Five Way

11/14/98, Cincinnati, OH, The Crown

That’s The Crown way down there.

SET 1: Funky Bitch > My Soul, Reba, Bouncing Around the Room, Tweezer > The Moma Dance > Sparkle > Character Zero

SET 2: David Bowie, Something, Piper, Golgi Apparatus, Guyute, Hold Your Head Up > Sexual Healing > Hold Your Head Up, You Enjoy Myself, Julius, Hello My Baby

ENCORE: So Lonely > Tweezer Reprise

Listen on phish.in

Even with my attendance bias, it’s apparent that the Ohio weekend at the precise middle of Fall ‘98 is a bit of a lull. There’s still some craziness to come in this tour, particularly in Hampton and Worcester, but Cleveland and Cincinnati are the first shows to throw up bricks after a really hot start. Beyond the Wolfman Left Body Jam and the extra thick serving of Meat, CSU contained some worrying signs: a 20-minute Disease with just an exhausting amount of notes, and versions of Antelope and Hood that can best be described as “meandering.” 

Phish’s first show at the rebranded Riverfront Coliseum – best known for the deadly stampede at a 1979 Who concert – starts inauspiciously as well. Funky Bitch > My Soul is just about the worst opening to a show I can imagine – there’s nothing I want to hear less than Phish being in a “blues mood” for the night to come. But to be fair, they mostly get it out of their system and move on to playing a setlist that is…entirely baffling, like someone was plucking Bingo balls with Phish songs on them sidestage and yelling them over to Trey. 

To describe it, I will use a very locally relevant metaphor and something I encountered for the first time on this trip: Cincinnati chili. The famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, dish is a real everything-in-the-cabinets approach to cuisine, combining ground beef, beans, onions, cheddar cheese (so far so good) plus spaghetti (?) and chocolate (?!?). I was very into it at first taste in 1998 – it’s kind of a perfect cheap and high-calorie tour meal – but even more tickled by one local chili chain’s advertising campaign at the time, which I still have no explanation for:

????

The 11/14/98 setlist is the Phish version of five-way chili. There’s a very early Reba and a Tweezer hidden in the middle of the first set, a Bowie set opener chased with a Beatles ballad, the first Fish vacuum song of the tour, a YEM non-closer that resolves into Julius of all things, and the debut of a Police deep-cut never to be heard from again. It has the set flow of a flight through a severe thunderstorm, with Bouncin’* tucked between Reba and Tweezer, Something falling between Bowie and Piper, and a fourth quarter that feels like an early-90s parade of Phish gimmicks.

Some of you might think I make too much of set flow, but I think this show is a good illustration of why it’s a quality I prioritize. None of the jam vehicles in this show turn in a sub-par performance; in fact, they’re all calmly confident 1998 instances along the lines I described in early summer. Tweezer rages for a bit then provides the night’s spaciest segment, skirting the line between dream and nightmare, Bowie indulges in a nice long intro that flirts with 2001 territory, Reba and YEM are perfectly cromulent almost-bookends to the evening.

(?)

They’re all inoffensive jams, but they might rise above that faint praise if there wasn’t some fluffy packaging stuffed between them. Start the second set with that Tweezer and fasten its spacey coda to the Bowie intro, and you’ve got a segment that would get people talking about The Crown as a promising new Phish stop. And who’s to say that the jams wouldn’t have improved from that proximity as well; oftentimes, set flow isn’t just about nailing the emotional contours of a set, but also about each individual song benefitting from the nearby influence of one another. Would Piper have mustered a post-build jam if it wasn’t stuck awkwardly between Something and Golgi Apparatus? We’ll never know.

Cleveland has similar issues, with all the energy built up by that hyperactive Disease quickly dispersed by Sample and Dirt. It’s something to keep an eye on for the back half of the tour, as a scroll through the setlists suggests a higher volume of songs for the rest of the month. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – don’t worry I’m not preparing a hot take about 11/27 being too ADD – but I’ll repeat myself and say that every additional song added to a set risks toppling the flow, Jenga-style. And when Phish is whipping wood bricks around with their eyes closed like they are on this night, it makes for an unsatisfying game.

* - A Bouncin’ bustout, no less! The first in 21 shows, its longest gap until 3.0.