Indian Summer
9/16/99, Mountain View, CA, Shoreline Amphitheatre
SET 1: Ya Mar, Chalk Dust Torture, Farmhouse, First Tube, Carini, Dirt, Vultures, Sparkle, On Your Way Down, Beauty of My Dreams, Stash, Train Song, Billy Breathes, Run Like an Antelope
SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Mike's Song -> I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Mountains in the Mist, Limb By Limb, Prince Caspian > Julius
ENCORE: Misty Mountain Hop
We’ve burned a lot of ink in this first year trying to figure out why this “fall” tour feels so…off. Between an action-packed summer tour – one I admittedly may over-value due to attendance bias – and December’s historic lead-up to Big Cypress, the September/October run sits in no man’s land and sounds like it. I proposed that could be due to the short layover between summer and fall, the infusion of TAB material, or the band having one eye on the album they’ll start making at the end. But here comes one more theory: this tour can’t decide whether its vibes are indoor/fall or outdoor/summer.
In the mid-to-late 90s, this was usually an easy differentiation to make. Summer tours were for outdoor shows in exurban amphitheaters and on decommissioned air force bases, with long afternoons on lot and campouts after encore. Fall tours were for sports arenas in cities and on college campuses, short, frosty tailgates, and white-knuckling icy roads between dates. Those two very different flavors of show-going experience were paralleled by the band playing very differently in each environment – summer/outdoor shows more crowd-pleasing and joyful, fall/indoor shows more intense and experimental.
But what happens when those two binaries don’t fully overlap? The 1998 fall tour dipped its toe in this thought experiment, opening with a solitary outdoor show in LA before heading back indoors for the rest. 1995, too, started on the west coast with a quartet in the September California sun. But neither of these tours yo-yoed like 1999, which starts indoors, heads outside for the next three, retreats under a roof in Boise, plays five more outside in CA/AZ, then whiplashes back and forth for the final week: one in, two out, one in, one out, one in. In all, September features five indoor shows and 11 outdoors, all intermixed, before October finally decides on cozy arena mode for the run out.
Today, that’s not so discombobulating – Phish just finished a very successful summer tour that mixed in three arena islands with ease. But 90s Phish was a different animal, a creature of habit. And the ambiguous nature of this first month feels like it’s maybe throwing off their game.
It’s a lot of words to say: night one at Shoreline is a weirdly unsatisfying show that never really figures out what it wants to be. It finds Phish falling back on some of their favorite defense mechanisms, playing a ton of songs – 14 in the first set alone! – and leaning on crowd favorites to chase a spark. But for a show with some respectable track lengths, inspiration remains elusive. There’s a quite good, if orthodox, Weekapaug in here, but Stash, Antelope, and Mike’s are all as stock as they come, and 2001 is more subdued (read: dull) than I’ve heard in a while, despite September 1999 being one of the song’s primo eras.
That swollen 100-minute first set especially feels like a tug-of-war between summer Phish and fall Phish. Opening with Ya Mar – hell yeah, get the beach balls and suntan lotion out. Then First Tube, Carini, Vultures – suddenly, there’s a chill in the air, the leaves are starting to change color, we’re thinking about Halloween candy. The deep thousand-show bustout is by Little Feat, one of the great backyard barbecue bands, but it’s “On Your Way Down,” one of their angriest tunes. Phish can’t pick a season, so they just keep playing, until the show swells to 30 percent longer than the previous date in Boise – but 60 percent less gripping.
And the in-betweenness of this show is even stronger in retrospect, knowing that there’s a big moment coming the next night. I don’t often feel bad for Warren Haynes, but he’s put in a real bind here; there were high expectations that Phil would show up and return the favor for April, so when some extra gear gets set up for the encore, the buzz must’ve been incredible…only for the guy from Gov’t Mule to walk out and play some slide guitar. As with its debut in Toronto, Misty Mountain Hop feels like a Zeppelin-shaped apology for a night that never found its footing.
If they had booked another arena show after Boise, maybe Phish keeps the momentum up and dials it in for a respectable fall run. Instead, they’re pushed back blinking into the sunlight, and aren’t quite sure whether to wear short sleeves or long. It’s a fitting mood for September, when often the weather can’t decide whether it’s summer or fall either. But the indecision leaves this tour between two stations, and a show without a big jam or a big star (sorry Warren) can’t help but slip through the cracks.