Island Time

4/2/98, Uniondale, NY, Nassau Coliseum

SET 1: Tube, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own, The Sloth, NICU, Stash > Horn > Waste > Chalk Dust Torture

SET 2: Punch You in the Eye > Simple > Birds of a Feather, Wolfman's Brother -> Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley -> Frankie Says > Twist > Sleeping Monkey > Rocky Top

ENCORE: Guyute

Listen on phish.in or Spotify.

“We were getting bored at home, so we wanted to do some shows.” As an inspiring mission statement for 1998, it could use some work. But it certainly got a big pop from the Long Island crowd, who didn’t even know yet that they were about to witness the best run in Phish history, and the dawn of the best calendar year the band would ever play. 

While the first statement is probably consensus at this point, the second of those is a bold claim, and I have the next sixty-or-so essays to make my case. But I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes now. 1998 has everything a Phish fan could want: quick spring and European appetizers, proper summer and fall tours, an exceptional New Year’s Run entirely contained in one room. A summer festival, a Halloween show, a new album. The best guest sit-in ever, the best crowd cheer ever, and the charming impulse to learn and play a bushel of adventurous one-off covers. It’s the last time we would be spoiled by such an embarrassment of riches. 

This bounty also came at the perfect creative moment for the band. 1997 is rightly lauded as a breakthrough for the band, but transformations are messy. It’s thrilling in November and December to hear Phish find the new sound it had been chasing, but there’s a lot of turbulence, awkwardness, and repetition preceding it. 1998 doesn’t have that problem; they’ve found their stylistic dream home and moved in, and now it’s just time to roll up their sleeves and remodel it to their precise tastes. 

Newspaper ad from Village Voice, posted by Scott Bernstein to Reddit.

The timing of the Island Tour was crucial for keeping that hot streak going. I’m sure the band took some time off after New Year’s Eve, but by March they were back in the barn polishing up Birds of a Feather and reading the bad reviews Todd Phillips brought. And It may have been lost to history just how spontaneous the Island Tour shows were – announced only 37 days before they happened, a cycle too fast to run a round of mail order. “The first half of the year will be spent working on a new album,” the Fall ‘97 Doniac Schvice had unsuccessfully forecast, “as a result, a spring tour is unlikely.”

So Trey’s confession of boredom should actually be interpreted as the opposite: the band could not wait to get back in front of a crowd, to resume iterating on the advances of Fall in public view as well as in the privacy of the rehearsal space and studio. “This album’s from our last week’s concert,” Trey jokes in a bad English accent after debuting BOAF, and the infusion of live energy immediately before their sojourn in Bearsville may explain why The Story of the Ghost holds up better than most Phish studio efforts. But it also provides an essential, ahem, island in what’s becoming a regular half-year break from the road at the beginning of each year, a sabbatical that can’t help but sap momentum.

All of which brings us to the band’s debut at the Nassau Coliseum, the NYC-area consolation venue for when MSG is booked (tonight, the Johnson/Oakley/Starks Knicks were beating up on the hapless Clippers 81-70). 4/2 is a bit of a prelude to the real meat of the run, but in hindsight, it tees everything up for the next three nights. By opening with Tube, they’re able to dive straight back into cowfunk only 90 seconds into the new year, but by the end of the second set they’ve provided a glimpse of the post-funk/rock starscapes that lie beyond.

Along the way, there are some feints at how they’d construct a 4-show non-holiday mini-tour without precedent in Phish annals. The Tube/MMGAMOIO/Sloth opening trio hinted it could be a bustout-fest reward for the fans quick enough to snag tickets and rearrange their spring break plans, or at least a reversion back to a deeper songbook after the austerity of 1997. The debuts of BOAF and Frankie Says in the second set could have indicated a new-song dump akin to the Dublin shows that kicked off Summer 1997, particularly with Trey’s comments about the upcoming recording sessions. Wolfman’s > Sally suggested that they were content to rest on their Fall 97 party-funk laurels for a bit longer, and who could blame them?

In hindsight, it’s the Stash that holds all the clues to the Island Tour’s instant classic status. The song is in its traditional “first jam after a break” slot, and proceeds with the standard (but excellent) tension-building discordance for the first 8 minutes of improv. But it never really resolves. Instead, around the 13th minute, the jam falls through a trapdoor and floats like a feather through an unhurried, textured space that wasn’t on the docket during the sweaty, intense nights of Fall 97. That it’s truly novel territory is reinforced by the fact that Fish sings a not-quite-debuted Frankie Says over it, and they don’t even try to return to Stash, instead engineering an unusual transition into Horn.

Still, that Stash is just a teaser trailer for the night’s true highlight, and the moment when the Island Tour asserts itself as the dawn of a proper new Phish chapter. Twist showed a lot of promise from the jump in 1997, standing neck and neck with Ghost as the most exciting new jam vehicle until the latter song found a snug fit with the Fall 97 zeitgeist and pulled ahead. When 1997 Twist jams stretched, they tended to find a cosmic zone that was out of step with either the rubberband-tight funk or the heavy rock thunderstorms that Phish preferred by the end of the year, and it sat on the sidelines for gaps of 6, 8, and 10 shows while its peers got every-other-night workouts. 

If the improvisational story of 1998 is the unraveling of both those jam modes into something new, Twist is the perfect vehicle. When the jam’s sinister chord progression breaks down, it gets nudged by Page’s whirring synth into an ambient cloud where Trey is playing soft, elongated drones and Mike, appropriately enough, grooves on the “Theme from Star Trek”. It morphs into something darker and noisier for the final five minutes, awestruck alien contact turned invasion, accompanied – as so many historic Phish moments are – by a legendary Kuroda lights performance as well.

It’s the band’s first offering to the year’s patron saint, Brian Eno, the most successful port yet of the late-night Siket Disc Bearsville jams and European club experiments to an American arena, and a declaration: just when you thought you were getting used to the New Phish, there’s a New, New Phish lurking around the corner. Most importantly, it sounds like a band that’s anything but disinterested, one that’s still brimming over with inspiration and eager to experiment together, in front of fans or in the studio. In the future, they’d burn off that spring energy apart, on solo tours and side projects and lengthy vacations. But in 1998, for the final time, there was only Phish, and it was the opposite of boring.