SET 1: Mozambique, Axilla > Limb By Limb, Horn, Guyute, Chalk Dust Torture, Back at the Chicken Shack, Stash, I Didn't Know, Character Zero
SET 2: Birds of a Feather, Ha Ha Ha > Ghost, The Inlaw Josie Wales, First Tube, Tweezer, Bug, You Enjoy Myself, Hello My Baby
ENCORE: Sample in a Jar > Golgi Apparatus > Tweezer Reprise
Thanks to the year’s tardy start, the gap between Phish’s summer and “fall” tour was a mere five weeks, barely enough time to recover from Japan jet lag. But the amateur numerologists of Phish were never going to pass up the opportunity to play a show on 9/9/99, so they were back on the road for the year’s west coast swing well before the autumn equinox. With the short layover between tours, it’s tempting to consider summer and early fall 99 as two legs of the same itinerary. But a critical decision made sure the two runs would have distinct flavors.
That offseason move is revealed right away, when Fishman’s frenetic drumbeat tricks everyone into cheering for a Buried Alive opener before Trey’s Latin chord progression reveals it as Mozambique. If you don’t count the prenatal tease in the 4/3/98 Weekapaug, it’s the first of three Phish debuts at this show; not exactly a season premiere new song dump, but an impressive rookie class for the 25th show of the year. But of course, they’re only “debuts” in this specific context, as all three had been played during Trey’s May solo tour.
The firewall between TAB and Phish was already springing leaks during summer tour, when Bug (played again tonight) made a few early appearances and Mountains in the Mist and Back on the Train made the leap from Trey’s acoustic repertoire. But none of those songs really represented the TAB sound: a driving, static groove leaving Trey free to play effects-heavy, noisy scribbles. Both Mozambique and First Tube, which makes its Phish bow halfway through the second set, exemplify this recipe, and before the week is out they’ll add two more representatives.
From our vantage point today, after hundreds of versions of Sand, First Tube, and Gotta Jibboo, it seems like this crossover was always inevitable. But that wasn’t the case back in 1999, when it was still unclear whether Trey’s side project would stay in its own lane or become a farm system for the Phish catalog. The early electric TAB material was an overt experiment in not-Phish; not just Trey writing with new collaborators, but writing songs in a new way, with Russ and Tony establishing a groove and Trey improvising over the top until he landed on a composed part.
As I wrote back in May, that is a very different chemical reaction from the fusion reactor at the core of Phish, where at their best all four components are equal contributors. So asking Trey’s primary co-workers to take on his side gig material wasn’t guaranteed to work. But goddamnit, Trey was determined to try, and the rest of 1999 would be defined by that attempt to smush Phish into a TAB-sized container.
Results are, of course, inconclusive on this first night, in part because of the first songs plucked from the TAB roster. Curiously, all three are instrumentals, which contributes to the feeling that they’re not quite ripe (c.f. Black-Eyed Katy pre-Moma). I rather like Mozambique, and wish it wasn’t so quickly demoted back to TAB duties – though admittedly, it works much better there as a horn section feature. The first First Tube mostly sounds strange for how it lacks in confidence – with all the final pieces present, just scrawnier – and out of place in the middle of a set*. And The Inlaw Josie Wales, while quite nice, has bad optics amidst this solo material invasion as a song played entirely by Trey, with no attempts to write parts for the other three, who just have to hang out awkwardly for a few minutes.
But it’s even more striking – and perhaps concerning – how much the TAB approach also leaks into Phish songs as well. Stash, performing its traditional duty as the first jam vehicle of the tour, falls into a dark hypnotic trance beneath guitar howls and synth emissions – a very cool zone, don’t get me wrong, but a much different approach from the four-way tension-release conversations crystallized on A Live One. Both Ghost and Tweezer are higher energy, but similarly glacial in their plot development, very much about establishing a consistent mood and letting Trey sculpt. No emergent themes, no exchange of ideas, an improvisational vector pointed as relentlessly straight as its been in the last six years.
For the first of possibly many times this tour, I feel the need to clarify that I like this sound, and the changes fit squarely within my central thesis that Phish achieve greatness by never sitting still. But I do find this particular phase disquieting, given that it is driven so much by Trey’s vision, one that centers him pretty dramatically – the first point in Phish’s evolution where they became less democratic. I have always wondered how Mike and Fish** felt about this era, and about being told to emulate a rhythm section with very different powers than their own. There were hints of this direction in the summer, but the porting over of TAB material makes it official that Trey’s solo ideas were now Phish’s to execute, even if the fit wasn’t quite right.
* - Fun fact: of the 92 performances of First Tube since 2009, only 4 haven’t opened or closed a set/encore. In 1999, it showed up mid-set 10 out of 14 times. Today, it feels like a natural beginning or ending, but it took Phish a while to figure that out.
** - I think Page was fine, the guy just got to play atmospheric synthesizers a bunch, it’s his happy place.
But the show was fun fun fun - and your review strips that away.
I appreciate your intellectualizing analysis of phish but let’s never forget they’re a dance band at heart.
Reading your reviews is rarely fun though often interesting.
Not sure I agree with you on Ghost. Through the slow development Mike and Page are connecting/communicating especially in the second half.