How Many Holes
6/16/97, London, ENG, Royal Albert Hall
SET 1: The Squirming Coil > Dogs Stole Things > Taste, Water in the Sky, Sample in a Jar, Beauty of My Dreams, Theme From the Bottom, Chalk Dust Torture, Wolfman's Brother, Olivia's Pool
SET 2: Limb By Limb, Ghost -> I Don't Care > Reba, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Dirt, Harry Hood
ENCORE: Cities, Poor Heart
If there’s an exception to my theory that Phish were honey badgering their way through Europe in the summer of 1997, it’s this show. The storied Royal Albert Hall, opened by no less than Queen Victoria in 1871, drips with history: appearances by Wagner, Rachmaninoff, and Einstein, the finale of The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions), the Beatles and the Stones on the same bill in ‘63, and Dylan in ‘66 (though not that ‘66 Dylan show). It’s a setting regal enough to snuff out any Ugly American impulses and put Phish on their best behavior.
So there’s no jumping on trampolines or tales of Gamehendge where Churchill once spoke, no instrument switching or vacuum solos to irritate the composer ghosts of the past. They’re wound so tight they don’t even play A Day In The Life, even though it would be naturally Phishy to do it; the opening line of Cities would have to suffice for a lyrical wink. There’s still a gaggle of new material — including the third consecutive performances of Dogs Stole Things and Limb By Limb, two odd choices for the heaviest rotation early on — but very little funk. Only Wolfman’s gets a 97-style workout, with even Ghost heading straight into a heavy metal direction that lands in the debut of bratty song fragment I Don’t Care.
Instead, there are more Phish classics than audiences heard in Dublin. You can’t blame Trey for wanting to hear what Coil, Reba, and Hood sound like bouncing off the opera boxes and UFO ceiling of the Albert Hall, and they do sound pretty majestic, even on this boomy AUD. I’ll even hand it to Wading in the Velvet Sea, where the guitar solo sounds great washing over all those, uh, velvet seats.
But given the venue’s classical pedigree, it’s surprising that Trey didn’t call for any of Phish’s more orchestral numbers. You Enjoy Myself, in particular, would appear to be a no-brainer, disrespectful trampolines or no, but it’s absent, as it will be until late in the month of June. Maybe Divided Sky? Gone until 7/3. Fluffhead? They won’t play it until they’re back in America.
Scanning the summer setlists, it looks like a lot of other songs have now officially gone on the shelf. There won’t be any more Rifts or Mango Songs until 1998, only one Guelah Papyrus in Europe, zero MFMFs or It’s Ices. We’re in the The Great Tweezer Drought of 1997, with no versions between 2/20 in Milan and the same show at The Gorge where they bring back Fluff. Mike’s and Weekapaug won’t be heard until the Paradiso on 7/2, and on and on. For many of these songs, the Song Gap graph is at the start of a sharp upward slope; after years of regular play, they’ll have attained bustout status the next time we hear many of these.
It’s mentioned in The Phish Book that the band consciously decided to prune the songlist before this summer’s tours, but it hadn’t fully sunk until now how much of the retired material was, to put it non-musically, the “hard stuff.” With the exception of Tweezer, and maybe Mike’s/Weekapaug, the songs listed above are some of the band’s most complicated, sharing the kind of compositional difficulty that Trey’s songwriting often relished in his early days. The inclusion of Coil, Reba, and Hood tonight throws that missing chunk of the catalog into sharp relief.
There’s still plenty of virtuosity to go around, and I’m not claiming songs such as Taste or Theme or Limb By Limb are “easy” to play. But their complexities are of a different flavor than a YEM-style epic, more about how the band’s four parts interlock with each other rhythmically and melodically than experiments in fugues and time signatures written down on notation paper. Something had to move aside when over a dozen new songs were imported in the Summer of ‘97, and unfortunately for the band’s one appearance at the home of The Proms, it was the band’s classical side that yielded to the streamlined new generation.