Event Horizon

9/29/99, Memphis, TN, Pyramid Arena

SET 1: Runaway Jim > Free, Driver, Taste, Dirt, Nellie Kane, Stash -> I Can't Turn You Loose Jam, Theme From the Bottom > Tweezer Reprise

SET 2: Gotta Jibboo > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Down with Disease, Billy Breathes, Back on the Train, Mike's Song > Catapult > Mike's Song > Kung > Mike's Song > I Didn't Know, Weekapaug Groove

ENCORE: Cities

Listen

We talk a lot about how trying to predict Phish is a fool’s game. But I think the safest bet ever was that the show in the 32-story pyramid-shaped building was going to be a classic. I wish I had been aware at the time that the Pyramid was an actual 3D triangular structure and not just the name of a local bank or business; I would’ve strongly considered the 700-mile drive down from Ann Arbor on a Wednesday, and been handsomely rewarded for my efforts.

Because not only did Phish live up to the cosmic weirdness of the venue, they played the jam that is the true apex of the 1999 sound inside its sloping, stainless steel walls. Heard in its full multi-track glory, tonight’s 2001 is the single strongest one-song argument for Trey’s obsession with digital delay loops and miniature keyboards, the full realization of the sound he has been chasing all year. I know I said pretty much the same thing about Chula Vista, but while that night showed the elasticity of his ‘99 approach across an entire show, this 2001 makes a highly-condensed case in 21-1/2 unfiltered minutes. 

Last year, I argued that 2001 was the perfect vessel for the more ambient sounds the band started playing with in 1998, and not just because of the psychedelic-astronaut associations. The Deodato arrangement provides an open playground that can be stretched as far as they want, with only a couple composed peaks (if they remember to play both) that need to be hit. The band didn’t always have the patience to fully realize that space, but when they did it usually resulted in a year-defining jam – three of them across 1998 alone. 

After an auspicious start in Charlotte, the song remained inconsistent across 1999. Which is a little ironic, given that Phish performances of the song practically created the TAB model long before it was a glimmer in Trey’s eye. Think about it – a steady drumbeat and simple bassline (at least to start), a hospitable environment for experimenting with texture and tones, a scripted climax that is basically Richard Strauss’ own First Tube. For six years, 2001 was training Phish to play songs like Sand and Gotta Jibboo without them even knowing it, like Mr. Miyagi making Daniel-san wax his car. 

In Memphis, the students return the favor to their teacher, lending back the tricks they’ve acquired in playing Trey’s solo material all month. The knowledge transfer is most clearly heard in how Gotta Jibboo tees up tonight’s 2001* – I’m not so sure we’d have gotten such a monster version if it had been in its traditional set-opening slot. The fourth Phish Jibboo is the shortest yet, really only 7:30 after Brad Sands announces that “Doug Nug” has won the first-set contest. But it’s long enough for Trey to set up the first of many, many, so many loops, a real bottle rocket of a bweeoooo that Page immediately complements with some shimmering stun-phaser noises of his own. 

Trey turns his whistler loop off to close out the Jibboo vocals, but flips it right back on to cue the start of 2001. And then he starts summoning an army of digital-delay broomsticks on guitar and keyboard beneath screeching, stuttering feedback. I’m not sure how many loop buttons Trey actually has to work with on stage, but this jam seems to max it out – he banks at least a dozen weird sounds and then spends the next ten minutes alternating and layering them like he’s playing Fishman’s 3.0 sampler pad instead of his “proper” instruments. 

It sounds glorious on another Altschiller masterpiece, with insane noises pinging around the full mental soundstage in exquisite balance with the menacing rhythm section and Page’s own textural contributions on Rhodes and synth (mein gott, that polyphonic swell at the 11-minute mark). Mixed properly, I don’t even mind that there are about 9 different digital Treys playing in and around the three human musicians onstage. And with bass-and-drums locked into an unrelenting groove, the space travel slowly becomes a Satanic ritual, particularly when Trey starts mashing his “DIE-DIE-DIE” sample 8 minutes in. The Memphis crowd would be hiding under their seats, Providence Bowie-style, if it wasn’t so simultaneously danceable.

After 12 minutes, Trey makes his guitar sound like a guitar for the first time the whole jam, and cues up the first peak. The interregnum is more sparse at first, letting Mike’s space bass rattle the inner walls of the pyramid for a while before Trey starts a solo with his reverse-delay at its maximum glitchiest, playing all the notes he neglected to play in the jam’s first half. It could go on forever, as far as I’m concerned, deeper and deeper into shoegazey madness, but they eventually steer into Disease where Trey can continue his frenzied geyser blast in more traditional tones.

That Disease is pretty great, the Mike’s – with breakdowns filled in by Catapult, Kung, and I Didn’t Know instead of funk solos – is clever, the first set’s key-of-D contest** is fun, I like hearing the fans singing “Happy Birthday” to Trey one night early***. But the gravity of that mammoth 2001 crushes everything in its orbit; I’d be just as happy listening to it on a loop for three hours. That this is the only Phish show in the Pyramid before it became a sporting goods store is a crime; the Sphere, the Pyramid, and the Rock Lititz cube could’ve been the 3-D geometric tour circuit of our dreams. 

* - The other foreshadowing can be found in the first set’s Free, which has an insane loops-and-keys “solo” including a bit of the “DIE-DIE-DIE” effect.

** - The one I misattributed to Boise…Phishcrit management regrets the error.

*** - The “Happy Birthday” singing throughout this show was the result of a fan campaign. Reader Nicholas Vescovo shares that one of the fan organizers was a young Andrew VanWyngarden, who later co-founded MGMT.