Grind, Grind, Grind

10/7/00, Mountain View, CA, Shoreline Amphitheatre

SET 1: First Tube > Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Fee, Bathtub Gin, Glide, My Soul

SET 2: Twist > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Tweezer, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Meatstick > David Bowie, Tweezer Reprise

ENCORE: You Enjoy Myself

Listen

I’ve been writing semi-professionally about music for almost a quarter-century; closer to 30 if you count the rec.music.phish reviews that were practically my first foray into posting my thoughts online. It’s come full circle from hobby to a thing people improbably paid me for back to mostly hobby again. Along the way, I hope I’ve gotten better at it, or at least more mature. One of the things that I’ve learned, and increasingly tried to keep in mind, is that the musicians I’m writing about are real people, doing a job. Because music at its best can have such magical properties, it’s easy to forget that it’s produced through the hard work of human beings.

And if I’ve learned one thing from the last six(!) years of doing this newsletter, it’s that this shit is hard. On one hand, it’s ridiculous to compare typing on a laptop in my home to virtuosically performing for three hours in front of tens of thousands. But ever since I started the 25th anniversary publishing schedule, I’ve at least had a window into the performing cadence of what it’s like being in Phish. Doing the same thing 70ish times a year – 4 or 5 times a week during busy seasons – while staying creative and maintaining professional standards…it beats mining coal, but it ain’t easy either.

I hold Phish to a high standard, but it’s out of respect. They built one of the most remarkable American rock band careers out of taking risks, and risks aren’t risks unless they produce some flops. It’s unfair and unserious to lambast them for every show not being as good as [insert favorite show here], but it’s also boring to just credit them with putting on an entertaining performance night in and night out. In order to sufficiently praise the times where everything is working, you also have to point out when they don’t.

At the same time, I want to treat Phish with empathy. The amount of shows they played in the 90s is pretty astounding, and I didn’t even cover the busier half of the decade. If you count travel, they spent close to half the year on the road up through 1994, lowering it down to a mere quarter for the remainder. In between, they were writing songs and recording albums, practicing and planning for the next big festival or holiday surprise. The work never stopped.

Once they built up a reasonable audience by fastidiously playing everywhere that would have them, they could’ve coasted. It would be far easier to just give the people what they want, and by the mid-90s, they had a roster of songs and a bag of tricks that could have kept a pretty large portion of the fanbase coming back for decades. They could’ve played peaky-dancey major-key Tweezers and emotional build Hoods and jumped on trampolines every night until retirement or death like a jammier Jimmy Buffett, resting on reliably profitable laurels.

Instead, it was pretty much precisely when they achieved that financial security that they decided to experiment artistically, challenging themselves in both songwriting and live performance to constantly find new territory. They spent the last seven years of the 90s continuously reinventing themselves, without alienating (most of) their following – a tightrope act that only a rare caliber of artist has successfully pulled off.

But constant evolution is exhausting, and by the time the calendar flipped over to 2000, the boys were burnt out. It’s tempting to speculate about stock Behind the Music reasons for why they needed a hiatus: Artistic differences! Substance abuse! The creativity-extinguishing curse of financial success! But it’s Occam’s razor that they were just running on fumes, unable to match the furious pace of work and regeneration that they could maintain in their twenties.

So 2000 doesn’t end in catastrophe, like 2004 does – it ends with a wheeze. This tracks; in 2004, they had to stop or someone would die, while in 2000, they just really, really needed a rest. Post-Japan, the whole year feels like an all-nighter that has gone on a little too long, occasionally throwing up second winds and useful delirium, but with lower and lower frequency. It ends with a four-night run that is mostly a squib, a heavy-lidded final mile before collapsing into bed.

Which is why it’s taken me so long to get to this “grand” finale, a historically significant but distressingly hollow show. They stuff it full of Phish classics – Mike’s Groove, Gin, 2001, Tweezer, Bowie, YEM – but maybe because there’s so many big numbers present, none of them individually get the space to do something unique in their farewell performance. When they do start getting interesting, like midway through the Tweezer, they get neutralized by Trey switching to keys and peter out, a very era-appropriate problem.

The YEM encore tries a half-hearted reggae swerve near the end, but all it does is confirm the fuel light is blinking furiously. There’s nothing sloppy or bad, it just might be the most unremarkable pre-2003 show on the LivePhish app, released for the chapter-closing milestone it represents rather than the music it contains. They didn’t just leave it all on the table, they left it all on a table several months ago, and kept going.

But I feel for them, because I’m exhausted too! This year has been a slog to cover, without the annual delivery of fresh ingredients that typically keep me going. There were barely any new songs or covers, the improvisational style essentially just extended what was happening in 1999, they played mostly the same cities and venues, they skipped the summer festival and their holiday traditions. I can only write so many times about how they’re tired – this essay is at least the third time this year – before it starts to get stale, even if it’s pretty undeniably the prevailing narrative of the year.

I love this project and I’m still happy I started it – as I often tell people, I was going to have these thoughts anyway, so it’s nice to write them down somewhere, and if people want to read them that’s just icing. But I do sometimes wonder if the full immersion has been a good thing overall for my personal fandom. I absolutely get tired of listening to Phish so much, particularly while covering a mostly static tour like this one. I worry that it creeps into my writing too often, and that my takes get too cynical as the shows pile up. This time around, I’ve felt stuck covering a low ebb of Phish’s past and jealous of everyone enjoying Phish’s vibrant present; though that there even is a Phish present, never mind a spectacularly successful one, is a great problem to have. I want to listen to Page’s surprise ambient release, not this dull-ass show!

Then again, that may have been the right frame of mind to cover Phish’s 2000. After fatigue, frustration is the other buzzword that describes that year; frustration about not being able to find the next phase, about being stuck in the same old formulas, about breakthroughs and euphoric moments not coming as easily as they used to. It’s an artist’s first instinct to try to push through that resistance; for Phish, the strategy had worked for years, until it suddenly didn’t. And I think it’s kind of poetic that we both arrived at the same conclusion at the same time: we need a break.

But like Phish, I won’t be going away completely. I’ll do a little coverage of the side projects that occupied them during the hiatus, just not comprehensively; sorry, I’m not listening to every Oysterhead or Vida Blue or Pork Tornado show. I also want to break from the 25th anniversary schedule and go back – way back – to an era of Phish that’s always been a blind spot. And I can’t help but be excited to eventually cover 2.0, a stretch that I’ve always been a little scared of, the time when the Phish experiment was at its most combustible. This isn’t the end, it’s only a pause. As I try to say every time a year ends – and it ends a little early this year – thank you for riding along on this obsessive journey, for what’s now a grand total of 2,179 days. Be safe, be kind. See you soon.