I Don’t Hear A Single

7/3/98, Ringe, DEN, Dyrskuepladsen

International Male, Mike Gordon

SET 1: Stash, Beauty of My Dreams > Sample in a Jar, Guyute, Also Sprach Zarathustra > Down with Disease, Limb By Limb, Water in the Sky > My Soul, You Enjoy Myself > A Day in the Life

Listen on phish.in or watch video.

Phish’s final day in Denmark took place at the Midtfyns Festival, a five-day event on the central island of Funen. This installment of the festival was headlined by the very 1998 pairing of The Prodigy and Nick Cave, with down-bill appearances by Wyclef Jean, The Corrs, Moby, Scorpions, and Robbie Williams. Showing their gain in stature since the last two summers on the European festival circuit, Phish got into the first sub-headliner line and the second-largest font size, equivalent to the delightful Cornershop and singer-songwriter Anouk (who appears to be the Dutch Jewel).

If you’re a long-time reader of the newsletter, you know that I spent a lot of time the last two summers grappling with Phish’s festival and opener sets in Europe. Just as they were asserting their dominance in the States, headlining huge venues all by themselves and sacrificing none of their idiosyncrasy, Phish willingly chose to go low status in Europe and play the traditional music industry game. Short sets for foreign crowds largely unfamiliar with Phish’s very specific deal and there to see other artists encouraged compromise, and they usually gave in, playing a mix of wannabe singles, familiar covers, and songs with solos. 

For the fourth time around the Old World since 1996, you’d think Phish might loosen up a bit for the sole festival appearance. After all, they’re a completely different band than they were just two years ago, even more dismissive of audience expectations back home and fully committed to using Europe as a quiet testing ground instead of a new market to conquer. But at Midtfyns, in front of a crowd of dozens, they fully revert back to the 96/97 festival repertoire, with the new arrangement of Water in the Sky the only anachronism.

Four of the 11 songs they play tonight appeared on the intro-to-Phish sampler Stash issued in Europe before the 96 visit abroad. The setlist also shares a number of entries with what they played at Glastonbury and Roskilde the year prior; if anything, it’s an even more conservative selection, with zero songs from their most recent studio album. There are three songs from the yet-to-be-released record, but they’ve all been around at least a year at this point. We even have audio evidence that they were worried about freaking out the Danes; after Disease, Trey calls for Lawn Boy, then asks “is that too much?” and switches to Limb By Limb.

But the biggest missed opportunity is that they don’t use this show to focus-group their next single. In October, they’ll pick Birds of a Feather to build hype for The Story of the Ghost, playing it on Letterman and getting a needle drop on Dawson’s Creek*. I don’t know if they’d already made that decision three months earlier, but the 6/30 version sounded suspiciously single-ish, and it’s hard to spot another likely candidate on SotG (the “radio unfriendly” Ghost? Limb? Roggae?). Midtfyns provided a chance to try BOAF out on an unsuspecting audience and see if it won over any Phish virgins, but nope, here’s Sample again. Stop trying to make Sample happen, Gretchen, it’s not going to happen!

Instead, the most juice in the set goes to 2001, the farthest thing from a single for a variety of reasons: it’s an instrumental cover of a jazz fusion cover of a classical piece used in a then-30-year-old film, that only really works if it goes ten minutes or so. And this one does, despite Phish being on their best festival behavior, producing the longest song of the night outside of a vocal-jam-less YEM. Perhaps 2001 was the right festival choice after all, grabbing the ear of any ravers lost on their way to the Moby set – at least the guy with the Keith Flint hair in front of the video bootlegger seems to catch the groove. 

Yet overall, it’s an ignoble end to Phish’s European festival career, a nut they never quite cracked over three successive summers. They’d fare much better in the three multi-band festivals they’d play back home in October, thanks to some useful constraints and the helpful mentorship of a respected elder pulling them into doing what they do best. Without the audacity to do that in Europe, and without the careerism to just play the dang hits, they’re lost in a middle ground that was unlikely to convert any new believers.

* - 25 years later, it’s somehow still on the music supervisor circuit, appearing in the newest edition of MLB The Show (don’t challenge me online, I’m terrible).