Label Maker

12/12/99, Hartford, CT, Hartford Civic Center

SET 1: Heavy Things, AC/DC Bag, Strange Design, Divided Sky, Beauty of My Dreams, Bug, Stash, Chalk Dust Torture

SET 2: Drowned > Prince Caspian, The Squirming Coil, Makisupa Policeman > Run Like an Antelope

ENCORE: Runaway Jim

Listen

With just eight shows left in the year, I’m starting to think about how we describe Phish’s 1999 sound. There’s a shorthand the Phish community uses to describe the epochal 90s odd-years of 1995, 1997, and 1999 – ‘95 is the arena rock year, ‘97 is the funk year, ‘99 is the spacey year. It’s silly to boil down hundreds of hours of music played in each time frame to a single term, but for the first two years it’s accurate enough at isolating the key, novel element that powered the band’s jamming. 1999…well, it’s not so clean.

For one, the more ambient, textural strain of Phish improvisation really began in 1998; I started yapping about it on the second show of that year. And while the Summer ‘99 experiments with The Siket Disc material brought that sound to the stage in its most purified form, “ambient” – in Eno’s “as ignorable as it is interesting” sense – doesn’t really feel like a good fit for describing the TAB-heavy focus of fall. The December tour does an excellent job of hybridizing these two jamming breeds, but “spacey” doesn’t seem sufficient to describe the fiery results in highlights such as the Palace Gin or the Portland Halley’s.

Tonight features another of the month’s landmark jams in a Drowned that goes past the half-hour mark. It’s a little surprising that this one hasn’t yet seen a Live Bait/From The Archives release, as it feels like an iconic jam for the tour even beyond its impressive size. It might not be the best jam Phish played all December, but it’s certainly representative of what they were doing at the time, and it feels like the perfect specimen to try and nail down a satisfying descriptor for the year.

It’s meaningful that this extended improvisation springs from a Halloween alumnus, given the heavy role those costumes played in shaping the band’s musical development. But it’s counterintuitive that it’s a track from Quadrophenia, not an album that’s exactly big on minimalism. It loops me back to the observation in yesterday’s post that there was more ‘95 than ‘97 in the Mike’s Groove. The first half of this Drowned gives me that same feeling; this is Phish in Marshall stacks mode, playing loud, fast, and riffy. You could drop it into any show from November or December of 1995 and it would sound completely natural.

But the back half goes in a direction Phish never would have gone that year. The energy level changes around the 15th minute, and it seems to be pulling back into a funk mode with Trey on his wah pedal, but it never thins out to the level of a ‘97 jam. It takes a full 20 minutes before Trey starts loopin’, and that steers them into the final phase, ten minutes of gradual deconstruction and abstraction.

It’s pure 1999, but the path it took there casts this ambient sequence in a whole new light. It’s minimal in the sense that Trey mostly stops playing notes, opting instead for squalls of digital noise and layers of miniature synth and guitar sparkles. Page is on texture duty as well, playing Rhodes and synth like another 2001 is lurking, while Mike writes his own TAB-style groove to cycle for several minutes. But Fishman, for most of this sequence, is still playing with the intensity of the jam’s first half; quieter, perhaps, with more emphasis on cymbal than snare, but with a busybody energy that keeps the music from drifting entirely into pure moods.

It’s what makes Phish’s approach to this kind of music so unique; not too many minimalist electronic/experimental acts have a Jonathan B. Fishman at hand. Or to stick with The Who, it’s as if they found a way to do the synthy part of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” without making Keith Moon wear headphones and sit most of it out. The combination on display in these last ten minutes of Drowned – and the windmilling exercises that preceded them – reveal the best description of Phish 1999 that I can come up with: arena ambient.

As far back as the Ring of Fire set, I grappled with what “ambient” means in a Phish context; they’re not exactly Jim O’Rourke’s Steamroom. The tension of that set was between Phish explicitly trying to play like Brian Eno and fighting their reflexes to produce pyrotechnics – “there’s too much gravitational pull towards the traditional structures of arena rock in their DNA,” I wrote. Where 1999 succeeds is finding a third option that reconciles those two oppositional goals, while retaining the ability to tip the scales in one direction or the other as needed. Arena ambient – like “cowfunk,” it’s a bespoke genre that only makes sense for a band as flexible, skilled, and curious as Phish, and it’s the label I’ll use going forward for the final phase of their metamorphic 90s.