way he plays an ever-changing, never wrong-footed melodic counterpoint to Trey throughout the entire jam is just brilliant. “Counterpoint” might not even be the right word; hearing both parts together, it’s impossible to tell who originates each successive idea, or who is complementing who. Together, they’re weaving a spider web for ten minutes, never getting tangled.

Meanwhile, Fishman keeps a steady but never repetitive hand – it occurs to me that what Trey is doing with his simple little lick is what Fishman does all the time with drum parts – and Page wisely chooses to stick close to his drummer, providing a second percussive instrument on the clavinet. Three melodic voices ducking and weaving in this fashion may have been oversalting, so instead he’s adding accent flavors: DJ scratches, chunky texture, and the occasional fill when the Trey/Mike shared brain pauses for a breath.

These are elements you can hear in practically any Phish show or song if you listen close enough (Trey and Mike kinda do it again in the Antelope intro), but rarely are they so purely distilled. One thing that’s distinctly un-1998 about the 8/3 Gumbo is that there are no loops and hardly any effects; Trey and Mike execute their choreography with clean tones, and Page keeps it simple with clav and Rhodes. It’s the perfect improvisation to illustrate how Phish learned that less is more, and then realized that they could do more with less. It’s essential learning for any aspiring jambands.