Dynamic Difficulty

10/28/95, Auburn Hills, MI, The Palace of Auburn Hills

SET 1: AC/DC Bag > Mound, Timber (Jerry The Mule), Uncle Pen, Sample in a Jar, The Lizards, Billy Breathes, Acoustic Army, Prince Caspian, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Maze, Theme From the Bottom > Scent of a Mule, You Enjoy Myself, Strange Design > Frankenstein > Chalk Dust Torture

ENCORE: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Listen on phish.in

I am terrible at video games. They passed me by two or three consoles ago, becoming way too difficult for my aging Generation X hand-motor skills. I could avoid them for a while, but now that I have kids, I’m forced to grapple with my inability to navigate a first-person perspective or 3D environment every time my sons want to play a new game with me.

But there’s a video game innovation that has made at least a handful of games playable for these old fingers: dynamic difficulty, games that adjust themselves to be harder or easier based on the player’s skill. In my rare kid-free (or Phish-free) moments when I can play a couple games of Playstation baseball, the game reacts to my performance and gets harder when I string together a few strikeouts or easier when I give up back-to-back bombs. It’s humbling when I get knocked back down to Rookie after a cold streak, but at least the game remains playable.

Occasionally, after I have bumped the level up or down a notch with my actions, there’s a lag where the game is either too hard or too easy until the two of us adjust. That awkward gap is where this show finds Phish, in their debut at the recently-demolished home of the Detroit Pistons, The Palace of Auburn Hills. Now, the Palace happens to be the site of not only my favorite Phish show, but also my favorite live music I ever personally experienced; if civilization holds together for two more years, you can expect a really long essay on that anniversary. But two Palace visits in advance of that magical evening, Phish sounds totally outmatched by the venue.

Capacity-wise, the Palace isn’t out of step with some of the tour’s largest venues so far; in fact, to my surprise, it’s roughly the same as Assembly Hall in Champaign six days earlier. But as many players and coaches know, going from college to the pros ain’t easy. I’ve been in both venues, and the vibe is completely different: Assembly Hall a low-ceilinged, dense round room, The Palace a spread-out, glass-and-steel airplane hanger. Despite its illustrious Phish history (99 is pretty swell too) and the laundry list of superstars who made it their Detroit-area stop from the late 80s into the 00s, The Palace wasn’t a great venue for concerts, with only the most capable arena acts able to tame its cavernous interior.

Phish will eventually become one of those conquerors, but they’re not there yet. It’s not a bad night, but their Palace debut is as stiff as we’ve heard them since they reached the Midwest, playing the least remarkable show since Montana. The sets contain plenty of the tour’s heavy hitters — Antelope, YEM, Theme, Maze — but none of the performances match their nearest neighbors. Even the tapers sound out of their element — the recording linked above is boomy and washed out, with a nearby chomper singing along obnoxiously, and it makes the arena sound half-empty.

As I’ve said before, the path of least resistance when moving up a tier to the nation’s biggest venues would be to just play faster and louder. Phish has largely avoided that easy option, supercharging their sound for higher ceilings but preserving just enough weirdness and texture to avoid dumbing it down. Tonight perhaps offers a glimpse of the alternate dimension where their fortitude isn’t so strong, and they keep pushing harder and harder to keep the attention of a non-sellout crowd — that 7-song second set may look impressive on paper, but it’s lacking in dynamics, apart from the Mule Duel and a Strange Design. By the end of the set, they fall back on that old-time rock and roll: Frankenstein and WMGGW, with their own hard-rocker Chalk Dust in between.

One thing I’ll grant the second set is that it maintains a consistently spooky atmosphere; you can always count on Phish to bring the seasonal flavor in October. Any set that opens with Maze is going to have dark energy, and what the YEM lacks in improvisation, it makes up in atmosphere, with Trey singing an eerie, unidentifiable melody (to Marley?) over the ambient section of YEM and then making some awful guitar screeches in the transition to the vocal jam. Three out of four phish.net reviewers describe the second set as “scary” or “terrifying,” and it’s easy to imagine how better sound quality and witnessing the light show play in that big space would make it all go down like a fun-dumb slasher flick.

But in the broader context of this tour, it’s a temporary dip in an otherwise steady ascent. Phish will figure out how to port their increasingly potent mix of widescreen sound and quirkiness to NBA home courts in...less than a month, give or take. On return trips to the Palace, they’ll feel right at home, but for tonight, very briefly, the venue difficulty has outpaced their ability.

[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]