Elimination Rounds

12/30/99, Big Cypress, FL, Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation

SET 1: Water in the Sky, Light Up Or Leave Me Alone > Suzy Greenberg, Corinna, Limb By Limb, Che Hun Ta Mo, Big Alligator, Possum, Farmhouse, Ghost, Ya Mar, Character Zero

SET 2: Wilson > The Curtain > Tweezer -> Taste, Meat, Golgi Apparatus, Wolfman's Brother, Gotta Jibboo > Harry Hood > Good Times Bad Times

SET 3: Chalk Dust Torture, The Moma Dance > Run Like an Antelope, The Sloth, When the Circus Comes, Mike's Song > Simple -> I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove

ENCORE: Boogie On Reggae Woman > Tweezer Reprise

Listen

Che hun ta mo, loyal readers. We’ve survived the trauma of the traffic jam and a tumultuous year of Phish and pitched our tent on sovereign Seminole territory, ready for two days of musical gluttony. As we entered the circular concert field on Thursday afternoon, we still didn’t know precisely what we were in for – “the band will return shortly before midnight and play until sunrise,” was all the Schvice promised. But it wasn’t until Trey’s first set banter that we found out the next night would truly be a continuous marathon set, complete with port-a-potties in the stage wings.

Those details inspired one of the festival’s two great cheers, the sound of 75,000 attendees’ simultaneous wish fulfillment. But it also put this night in an awkward spot, leaving it as almost a prelude to the next night’s main event. Three-set festival shows are usually the apex of the Phish calendar, the ultimate smorgasbord of music. At Big Cypress, 12/30 was just the appetizer; the next night’s entertainment would be almost twice as long, with no breaks.

It also created a bittersweet dynamic where everything that the band played tonight was (likely) ruled out for inclusion in the one-of-a-kind all-night set. With 7+ hours to fill, it was almost guaranteed that every jammed-out song – if they played songs at all – would get an extra-large treatment, and we suffered through our time on Alligator Alley dreaming of hour-long Tweezers, overstuffed Mike’s Grooves, and maybe, just maybe, a full Gamehendge*. They had to play something in that “normal” show on 12/30, but the opening notes of each song inspired an unusual mix of joy and disappointment that I’ve never felt at any other Phish show.

The band, wisely, didn’t care. I’m guessing they hadn’t really planned any of the setlist for the following night’s sleepover, beyond the Meatstick midnight gag and Disease + fireworks. They had come this far by leaving setlists to chance and whim, why change it for the biggest show of all?

By letting the chips fall where they may, they accidentally turned the 12/30 setlist into a pretty neat retrospective of their long path to the present milestone. After the obligatory Water in the Sky opener – the only thing more predictable would have been Slave – they reach way, way back to their days as an eccentric, deep-track loving bar band**. In only the first four songs, there’s not one but two 1,000+-show bustouts, both last played a decade prior, doubling down on the previous night’s semi-public revival of The Ballad of Curtis Loew.

And they both sounded wonderful, with “Light Up or Leave Me Alone” by Traffic (get it?) dropping into a thick Jibboo jam and Taj Mahal’s “Corrina” providing the meditative moment we all needed after the stressful trip in. While the time allotted to host Chief Jim Billie was very gracious, it also tripped the set back into extended soundcheck territory, with the exception of Ghost – the first song that might have fared better in the middle of the night than being burned in an early evening warm-up.

The band regrouped after the break, winding the clock forward to what feels like a classic theater-era set, elegant and proggy, despite a few anachronisms. It’s anchored by a Wilson > Curtain > Tweezer > Taste sequence that’s quintessential Phish, even if it never happened before and hasn’t happened since. Wilson may have quashed those Gamehendge rumors, but c’mon, it’s Wilson in a field full of ten thousand screaming maniacs. And while no Tweezer length records would be broken this weekend, the Big Cypress version would suffice as a model of the 1999 style, with a long, patient fade out to a few minutes of arena festival ambient.

The Good Times Bad Times closer tees up a third set that nudges the timeline towards the early arena days and heavy hard rock mode, finally escape-valving some of the surplus energy built up on the drive down to south Florida. And it eventually breaks through to the first truly transcendent jam of the festival: a Mike’s Song that moves from Immigrant Song teases to Nazgûl shrieks to a Y2K digi-noise apocalypse, all under the cover of an immensely evil cloud of fog. Removed from context, it might be my favorite jam of the two nights, but it’s also an intense and dark strain of Phish that was probably wise to leave out of the all-night set, for the sake of everyone’s mental health.

That it took four hours to reach that breakthrough jam says a lot about the nature of this show. In theory, the 30th could have been as unpredictable as the following night; in sovereign native territory, there’s no curfew to worry about. But it’s a safe show by December ‘99 standards, light on exploratory jamming and all wrapped up with the expected Tweeprise by the downright conservative time of 12:20.

So it’s kind of absurd that 12/30/99 hangs around in the top ten fan-rated shows ever; I’m not even sure it’s a top ten Phish festival show at this point. Instead of a tour de force, it’s a paragon of pacing, a band that loves to play with tension and release slowly turning the anticipation dial and keeping their powder dry for the big gimmick. Because by the end of the decade, Phish was smart enough to know: even after you’ve convinced 80,000 people to drive down to a Florida swamp for New Year’s, you still gotta leave ‘em wanting more.

* - On New Year’s Eve? That’s unpossible.

** - Lining up with the campground street system, which name-checked historical venues such as The Front, Amy’s Farm, and the Colonial Theatre.