First Chance to Dance Trance

12/3/99, Cincinnati, OH, Firstar Center

SET 1: First Tube, Wolfman's Brother, Bouncing Around the Room, Back on the Train, Billy Breathes, AC/DC Bag > Possum, Slave to the Traffic Light

SET 2: Sand, Limb By Limb, Bug > Piper, Harry Hood

ENCORE: Rock and Roll

Listen

The second show of the December run marks the bow of the tour’s undisputed MVP: ‘tis the season of Sand. The still green TAB hand-me-down will be the centerpiece of a third of the winter tour’s shows, and from this point on, nearly every version will be longer than the last, culminating in a quadraphonic marathon at Big Cypress. Ask any Phish fan to imagine the sound of late 1999, and Mike’s relentless bassline will immediately come rumbling into their brain.

It’s a rapid ascent for the song, which debuted – for Phish purposes – less than three months ago with a fine version at The Gorge. Sand seemed to arrive fully formed, prowling its way past the 18-minute mark, picking up almost seamlessly from the lengthy TAB versions of the spring. But its first appearance turned out to be a bit of an outlier for the fall – Trey goes for a noisier approach instead of exploring his pedals, and you can feel Mike and Fish bristling at the bass/drums restrictions a bit, which adds a nice tension to the jam. Subsequent versions in September and October felt like a step back, as they tinkered with the tempo and hesitated to ride the jam for more than 12-14 minutes.

The song was always going to be a big challenge for Phish, a band that lives to play complicated parts and constantly shapeshifting jams. Keeping Mike and Fishman locked in to a single part for a quarter-hour goes against all their natural instincts, and space had to be found for Page in a song originally written for a trio. Even Trey, who cooked up the experiment with Russ Lawton and Tony Markellis, struggled to adapt, sometimes overplaying his part against the static backdrop.

But one promising trend emerged over the course of the fall Sands, as they experimented with playing less. Often the most interesting part of the song, to my ears, was the first couple minutes after the vocals, when Trey let the song breathe and mostly conspired with Page to add textural detail around the brutalist rhythm. When the jam inevitably built to an overdriven roar, that was less compelling, verging on egocentric.

Cincinnati media were tackling the important issues that weekend.

After that constructive two-month working vacation, Sand comes back with more of what I like and less of what I don’t. Instead of attacking the jam right away, Trey approaches it more like a recent-vintage 2001, adding a foundation of loops and keyboard parts, then gently winding melodies between Mike and Fish’s pillars. Page is also in Deodato mode, filling out the space with warm Rhodes and tasteful synth accents. It’s extremely patient, bringing to mind the ambient/electronic genre branch of trance – methodical but changing in subtle ways, a musical hypnosis that’s subcutaneously psychedelic. It starts to get a little noisier in the last few minutes, but never detonates the Trey pyrotechnics that dominated most fall versions.

Even better, that approach bleeds into the next song. Limb By Limb doesn’t get the delicate chamber piece treatment that I treasured in the fall; the jam starts out blistering after all the restraints of the song preceding it. But once it expends that pent-up energy, the band settles waaaaay back. It’s perhaps the most Siket-y jam since the summer tour, a couple Fishman cymbal accents away from being My Left Toe, but with the fussy Limb By Limb rhythm still present at subliminal levels to propel it forward. Resurfaced this summer in the Mondegreen From The Archives, it’s premium stuff.

There are limits to this strategy, as evidenced by a set-closing Hood that goes for ambient but falls on the wrong side of the razor-thin line between minimalist and boring. But tonight’s Sand and Limb By Limb do manage to successfully combine the Siket Disc meanderings of the summer and the heavy TAB pulse of the fall into an enticing hybrid, a style that will serve them well at Big Cypress and in Japan the following year.

And then just as quickly, they’ll lose interest. It’s fascinating that there are only two Sands in the entirety of 2.0; perhaps a hangover of the song’s heavy airplay immediately pre-hiatus, perhaps a byproduct of deeper intraband dynamics. But we’ll get there eventually. For now, Sand’s time has come, and the song is a beneficial cause, not a symptom.