SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, Guelah Papyrus, Cars Trucks Buses, AC/DC Bag, Sparkle > Brother, Theme From the Bottom, Axilla > Runaway Jim
SET 2: Timber (Jerry the Mule) > Divided Sky, Gumbo, The Curtain > Sample in a Jar > Tweezer, Swept Away > Steep > Maze, Contact > Slave to the Traffic Light
ENCORE: Waste, Cavern
Superstitious people know that when the clock shows 11:11, you make a wish. If somebody wished on their calendar for an extremely standard Fall 96 show, the magic worked; if they wished for an awesome show at the Van Andel Arena on November 11th, a finger on the monkey’s paw closed and they hopefully were back in the room exactly two years later. But despite this show’s overwhelming median-ness, I couldn’t help but notice one oddity, or depending on how you slice it, two or three. That’s Divided Sky, Swept Away, and Steep, all repeated from the previous show in Auburn Hills.
Back-to-back repeats aren’t totally unheard of for Phish, even in 1996, and especially for new songs like the Swept Away/Steep mini-suite. But usually when they violate the setlist rotation norms, there’s a space of a few days or several hundred miles between the two shows. Here we have merely one night off, and an intra-state distance of only 150 miles. If you lived in Lansing, you wouldn’t even have to take off work to attend these two shows.
What’s more, there are four songs with only a single show gap, meaning their last performance was two shows ago in Champaign. Midwestern fans zipping back and forth between IL and MI this week in ‘96 were seeing a lot of Theme, Axilla, Jim and Maze, none of which were exactly new songs. If you continued onward to Minneapolis (and skipped Phish singing the national anthem [a two-show gap] at a Timberwolves game), you were treated to yet another Theme, as well as further one-show gappers in Taste, Zero, and YEM.
The catalog back then may not have been as deep as it is now, when Phish can do an entire fall tour without repeating themselves. But this is still a surprising amount of repetition, and brings forward the timeline on a decision that I’ve always attributed to 1997, thanks to The Phish Book. There, Page and Fish both mention how the band trimmed its songlist in early 1997, cutting “about 14 songs” according to Fishman, consisting of “which songs we wanted to ditch,” according to Page.
“We asked ourselves what material was making us happy and genuinely exciting us,” Page said. “Because they’re all great songs in their own ways, and each has had its little moment or two, but it doesn’t mean that every one of them is exactly where we are now.”
I’d argue they were already subconsciously self-editing the songlist in late 1996, a few months before it became official band policy. According to the total songs chart on phish.net, the band played appreciatively fewer songs in 1996 than surrounding years — only 167 to 1995’s 189 and 1997’s 196, and that’s in a Halloween year. When I took a look at the average gaps for Fall 1996 shows, I didn’t find what I expected — that 11/11 would be an outlier on the low end with its average gap of 4.09 — but I did find an overall low average, just about 7.5 for the whole tour.
That average might sound high, given that the rule of thumb for as long as I can remember is that heavy rotation Phish songs appear roughly once every four shows. But it doesn’t take more than a bustout or two to spike a show’s average gap into the double figures, and you can see in the figure below that those spikes were rare occurrences on this tour, and didn’t pick up in frequency as the tour rolled along. I’m not going to run the numbers on every tour (sorry), but the distribution feels very uniform, reflective of a shallow songlist and a tight rotation.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Page said, focusing on the songs that excited them, instead of just playing everything they thought the audience wanted to hear, would become a beneficial decision in 1997. The difference with tightening the belt in 1996 is that they didn’t also have the huge influx of new material that 1997 would bring — even Billy Breathes was mostly songs that had already debuted live. Without that fresh blood, a shorter songlist just makes for homogenous shows, with fewer combinations possible to unlock new inspiration.