Hitting The Changes (Mostly)

7/3/00, Camden, NJ, E Centre

SET 1: Down with Disease, Guelah Papyrus, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own, Foam, Bathtub Gin, My Soul, Heavy Things, Fluffhead, When the Circus Comes, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Runaway Jim, Glide, Theme From the Bottom > Sand, Meat > Chalk Dust Torture, Bittersweet Motel

ENCORE: Waste

Listen

When people point to down periods in Phish history, they usually focus on the flubs. Despite 1998 Trey’s strong feelings about missing a change, many fans consider a noticeably sloppy run through a composed section to be a red flag for the band’s state of mind, even more concerning than a night that’s light on improv. That view misses the fact that some of Phish’s most exciting stretches were simultaneously pretty loose technically, but I get it – this project is barreling towards a grim era when the band couldn’t execute even some of its most well-worn material, and the trainwrecks of Coventry and its preceding shows left a deep mark on the fandom’s psyche.

I’ve been curious to hear whether 2000 started them down that path, and have been pleasantly surprised that they haven’t yet dropped off that cliff. Sure, there was that massacred My Sweet One in Atlanta, and the doldrums of Walnut Creek led to some real bum notes throughout the night, but they are not distractingly bad errors, easy to laugh off or sleep off. My first glance at the setlist for this show had me worried though – that first set’s carrying a lot of composed notes, in songs that haven’t been played very often of late.

There’s Guelah, unplayed for 52 shows, with its thorny Asse Festival middle. There’s Foam, on the shelf since Fall 98, one of the band’s most mathematical arrangements. And there’s the 2000 debut of Fluffhead, soon to be famous for the IT “Mike Says No” incident, a major signpost along the band’s decline. For bonus credit, the second set slots in Glide, one of Coventry’s most infamous disasters. In a year where the focus has largely been on more direct material like the minimalist TAB songs or relatively straightforward oldies like Gin, Disease, and Twist, those are bold selections.

But, pleasant surprise: they mostly pass the test. Nobody’s going to mistake these performances for 1993, but neither are they disasters. The Guelah fugue sounds a little tentative but hits its marks, Trey gets a bit lost in Foam but recovers in time for the type of delicate, jazzy jam they rarely play any more, Fluff’s Travels are relatively free from turbulence. Through them all, Page is the rock, never missing a note and keeping Trey honest, even if he occasionally has to do the thing where plays a little quieter while he gets his bearings.

Better still, all those scripted segments fulfill one of their core purposes. The band has often talked about how the composed left-brain passages get them aligned before leaping into right-brain improvisational passages, usually discussed in the context of a single song like YEM or Reba. But it works across shows too, and tonight is a great example. After a high-difficulty first set, they open the second with the year’s longest jam*, a 33-minute Jim.

It’s a divisive jam, heavy on the 2000 density. The first half builds to teeth-grinding, one-chord intensity and stays there, with Trey layering in industrial noises and angry wah over a frantic Fishman beat. Thankfully, it finds an island of serenity around 16:30, teasing some Japanese ambience in the very un-Zen atmosphere of Camden, New Jersey, before resuming the earlier white-knuckle mood for the final ten minutes. It’s closer in temperament to the Tokyo Piper I didn’t care for than the Osaka Jim I adored, but love it or hate it, you can’t deny they went for it.

And my hunch is that you have all those tricky, closed songs in the first set to thank for this openness (It doesn’t work as well the other direction; the Glide following the Jim brings more cringeworthy moments than anything in the first set). I’ve focused a lot in this disjointed year on the band’s strategies for syncing up, usually pointing to a 12-bar blues or a bluegrass number as their favorite exercise for tuning up their collective listening skills. But testing their muscle memory through the twists and turns of an early, proggy song they haven’t played in a while is another way to reconnect. If it’s a choice between hearing a B+ take on a mostly scripted epic or the My Soul/Heavy Things couplet that haunts this first set, I’ll take the predictable epic any day.

* - The phish.net 20-minute jam chart has the Drum Logos Twist down as longer, but that’s only if you include the first “Fukuoka Jam,” which I’d argue begins after Twist has closed out.