Go Round In Circles

11/9/98, Chicago, IL, UIC Pavilion

SET 1: Llama, Horn, I Get a Kick Out of You, Divided Sky, Frankie Says, Dogs Stole Things, Poor Heart > Free, NICU, Bold As Love

SET 2: Bathtub Gin, The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu > The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > The Moma Dance > Slave to the Traffic Light > You Enjoy Myself

ENCORE: Frankenstein, Free Bird

Listen on phish.in or watch on YouTube

As Phish was telling David Byrne about how covering Remain in Light affected them, one point stood out. Fishman talks about how it raised his confidence as a singer, which is pretty interesting, and Page tells him it inspired their recent funk phase, natch. But the second part of his answer resonated with me: 

“It may have had, in some ways, the biggest effect on us because I think we really learned the grooves. We really tried to get inside the grooves that were on the album. I know for me, personally, I took so much away from that. That sort of groove-oriented playing that we've done in the last few years. You know: repetition, pulling things out, putting it back, all that sort of thing, a lot of it was from learning that.”

I’ve been beating the drum about the role of repetition in Phish’s late-90s transformation for three years now, from Albany to Los Angeles to Worcester to The Gorge to Deer Creek. Phish is, at their core, an extremely busy band, one that likes to play a lot of notes and progress through a bunch of different themes in a single song or jam. Reining in those instincts and doing more with less was the foremost challenge they gave themselves for the back half of the decade, and it paid off in generating an entirely new approach to improvisation that breathed new life into their career. 

Any good experiment explores the extremes, and while the 11/9/98 Bathtub Gin isn’t as confrontational as the Worcester Wolfman’s, it is certainly in its ballpark as far as echolalia endurance tests. This Gin is an anomaly for the first third of the Fall 98 tour, neither spiraling off into loop-based entropy or igniting into maximum rock n’ roll, nor even throwing back to the cowfunk of yesteryear. Instead, shortly after leaving the main Gin melody behind, Trey slides into a playful riff that he must like an awful lot, because he’ll spend the next 8 minutes in its vicinity.

It sounds, it must be said, a lot like “Macarena,” and given the time period – and next year’s attempt to beat the Macarena record – it’s not an entirely improbable reference. Trey doesn’t play it exactly the same way over and over again this whole stretch, he’s constantly varying it, and occasionally seems to escape its spell. But it’s the kind of sticky Phish jam theme where, even when he’s not playing it, you can practically hear it running invisibly in the background, like all four members are still comping off its ghost. Go ahead and hum it over any portion of the Gin’s jam up until the 15th minute, when it finally finds a new track.

Amusingly, it then lands pretty quickly on a familiar repetitive-riff theme – the one I identify with the 8/3 Gumbo, but which turned up in multiple other summer shows and jams. Then it skirts along the border of “Gypsy Queen” for a while before the earlier theme remerges, faster and octave-shifted into a helium atmosphere until the trademark Gin riff saves us from another round of Trey drilling it into our brain.

I was delighted at the time to get a jam that measured up to the Bag > Ghost I missed two nights earlier, but nowadays, I’m not as enamored. It’s brief resemblance to the 8/3 Gumbo does it no favors, Trey’s well of inspired variations hitting bottom much quicker on a riff that is ever so slightly annoying*. The counterpoint offered by the other three is also less compelling than that earlier jam – as I wrote in August, the SBD of that Gumbo is a revelation for how it reveals Mike’s role in the jam, but the Live Bait 10 release of this Gin doesn’t add much new detail.

The repetition bug comes back to bite again near the end of this show, when Trey humorously swipes Mike’s favorite C&C Music Factory tease at 12:40 in YEM*, then refuses to give the toy back until the bass solo at the end. It’s a shorter and punchier representative of the species, resolving into a full band fire in just a few minutes’ time. But it’s enough to confirm the continued presence of a notable Phish trend – the willingness to get stuck, to run in place, and to ride the line between aggravation and exhilaration. 

* - It’s going to be stuck in my head for a week now…the things I do for you guys.

** - The late call for YEM may have also led to the weird moment between the second set and the encore when the house lights briefly came on; you can hear the crowd boo on the AUD. I think maybe the UIC administration had decided enough was enough for a Monday night, but fortunately they were overruled to allow me my only Freebird.