Evolution By Jerks

11/17/97, Denver, CO, McNichols Arena

SET 1: Tweezer, Reba, Train Song, Ghost > Fire

SET 2: Down with Disease -> Olivia's Pool > Johnny B. Goode -> Jesus Just Left Chicago, When the Circus Comes, You Enjoy Myself

ENCORE: Character Zero

Listen on Spotify (or the streaming service of your choosing)

Back in the early days of this project, when I was using it to experiment with a new-fangled website called “Twitter,” I liked to explain why I was doing this show-by-show journey with a metaphor from my secret identity as a science guy: punctuated equilibrium. Popularized by biologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould, the punctuated equilibrium theory argued that evolution doesn’t happen at a steady, constant pace. Instead, it spends long periods of time in slow, incremental stasis, with only small genetic changes occurring beneath the surface. But every so often, usually due to some environmental disruption, evolution shifts into hyperdrive for a short burst of speciation. 

Listening to every Phish show from ‘93 onward and writing about it on various social platforms was a way to map this phenomenon onto my favorite band’s evolutionary process. As I say a lot, the most special thing about Phish was and is their refusal to stand still – for most of their nearly 40 years, they have been restlessly changing. But that change doesn’t happen at the same rate throughout their career, it ebbs and flows. Hearing every show instead of just the consensus highlights allowed me to look for those subtle alterations in the (seeming) stasis eras, the accumulation of new and hidden genetic variants that were ready to explode into view when a dramatic catalyst occurred.

It’s hardly controversial to say that 11/17/97 is one such moment of violent punctuation. It’s the 10th-highest rated show on phish.net, the top rank of any performances released in the original Live Phish series. Its neighbors on that list reinforce how important it was – in the weeks following, Phish played the #2, #3, #9, #17, and #20 shows as well. It is, without hyperbole, one of the most pivotal shows not just of 1997, or the 90s, but of Phish’s entire career. You can fairly divide Phish history into pre-11/17/97 and post-11/17/97.

All the evidence suggests that the band liked this show just as much as the fans did. It may have taken five years for it to get that official release nod, but if they hadn’t released their “declaration of a new era” live recording twenty days prior, tonight’s first set could’ve worked just as well. You wouldn’t even have to edit it down; like a lot of this tour’s classic sets, it fits easily on a single disc. But while the inspiration of Hamburg was only recaptured intermittently over the summer, the breakthrough in Denver stuck hard – in a broad sense, almost every show for the rest of the year will sound a lot like this one.

“We played the tape of that show almost every night of the tour afterward,” Trey told Richard Gehr in The Phish Book. “In a sense we became our own influence, which has never happened before.”

I think we can stipulate that this show is excellent. It is known. It’s more interesting to talk about why it’s so good, and why it was the tipping point in the late 90s reinvention of Phish. 

The obvious place to start is the start, which unlike the previous three shows, wastes absolutely no time before diving into the deep end. I wrote about the effectiveness of this cut-to-the-jam-chase phenomenon back on the second night of Amsterdam, and in both cases, I think it’s a move that’s easier to pull off on the back end of a two-show run. Instead of a cold restart after an overnight bus ride, night 2 in Denver picks up the baton directly from the strong-but-uneven second set the previous night and immediately ups the ante. From afar, the whole run feels a bit like a four-set show, with tonight’s second set radiating strong “victory lap encore” energy for the first half of its 80 minutes.

Even for a younger, more resilient Phish, you can’t overestimate the effect of minimizing travel and new-venue adjustments. Phish’s ascendant box office clout meant that Fall 97 would feature five multi-night arena stops in its relatively short calendar, compared to only one (at MSG) the previous autumn and two non-festival stops in the summer. Not every second night would top the first, but even knowing you don’t have a long drive ahead of you can freshen the legs. And the added geographic and musical continuity heightened the sense that Fall 97 was one long, uninterrupted party, a euphoric, month-long run-on sentence.

It’s also unlikely that this transformation could have happened outdoors in the summer. The major advances in Europe happened in small, smoky clubs, and Phish audibly struggled with importing that sly, dangerous vibe to the anonymous and enormous outdoor sheds of America. Phish playing outside in the summer, with some notable exceptions, loves to ease in, waiting for the sun to set and the light show to rev up before taking big risks. Arena shows in the fall provide two sets in the dark, and if the rooms were much larger than in Europe, well, the sound Phish had discovered was pretty large too. 

Cue the Tweezer, which accomplishes nothing less than establishing the song’s new standard jam format up to the current day. No more slowdown broken-clock gimmickry, no more freeform marathons (okay, maybe a few more), now Tweezer has reached its mature but still infinitely flexible form, shifting from funk-rock to cowfunk to arena-rock and occasionally, as in this version, back to cowfunk once again. The final minutes of this one – a special yachtier brand of cowfunk with Page on spacey Rhodes instead of the clavinet – also manage to invent the stop-start jam we’ll hear so often in the coming weeks, just as a nice bonus.

It’s an all-timer, immensely important jam…that is topped two songs later. It’s interesting to ponder why the 11/17/97 Ghost is revered so much more than the same night’s Tweezer, as both feel on the surface, and in the context of Fall 97, like sibling cowfunk calls-to-arms. The answer, I think, lies in “what comes after the funk,” the use of the genre not as an endpoint, but as a very enjoyable connective tissue between segments of further improvisational inspiration. This Ghost jam starts with the now-familiar “Super Bad” tease, some wonderful Page synth squiggles, and a Mike-forward mix, but is already morphing into something more exotic by the 7th minute. 

There’s a bed of loops, the first of many wonderfully-catchy spontaneous Trey riffs (it’s incredible how much of this 21-minute, fully improvised jam I can hum from memory), and a shift into a lighter key over a hypnotic Mike and Fish groove. So slowly you don’t even realize it happening, in the space of about four minutes, they’ve switched from a taut, intimate jam into a HUGE wall of sound, somehow sounding both triumphant and melancholic. Then it’s back, over the last seven minutes, to spontaneously writing the 47 flavors of funk Joe Walsh never got around to back-filling, for our dancing and listening pleasure. The overall structure might be similar to the Tweezer’s, but they’re already revising and improving upon it, evolution so rapid it’s happening within a single set, never mind over the course of shows or tours or years.

Because the most exciting part of 11/17/97 is that it makes a huge leap forward but also leaves room for even more. The material between and around the two towers of this first set is no letdown – a very solid Reba shows their prog muscles are still in shape, Train Song is a necessary breather, Fire is a fitting exclamation point. But it’s not a flawless wall-to-wall statement like some later sets in the tour, and the second set is more direct, a blast of thrilling hard-rock hyperactivity (and a really weird post-JBG jam) lacking the nimble nuance of the opening frame. 

It’s a show that doesn’t just leave you wanting more, it leaves you with cliffhangers. Can they make a set-long statement in the vein of Tweezer or Ghost? Use the constructive dough of funk jams to bridge between songs, not just sections within them? Stretch those risk-taking feats out over a full show? 11/17/97 isn’t the endpoint of this era of gradual Phish progression; it’s a pivot, just the start of the rapid evolution we’ve been building up to for years, as much an ellipses as a punctuation mark.