Hi-Lo Intensity

11/18/98, Greenville, SC, Bi-Lo Center

SET 1: Back at the Chicken Shack, Birds of a Feather, Farmhouse > My Soul, Guyute, Lawn Boy, Love Me, David Bowie, Carolina

SET 2: Wolfman's Brother -> The Lizards, The Moma Dance > Albuquerque, Slave to the Traffic Light, Fluffhead > Character Zero

ENCORE: Brian and Robert, Sleep, Dog Faced Boy, The Squirming Coil

Listen on phish.in

A slight shift in the essay project this fall is a new setting where I do some of my research: the gym. The bulk of my listening time for shows used to take place on a very long commute, but in part due to the job change mentioned here, that time spent in Chicago traffic has happily shrunk. Recently, I decided to use some of those bonus minutes on doing something about my doughy mid-40s body, rolling up to the rec center for a little bit of strength training and cardio three times a week. 

Since I’m not interested in whatever Skip Bayless or Pat McAfee are blathering about on the gym TVs, I’ve had these fall shows in my earbuds…with mixed results. Occasionally I’ll luck out with something high-energy like the 10/30 second set or the Van Andel Halley’s to help me power through my reps. But other times I’ll queue up a show sight unseen and get tonight’s first set, where I find myself looking for some audio motivation while holding a plank and I receive Lawn Boy and Love Me back-to-back. At least I wasn’t doing deadlifts* during the encore.

There are eras of Phish that would be very effective workout supplements. You could go with any lightning-fast early-90s show – where the band itself was often doing heavy cardio as they played – or a Fall 95 show full of sprinting-through-a-brick-wall jams. Fall 97 is somehow equally well suited for mind and body, with the groove-based improv providing a steady metronome for a long elliptical sesh. But Fall 98 is often laughably bad for gym listening, even when I’m usually loving the sounds back at home. 

That’s sort of related to the set flow issues I’ve been a broken record about these last few shows, and Greenville isn’t a comeback on that front. That Moma > Albuquerque in the middle of the second set is a real speedbump, a late-show Fluffhead is always tough to work around, and the Zero closer is a hat on a hat. They’re jumping around to whatever equipment is unoccupied, instead of a disciplined focus on a particular muscle area.

But there are other features of Fall 98 that share the blame for Phish’s un-gym-worthiness. I haven’t brought it up in a while, but it’s worth remembering on the other side of the Summer of Covers and Double Halloween that 1998 is the 1.0 record-holder for most songs played in a year, with 239 – 29 songs more than 2nd place. As we get into the second half of the tour, the band’s eclectic urge only gets stronger; we’ll soon see the extremities of that impulse in Hampton. Tonight doesn’t have much in the way of bustouts, but it still gives us oddities from all over the stylistic map: not just the crooner two-fer mentioned earlier, but also the laid-back jazz of the first full Back to the Chicken Shack, the jabberwocky prog of Lizards and Fluffhead, blues-rock blowouts, and that hushed quadruple encore. 

Then there’s the ‘98 jamming style, which isn’t super present in this show, but still tends to lower the overall heart rate. The Bowie is long but measured, burbling along at a low-intensity steady state without mixing in many sprints. Slave delivers a classic Phish slow build – great for a simulated climb on the stationary bike – but its weird placement in the set makes it less of an exclamation point than usual. The exception is Wolfman’s, which ducks the typical collapsing arc of the season and instead sounds about twenty years ahead of its time, riding a gooey rail before flipping into a happy-go-lucky climax over an uplifting chord progression.

On the second gym visit listening to this show, that’s where I jumped to first; it’s an energy-drink jam no matter if it’s the default mode for nowadays Phish. But for all that I adore about Fall 98, I don’t think the tour’s highlights will make the workout playlist much when this month’s research is complete. It’s possible those same qualities affected people’s enjoyment in real time; I’m not saying that going to a Phish show is like going to the gym, but I’m certainly sore in similar ways after each experience. As Phish’s target started to drift from the body up to head, they lost some of the immediate, visceral effects people came to expect. You can still feel the burn, but more often than not, it’s the slow kind.

* - I don’t know how to do deadlifts, I just do the machines like a true gym custie.