Early Riser

7/29/98, Maryland Heights, MO, Riverport Amphitheatre

SET 1: Bathtub Gin, Dog Log, Foam, Fikus, Farmhouse > Vultures, Glide, Birds of a Feather

SET 2: Buried Alive -> If You Need a Fool, AC/DC Bag > The Lizards, Tube > Kung > Run Like an Antelope

ENCORE: Waste > Golgi Apparatus > Bittersweet Motel

Listen on phish.in (or the Gin in SBD on Live Phish 17)

When the very first song of the night is a completely perfect jam, where do you go next? I don’t think it’s too bold to declare that the Riverport Gin is the best show opener in Phish history*; Maybe I’m forgetting something, or showing my late 90s jamming style bias, but I’m going with it until proven otherwise. If Phish had played the first 24 minutes of this show before a Wilmington-style storm blew in and canceled the rest, I don’t think anyone would have gone home unhappy. At $25 face value, it’d be a steal. 

By minute 7 of the show, Trey is playing dopplered smoke rings for Mike to cartwheel through, gradually raising the intensity. By minute 11, they’re playing the kind of full-band intense peak it typically takes 2-½ hours of show – or 1-½ days of festival – to reach. When it subsides, Trey could have very easily brought back the Gin melody and ramped the energy back down to a more typical first set threshold, and it would’ve still been an excellent show opener we talk about often if it had faded out at 12:30.

But it doesn’t. Instead, there are 12 more minutes exploring one impossible groove. It’s dense, but nimble. Patient and single-minded – no fiddling with changes or tempo shifts or tension/release dynamics – but endlessly creative. Absurdly intricate, particularly in Fish’s cephalopod rhythms, but pure fun and humanly impossible to listen to while remaining still. It’s everything that’s great about the 1998 post-funk, one of the highest marks that that phase of Phish would ever reach. Goddamn, it’s good.

There’s no video, sadly, but according to message board lore the band took a rare mid-set bow when it was finished; I think the last time that happened might have been the 12/29/94 Bowie. Imagine getting caught in traffic or the security line, coming in late to the show, and seeing Phish doing that after the song you missed. It’s unfair to the rest of the show to start off that hot…possibly unfair to the rest of the tour to drop such a momentous jam on a Wednesday night in St. Louis. Even its inclusion as filler five years later on Live Phish 17 is cruel to the featured show, like “if you thought that was good, here’s how much better it got in just two weeks.” 

So what does Phish do to follow that accomplishment up? Why, Dog Log, of course. It’s the start of Bustout Show Part 2 – a pretty smart swerve given that it was going to be tremendously hard to top what they just played on pure improv alone. From the sublime straight to the ridiculous, the song about dodging dog doo-doo gets played straight for once and dedicated to Paul Languedoc, then Phish proceeds to rattle off four more songs in the first set making their 1998 debut, plus two more in the second, raising the total for this midweek I-70 series to 15. 

Perhaps the most significant of tonight’s revivals is, of all things, Farmhouse, which gets a warm crowd reaction despite going missing for 27 shows; after all, Phish had unveiled it on national television. Bookended by two odd songs from the Story of the Ghost sessions (Fikus and Vultures) that won’t be heard from as often, the more direct Farmhouse sounds like the sound of Phish’s future. For better or worse, it lacks the proggy twist and turns of its peers or the veterans Foam and Glide, also making their reappearance tonight – and played quite well, it should be said.

Phish tried another oblique strategy to follow up that Gin in the second set, this time opening with one of the more unlikely jams of the year in Buried Alive. After a three minute 2001 fakeout, the cartoonish oldie pratfalls in and refuses to leave after its usual brief runtime, getting more and more deranged and deconstructed until becoming absurd avant-garde, with the main theme occasionally bubbling back in like an intrusive thought. It’s the version of the song that best simulates the experience of finding yourself under six feet of dirt, I’d speculate. Just before you run out of air, your oxygen-starved brain plays an old Steve Earle song.

It’s good but, man, I’m still thinking about that Gin. If anything, the rest of this show makes a strong argument for when a bustout show might work best – after an early triumph, when you’re playing with house money, just dust off some deep cuts and maybe take a scripted song out for a long atypical stroll. By 1998, Phish is mature enough to know when it’s touched heaven, and isn’t afraid to take a bow and try a different game instead of going for a second, hubristic bite.

* - I should go back and add this claim to my litany of reasons why 1998 is the dang best.