Laboratory Accidents
6/10/00, Tokyo, JPN, Zepp
SET 1: Down with Disease, Sample in a Jar, Piper, Lawn Boy, Guyute
SET 2: Heavy Things, Sand, Sparkle > My Soul, Bathtub Gin > Jam > Twist, Albuquerque, Wading in the Velvet Sea > Loving Cup
ENCORE: The Inlaw Josie Wales, Limb By Limb
If you doubted my claim that the first night in Japan immediately flipped Phish into experimental mode, peep the numbers on this first set. Within the first three songs, the band has already stuffed in two 20-minute jams, and if the rest of the show doesn’t live up to that early promise, it’s still poking in interesting directions. With only seven shows and eight days to capitalize upon the unique circumstances of Japan, it’s clear that Phish doesn’t want to waste any time getting used to the new time zone.
But here’s the thing about experiments: they don’t always work out. By taking the shackles off, this show – and I suspect others to come this week – scratches the tension at the core of 2000 and the band’s struggle to find a new direction. The small rooms and attentive crowds of Japan might encourage Phish to explore quiet and sparse territories, but the gravitational pull of the band’s current phase is in the opposite direction: very loud, very dense.
Every era of Phish has its jamming center of gravity, the default style they are most likely to fall back on. In the early 90s, it was tension-release dynamics and slow builds, followed by periods of hard-rock windmilling, cowfunk, and arena ambient. At the turn of the millenium, that last one hadn’t yet expired, but it had spawned an evil, heavy shoegaze twin. Roughly speaking, an era that started with exploring textures ended with Trey trying to stack up as many of those sounds as possible, like a game of sonic jenga.
Before Phish can reach the minimal extreme of that relationship in four more nights, they have to go through the maximalist opposite tonight. Surprisingly, it doesn’t happen in Disease, a song that will spend the year particularly vulnerable to the high-decibel treatment. Tonight it avoids that fate, thanks to some unusual – maybe even experimental – restraint from Trey, who avoids his bweeoooo and synth crutches and focuses on rhythm guitar with only light effects. While it’s not exactly quiet, it’s at least lean and mean in how it navigates a propulsive rock progression before decaying naturally into a peaceful, weightless final section.
Not so much Piper, which has ironically become the symbol of the band’s shift towards excess. When it debuted, the song was an exercise in patience, a test of how long the band could stick to quietly playing a single, lilting chord progression before the potential energy build-up became too much to contain. Now, Piper’s in a hurry; tonight, they’re singing the lyrics before the two-minute mark, and by three minutes they’re already at full velocity. And they stay at that level for 13 minutes of the jam, with all of Trey’s unused toys from Disease getting a full, simultaneous workout.
I’m all for noisy Phish, but that’s a long time to keep the throttle down – it’s exhausting to listen to, even more so, I assume, to play. Unfortunately, the tidal wave of volume and notes doesn’t leave a lot of oxygen for any other ideas; there’s not really a melodic theme established until they finally back off – a little bit – for the last 8 minutes. Even then, it’s clumsy and brutish, with none of the ambient elegance of Disease’s landing pad. I can imagine it being an overwhelming sensory experience in the 3,000-capacity Zepp Tokyo, like sitting front-row at a Formula One race, but on an audience tape it blurs into a migraine-inducing hum.
Those two early excursions burn off most of the improvisational energy for this show, apart from a promising but brief interstitial jam between Gin and Twist. Instead, the second set feels mostly interested in exploring the opposite of Piper’s density, the simple pleasures of playing quietly in a nice-sounding room. Both Gin and Twist burbling pleasantly without succumbing to complete entropy, and a fourth quarter heavy on ballads feels anticlimactic yet well suited to club acoustics. Pretty soon, they will figure out how to apply those benefits to unscripted material, but tonight, they’re still getting familiar with the laboratory conditions.
