SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, Weigh > Rift > Guelah Papyrus, Stash, Waste, Guyute, Free > Tela, Character Zero
SET 2: Suzy Greenberg > Bathtub Gin -> Hold Your Head Up > Bike > Hold Your Head Up, You Enjoy Myself
ENCORE: Frankenstein
The jamband community might be the only musical fanbase that prefers their favorite bands to play fewer songs in concert. An outsider would be baffled by Phish fans complaining about shows being too “song-y,” or that the bandleader was too eager to play more songs for their fans. I’m not immune myself; in earlier days of 3.0, when I would download last night’s show each morning without peeking at the setlist, I had a reflexive expectation based on whether there were more or less than 20 tracks in the zip file.
Even that was grading on a curve, because the true sweet spot for fans raised on late 90s Phish is a four-song second set. There’s a rhyming beauty to shows like 11/21/97, 4/3/98, or — precisely two years in the future — 11/7/98, where the quartet of Phish played only a quartet of songs. It’s no accident either that set flow improves as the setlist gets shorter; symphonies traditionally have four movements too. Never mind that these minimal setlists were also the product of the band spending less time on stage, these are Phish segments streamlined to the extreme: all killer, no filler.
With the anomalous exception of the Fleezer show and its three-song (!) second frame, four-song sets are typically traced back to the Fall 97 tour, when they suddenly became almost common. But as with a lot of 1997 moves, there’s a hidden example the year before that isn’t quite fully-baked. Here, at their only appearance on the home court of Wildcats basketball, Phish stumbles into the format, though it’s deceptive — only on the technicality of tossing out the intro/outro of HYHU do you get down to the magic number.
They accomplish this landmark by playing the longest jam of the year, and then topping it two songs later. The first of these is Gin, which delivers on its growing potential this fall with the longest version to date, 26:31 by the LivePhish clock. After the humorous interlude of Bike, Fishman’s first vacuum feature since pre-Halloween (“By gum, you’ve brought me out of the penalty box!,” he announces), the band gives The Timer another workout with a YEM that clears the 30-minute mark for the first time since the magisterial versions of Fall 95.
Alas, those impressive track times might be the most distinctive thing about these performances. Both are essentially super-sized Type I jams, without any “what song is this?” moments — you could hum the closing Gin riff over all but the last 3 minutes of the jam, and the YEM never really diverts off its usual route, it just spends a few extra minutes at each stopover. The most notable thing about them may be how often Page uses his Moog Source synthesizer, with a long solo over Trey’s obligatory mini-kit diversion in Gin and a Prince-y stop-start breakdown in the thick of the YEM jam. Some points of the Gin resemble the controversial “Fire on the Mountain” tease of NYE 95, and the last three minutes revisit some wild 94-ish noisescapes, but there’s no hint of the post-Remain in Light advances, no thrilling breakthroughs on par with the West Palm Beach Crosseyed.
Instead, if there’s progress made in this show, it’s simply patience. Even if they’re not finding totally virgin territory to explore, they’re certainly in no rush to get to the next song, or to hamfistedly squeeze something from Billy Breathes into the show’s second half. No matter what they fill it in with, just sketching out the structure of a four-song set is a bold move, a trust exercise where they see if their crowd is comfortable with hearing just as much music, but packaged into fewer chapter breaks.
[Thanks @rollinfuego for the stub!]