Dude Imperfect

12/13/97, Albany, NY, Pepsi Arena

Photo by Steve Leonard

SET 1: Ya Mar > Axilla > Theme From the Bottom, Ginseng Sullivan, Strange Design, Sample in a Jar, Vultures, Tube, Good Times Bad Times

SET 2: NICU > Punch You in the Eye > Ghost > Mike's Song -> Llama, When the Circus Comes, Weekapaug Groove -> Catapult -> Weekapaug Groove, Harry Hood

ENCORE: My Soul, The Squirming Coil

Listen on phish.in

Fall 97 proper – without counting the New Year’s Run, which people typically do – ends on a partially ignominious note. Thanks to The Phish Book, it contains the only set of the tour we can verify for sure as a whiff for the band: tonight’s first set, which Trey identifies alongside “one of the sets in Champaign”* as the only performances he didn’t like across 21 shows. I think Richard Gehr included that quote as testimony to how pleased Phish were with the music of Fall 97, but I can’t help but fixate on the much-less-than-half-empty glass question. What was it about this show – or half of it, at least – that so disappointed Phish’s team captain?

The Ya Mar opener alone would seem to protect it from criticism. I’d always considered the abrupt half-time slowdown and ensuing jam to be a cocky declaration that they could transform any song they wanted by the end of the tour. But in light of Trey’s comment, it feels a little grouchy, especially after they battle over the tempo at the very start. Perhaps it was inevitable that the ban on backstage post-show analysis would squeeze some of the squabbling onstage instead, parents fighting in front of the kids.

But intra-band tension isn’t always a bad thing, musically speaking (8/10/97, please report to the office). I’d rather hear the passive-aggressive wandering of this jam than the cowfunk-by-numbers opening trio the previous night, and even if there’s more shooting than scoring over Ya Mar’s 19 minutes, you can still dance to their frustration. Sure, the rest of the set lacks a certain spark, but on the plus side, they remember Vultures exists, and the first Tube post-Dayton is no slouch, with a jam that dips into the darker, more mellow currents of the last few shows. Hey, at least they didn’t play My Soul! Now let me take a big drink of coffee and look at what they played in the tour’s final encore…

In between, set 2 looks like it could be heading the same unsatisfying direction with the opening acronym double of NICU and PYITE, but the band rallies for a fitting final hurrah over the next hour. It’s predominantly a Ghost > Mike’s Groove that neatly summarizes the advances of the previous month without just replicating them, innovating by doing breakdown solo jams…but spookier. It even introduces a retroactive term for those stop-start isolations with “bring in the dude,” a really fun bout of banter that fortuitously happened in the tour’s last show, preventing them from running the gag into the ground, “____’s House” style.

Another one by Steve Leonard.

The Ghost > Mike’s sound at first blush like a victory lap for cowfunk, but they’re really a celebration of the hard-won democracy Phish unlocked over the last ten months. They’re in the running for Michael Gordon’s finest 25 minutes ever; he dominates this Ghost, unbalancing every breakdown with a lingering, unresolved note and then grabbing the jam by its collar with a raunchy bassline at 6:15, answered by a perfectly-timed bweeooooo – one of those Fall 97 micro-moments forever etched into my brain. He also gets cajoled into soloing at the start of the “bring in the dude” hijinks, and chooses an effect that sounds like chewing barbed wire, then keeps the rest of the segment trapped in a deeply ominous groove.

Later, Page gets his own turn and does the Pagiest thing ever, dropping out of that intense, prowl to play a timid little electric clav part that sounds like the “Where It’s At” hook. The dynamics of this jam are incredible – even after they stop doing the solo rotation, they get stuck on a heavy blues riff similar to the Worcester Wolfman’s (though thankfully more concise), then jump off a cliff into 90 seconds of gorgeous, “In A Silent Way” jazz fusion, then crank back up on a dime into speed metal, psychedelicized with maximum Leslie speaker. Not since the New Haven Tweezer has a jam more inspired me to run straight through a brick wall.

By the time they get to Weekapaug, on the other side of Llama and When The Circus Comes, they sound a little worn out…but fuck, so am I. Hood is the right call for those tired bones, and it’s one that’s more for the people in the room than the people listening 25 years later, with a long lights-out-and-glowsticks segment that we can only experience vicariously through the bursts of crowd noise and the clatter of sticks bouncing off Page’s poor piano. It’s fitting that maybe the most-analyzed tour in Phish history ends in a moment that’s impossible to scrutinize from afar.

That second set stretch is more than enough to make up for whatever dissatisfaction Trey was feeling about the first half, and they almost have to vaudeville-hook the band off the stage at the end of Coil to let Page send the fans home with his solo. Okay, it would’ve been nice for them to pitch a perfect show to cap off the tour, but really, imperfections and comeback victories are all part of the Fall 97 magic. Plus, they only have two weeks off before they get another chance to give this pivotal year the sendoff it deserves, finally bringing the New Phish back to where the old version was crowned two years earlier.

* - It’s gotta be the first one, right? He better not be dissing my beloved Makisupa sonic tsunami.