Heat Shimmers

7/10/00, Noblesville, IN, Deer Creek Music Center

SET 1: Cars Trucks Buses > Wilson > It's Ice > Bathtub Gin, Buffalo Bill, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own, Split Open and Melt, Sparkle > Funky Bitch, David Bowie

SET 2: Gotta Jibboo > Sand, Twist, Fee > What's the Use? > Limb By Limb > Loving Cup

ENCORE: Run Like an Antelope

Listen

I haven’t toured in a long time. Like really, really toured. I still manage to catch 3 or 4 shows a year, but – like a lot of you, I’m guessing – these are largely made up of weekend getaways, driving or flying into a town for a couple shows and then taking my tired old bones back home to recuperate. I am glad that Phish now constructs their tours as a series of multi-show runs that enable this parent-friendly pattern, just as I’m sure the band is happy to limit their time on the tour bus. But there’s still something lost, for better or worse, from the days of grinding out hundreds of miles each day to see a show at night.

I was reminded of this experience as I listened to this show, which mostly took place on a very boring drive over 4th of July weekend. I was going the opposite direction of the drive from Chicago to Deer Creek, but the distance was roughly the same, and the scenery too, in that there was very little. It was the kind of trip that Midwesterners are accustomed to – straight, flat, with the only variation along the side of the interstate being soybeans or corn. We saw some skydivers when we stopped at Love’s, other than that it was just asphalt, blue sky, and clouds.

Against this backdrop, somewhat to my surprise, this show sounded pretty incredible. Most of my listening for this project is done from the comfort of home or the discomfort of my commute, but being out on the open road, methodically chewing up highway, felt just right for this evening of Phish 2000. In particular, the second set sounded especially wonderful at a drowsy, monotonous 70 mph cruise control, where it might have come off as too low energy in another context.

There’s probably some natural element synchronicity at play here; central Illinois and central Indiana ain’t that different, and outside our A/C-ed interior it was a scorcher, as it tends to be when summer tour rolls through the Midwest. There were some thematic syncs too; Cars Trucks Buses, naturally, but also Buffalo Bill just before I drove by the site of his namesake museum in scenic Le Claire. Happily, It’s Ice isn’t relevant in July, and my tires resisted the urge to Split Open and Melt on the blacktop.

Highly accurate “You are standing on the lawn at Deer Creek” POV shot.

And while I listened to this show at the mellow front end of a three-day weekend, Phish played it as the first third of a rare-for-the-time three-night stand, an odd Monday through Wednesday layover in the Indianapolis exurb. Now, three nights is a lot of time to spend in Noblesville. But with a night off between Alpine and Deer Creek, Phish could take their time getting down from Wisconsin to Indiana, and they still sound unrushed as they arrive at their destination – a sharp contrast to the well-known lunacy of the night that follows.

The first set still sports plenty of pep, with fun, old-school song selection and equally throwback-y improvisation. Gin doesn’t have the disco edge or sonic blitz of other versions this summer, and the Melt jam never strays far from its standard rhythmic pattern, as though the familiar grounds of Deer Creek – visited for the sixth summer running – has them feeling nostalgic for most austere sounds. With no Farmhouse songs, it’s a set that could have been played at virtually any Phish visit to the cornfields of Indiana.

Not so the second set, which is 1999/2000 to the core. Exhibit A: the only time Gotta Jibboo and Sand have ever been played back to back, with drumbeats so similar that it initially made me think they were doing the “restart the jam after a pause” trick from Meat and the 6/28 Mike’s. In Sand, Trey goes deep into his keys-and-loops hole, and while it’s normally the type of thing I gripe about, here it works for me, creating a little ensemble of musical automatons. There’s no real build to the jam, apart from an ever-thickening soup of sound – one that blended so seamlessly with the ambient noises of highway driving I couldn’t quite tell where the guitar loops ended and the pavement drone began.

That focus on texture – and even some of the same loops, I think – carries over to the Twist and even Fee, which sees its old harmonics jam outro return for a couple sweet minutes. It explodes into What’s The Use?, the ideal destination for all this post-rock build-up, and a version where Trey has his tone dialed in perfectly, broadcasting huge, skronky echos out across the farmland. Given its recent form, Limb By Limb seemed like a great call to keep this set chillaxed, but instead it helps the band resurface to more typical shed fare after 40 minutes of exquisite ambience.

Which leads me to speculate that this night’s performance might work better on the drive to the show than in the show itself; the crowd is nearly silent for long stretches, and Deer Creek crowds aren’t exactly known for polite manners. Given that it’s a Monday night and there are still four sets remaining to satisfy anyone’s desire to rage, it’s not as antagonistic a move as it might appear. Tomorrow night will bring out Phish the pranksters, but for tonight they’re more contemplative, making hypnotic music to accompany the charm of the highway strip.