Keep It Open
9/12/99, Portland, OR, Portland Meadows
SET 1: First Tube, Poor Heart, Mozambique, Bathtub Gin, Back on the Train, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own, Frankie Says, Birds of a Feather, Lawn Boy, Possum
SET 2: Ghost > Runaway Jim > Roggae, Also Sprach Zarathustra > You Enjoy Myself
ENCORE: Theme From the Bottom
As often happens, I’m worried I’ve been a bit too hard on the band over this first weekend of fall shows. It’s not that I don’t like the late 1999 sound – we’re about to get to some real good stuff. It’s just that the changes they made at this point feel particularly abrupt and calculated, driven not by the slow evolutionary steps of the decade so far, but a forceful, unilateral decision. There are elements that feel like a natural progression from the 1997-98 redefinition of how Phish plays, but there are also ideas that originated outside of the band and were rammed into their formula. With the hindsight knowledge that these decisions overlapped – maybe coincidentally, maybe not – with the beginning of the band’s unhealthiest stretch, it’s natural to view these developments with suspicion.
But you also can’t deny that when it worked, it worked. Only four shows into the forced TAB-Phish hybridization, Phish plays a great show in Portland that confirms Trey’s instincts weren’t entirely off. And it makes an argument for the TAB approach without really using any of its songs – there’s only two in this show, and they’re finished with those 15 minutes in. Instead, the most exciting moments tonight come when the aesthetics of Trey’s side project create fresh air in older material; the contamination I was complaining about just three nights ago.
The first comes hot on the heels of the early First Tube and Mozambique appearances. Bathtub Gin, always a song sensitive to the band’s current obsessions, soaks up some of the direct intensity of those two songs. It’s another jam that doesn’t feature much in the way of twists and turns, but the rhythm section locks in to a two-chord groove that is heavy but still strangely uplifting. It provides a racing pulse that unlocks an older version of Trey, playing with melodic inventiveness instead of getting lost in a swirl of effects, summoning echoes of the Went Gin and Camden Chalkdust against the backdrop of the more deliberative 1999 style. It’s a buried treasure of a jam, one that feels propelled instead of restrained by the new style.
The same goes for the second set opening Ghost, a song that has struggled to adapt to changing tastes. Ghost arrived at precisely the right time in Phish’s stylistic narrative, thriving on the cowfunk sound and defining how it could be a springboard to new spaces. It hung in there as the funk dissolved into spacier territory, wearing its bweeooos well, but in fall ‘98 and summer ‘99 the song took on a more hard-rock flavor that capped its once-vast potential. Solid versions still arrived frequently, but it no longer lived up to its spectral namesake as often, even as Phish shows moved into gloomier spaces.
In Portland, Ghost finally taps into that darkness. It’s assisted by a low-end-friendly tape, but Mike absolutely rumbles in on this version, borrowing Tony Markellis’ thunder but adapting it to his more active style. Like the standout Toronto version, he’s the conductor in the shadows for the jam’s first stretch, threading in demonic disco as Trey howls away on his pedals. If it had stopped at 15 minutes, it would’ve been a strong representative of the song in this era, a fiery, direct build that recreates the First Tube climax without pre-composing it. But the jam still has more work to do.
In an increasingly rare move, Trey wipes away his wall of sound and sits back on funk chords, creating a sparse, Remain in Light-esque environment where Page has the space to unfurl synth ribbons. For the last ten minutes, the jam smolders in a paranoiac attack, clinging by its fingernails to a groove that’s constantly threatening to decay. The lowered volume helps Trey’s sonic experiments complement the whole instead of dominate the conversation; there’s even some mini-keyboard in there that folds into Page’s synth work instead of bogarting it.
With this lengthy second phase and a false ending/coda, Ghost falls just short of a half-hour and a single second shy of setting a new length record. But more important than those stats is that it finds fresh territory, successfully hybridizing the era of its birth with the more direct and sonically complex innovations that followed. Maybe it could’ve gotten there by itself, but Trey’s new emphasis on heavy groove, repetition, and texture speeds up the process; it sounds like a band rehearsing First Tube and Sand every night then unleashed on a song that was an ancestor to both. And for all my misgivings about the origins and the implications of the TAB-to-Phish crossover, that’s exactly what you want a new Phish trend to do: reinvent the past while pursuing the future.