Haters to the Back

7/8/99, Virginia Beach, VA, Virginia Beach Amphitheater

New photo, apologies for the original inaccurate one.

SET 1: Julius, Fee -> Jam, Guyute, Dirt, Nellie Kane, Stash, Cavern

SET 2: Birds of a Feather > Prince Caspian > Jesus Just Left Chicago, Saw It Again, Sleep, Meatstick, Tube > Simple

ENCORE: Terrapin > Hold Your Head Up, Character Zero

Listen

BREAKING NEWS (at time of this writing): Trey hates Fee! “Sometimes, I’m just not feeling Fee,” he confessed to Jordan Hoffman, lumping it in with Mango Song and Sanity as novelties born of slap-happy late nights at Nectar’s. “These songs just emerged from our gang. We were just having fun…We would be there until 1 a.m., all of us were 18 playing this shit and cracking each other up. Funny weird stuff.” From a man who just staged a Broadway-level production featuring dancing lizard people and multi-beast puppets celebrating a whole song cycle from that same goofball era, that’s some harsh shade for Fee between the lines.

But I’m not a huge Fee stan myself, and I can see where Trey is coming from. When people reach for the “Phish is just Raffi for adults” insult online, Fee is one of the reasons that snark stings just a little bit. Apart from the nipple violence, it’s basically a funny-animal nursery rhyme, with a cloying chorus that rhymes “Fee” and “free.” Live, Trey used a megaphone to sing the verses and add a little extra quirkiness, but it was generally a filler song that saw less and less play as Phish graduated from clubs to large venues.

And yet, Fee has frequently offered glimpses of promise. After Floyd gets his final comeuppance, the outro has provided space for some fascinating micro-jams all the way back to the early 90s. While usually only a minute or two in length, these jams were often quiet and delicate at a time when that wasn’t really Phish’s M.O., and in 1997 and 1998, Fees in Champaign and Prague showed early glimpses of the ambient obsession to come.

So as Phish dives deeper than ever into that sound in 1999, Fee was primed to take advantage. This evening’s version starts in familiar outro territory, based around light Trey harmonics with the rest of the band providing gentle lullaby accompaniment. But instead of drifting peacefully into the next song, the jam picks up momentum and volume until it can no longer be called ambient, Trey fanning his original quiet melody into a blazing bonfire. 

It’s an important moment for Phish’s developing space-ambient phase. The big breakthrough with cowfunk didn’t come when Trey found his wah pedal and Page unleashed his clavinet – they’d dabbled in that sound as far back as the Albany YEM, if not further. It only became a truly potent arrow in Phish’s quiver when they figured out how funk could open up new avenues of improvisation. Tonight’s Fee accomplishes a similar feat, reaching a soaring and rhythmically complex peak that sounds like virgin territory, in no small part due to arriving there via an unusual origin and path.

Later in the show, Phish resuscitates what was one of my least favorite songs at the time. I’ve talked before about my annoyance with Birds of a Feather in Fall 98, a mixture of anti-sellout paranoia, omnipresence, and disappointment at how much it regressed from its first two appearances at the Island Tour. But the song started showing signs of its original menace by the end of last year, and its second performance in 1999 (after an awful one on opening night) declares that it will be a rejuvenated force for summer tour.

There’s nothing ambient about this jam, it’s played at maximal wall-of-sound intensity for several minutes. An internal battle appears to play out within Trey between the standard, studio-informed guitar solo of most Fall 98 versions and weirder territory, and it’s not until the 11th minute that he backs off to, curiously, start playing “If I Only Had a Brain.” But crucially, Fish and Mike show no inclination to slow down, keeping up a torrid rhythm behind Trey’s slow, whimsical melody. This slow/fast tension ends up being a dry run for a jam two nights later that will rank among Phish’s finest.

So two songs nobody would have expected to make a significant mark end up providing big early strides for Phish’s evolution in the year ahead. And there’s still plenty of time left for cracking each other up, despite Trey’s 2024 implication that those days were left back in Nectar’s. Later in the show, they teach the crowd the Meatstick dance (“Be the first ones on your block to know the Meastick”) and after dropping Saw It Again as a clue in the second set, they pay tribute to last year’s emotional Virginia Beach encore with…Syd Barrett’s Terrapin. The lesson: never trust Trey – or maybe more accurately, never write off the songs that seem silly and/or overplayed, to him or us.