Into The Groove

11/21/98, Hampton, VA, Hampton Coliseum

SET 1: Wilson > Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, Lawn Boy, Divided Sky, Cry Baby Cry > Boogie On Reggae Woman > NICU, Dogs Stole Things, Nellie Kane, Foam, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Guyute, Bold As Love

SET 2: Sabotage > Mike's Song > Simple > The Wedge > The Mango Song > Free -> Ha Ha Ha -> Free, Weekapaug Groove

ENCORE: Tubthumping

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I said yesterday that all six discs of Hampton Comes Alive have their charms, but if you forced me to pick one to keep in my visor CD sleeve, I’m going with Disc 6. It manages to fit all of the second set and encore into a single portion, bookended by two bonkers covers and containing what is easily the run’s best jam. And its structure is immensely satisfying, built as it is around Phish’s oldest and most flexible architecture. 

Mike’s Groove has expanded and contracted multiple times over Phish’s history. From 1988 to 1993, you could almost always count on it unfolding in the standard fashion, basically one long suite chaining Mike’s Song, I Am Hydrogen, and Weekapaug Groove. But then they started testing the elasticity of the structure, first auditioning alternatives to Hydrogen as the filling, then seeing how many songs they could pack inside its crawlspace, and finally introducing Simple as a fourth member of the family in 1994. Then they extracted Simple, shrunk it all the way down to a direct Mike’s > Weekapaug pairing, and even put a set break in the middle. 

Hydrogen appeared to be one of the victims of the 1997 songbook bloodbath, going 83 shows absent at one point. But it returned as Mike’s Groove restandardized in late 1997, only to disappear again when the calendar rolled to 1998. It’s been gone all year – we’ll hear its triumphant return at the end of this week – and in its stead Phish speedran the Mike’s Groove evolution a second time, trying out different middle thirds, null stuffing, and then reinflating their signature suite to nearly set length.

Since The Gorge, most Mike’s Grooves have had three or four songs within, and the tally grew as high as seven at UIC and ten at Lemonwheel. It produces a microcosm of my set flow mathematics, where every additional song you add threatens to topple the cohesion of the overall product. Lemonwheel, as I argued then, was truly gluttonous – there’s over 90 minutes of music between when Mike’s ends and Weekapaug begins – while UIC wrapped its Mike’s Groove around a typically Fall 98 slow-starting first set. 

Hampton, with five songs and six tracks baked inside, gets it just right. It’s not aesthetically pristine, with Sabotage providing a high-energy prelude and a slight hesitation before Weekapaug preventing a perfect daisy-chain of segues. But floating on the holiday-like energy of the preceding three sets at the Mothership, it deftly triangulates the three Phish characteristics of improv, song choice, and surprise. 

Mike’s and Weekapaug are both straight-laced but cocky examples of how Phish has condensed the cowfunk and hard-rock poles of a year ago into one blistering laser beam. The Wedge and Mango Song are great left-field choices in line with the overarching deep-cut flavor of the weekend, played exquisitely and providing a breather without completely slowing down the heart rate (Velvet Sea was already spent in the first set, thankfully, and Caspian is MIA). The Free > Ha Ha Ha > Free sandwich works splendidly, freshening up a song that has, for the moment, lost its improvisational way. 

And then there’s the Simple, easily lost in the playlist shuffle of Hampton Comes Alive, but one of Fall 98’s most notable jams. There’s probably not a better dictionary example of what they were doing with the season’s ambient approach than these 15 minutes, calmly unwinding the anthemic source down its star-sourced atomic structure. Once again it comes awful close to debuting the first Siket Disc track, with Fish nestling against the My Left Toe beat as Mike, Trey, and Page weave delicately around it.

Mark it as yet another win for 1998, a year where Phish achieved Mike’s Groove excellence in both the most direct and indirect versions of the format. There’s even a couple terrific traditional versions still to come, though “traditional” doesn’t really do the mania of Worcester and NYE justice. At the peak of the band’s confidence and at a high point in their versatility, it only makes sense that their earliest signature song suite would benefit.