Look Out, Cleveland

12/5/97, Cleveland, OH, CSU Convocation Center

SET 1: Ghost > Wilson > Funky Bitch > Black-Eyed Katy, Sparkle > Runaway Jim -> My Friend, My Friend, Ginseng Sullivan, Limb By Limb > Character Zero

SET 2: Stash, Bouncing Around the Room, Julius > Slave to the Traffic Light > The Lizards, Loving Cup > Chalk Dust Torture

ENCORE: Bold As Love

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After an impressive and unprecedented 11-show winning streak, the Phish dynasty of Fall 97 finally turned in their first dud in nearly three weeks. Or should I say “dud” or dud* – this is still a show rated 4.17 by Phish fans, and while that’s the lowest ranking since Denver night 1, it would be enough to put it just outside the top 10 of Fall 96. It’s actually quite unfair, as poor 12/5 is deep in the shadow of the monstrous shows that followed on this Midwestern weekend, lacking a Tweezabella or Tube Jam Reprise moment to make its legend. On Fall 97 draft day, it’s either CSU or Penn State – the show on the other side of the Detroit/Dayton juggernaut – that gets picked last, through very little fault of their own.

Because as I mentioned a few days back, this tour’s floor starts near the observation deck of the skyscraper. Tonight in Cleveland features at least two excellent extended jams, two very unique versions of songs that don’t traditionally change much, and several songs that they just casually play the hell out of. If this was your only show of the tour, I can understand being disappointed that you missed the legendary dates that surround it, but you have to dance with the one what brung ya, and this is still an extremely satisfying night of Phish for any era.

Still, the relatively tarnished reputation of this show is worth examining. It’s easy to glance at the setlist and track times and conclude that Phish just played too many songs, and never found the inspiration to take one out for a long stroll. But as I said last time, December 1997 doesn’t need a four-song set or a twenty-minute jam to find genius, and the contours of this show aren’t too different from those in the Nutter Center two nights later. What went “wrong” – to use those loaded scare quotes again – with this one?

It certainly starts strong, with the tour’s only Ghost opener throwing down a Fall 97 primer immediately, and if you needed another sign that we’re spoiled by this point in the tour, it’s not even jam-charted. It’s the most effective jam of the night, though perhaps also the most predictable, and unlike many recent shows they fail to build off the momentum of an immediate dive into the deep end, stringing together some segues that are more fickle than flowing.

The first Jim since Worcester’s titanic version symbolizes this hesitance. You believe for a moment that they’re going to go long again; maybe not for 59 minutes, since we’re already 40 minutes deep into the first set when it starts, but possibly taking us into setbreak. Even the “Type I” segment is thrillingly askew, riding down the highway on a loose wheel, and the band pushes past the first pause for breath in the 10th minute, threatening to launch another multi-part excursion. But after four further minutes of trying, the spark isn’t there tonight for whatever reason, and we get the long absent (57 shows) MFMF and a bunch of other songs instead.

In the second set, Stash, another song that has been reliably open-ended of late, also fails to break its shackles, so Phish gets even riskier, trying to shake up two songs that rarely deviate from Plan A. First up is Julius, a gospel-blues shuffle that doesn’t normally lend itself to open improv, but they try their damndest, speeding up to a manic Johnny B. Goode feint, then exchanging genre currency for a brief, bizarre reggae-funk hybrid jam in its final few minutes. It’s a bold attempt, but it mostly just becomes a double-long version of a song that is already plenty at its usual 7-9 minutes.

They finally bail out for Slave, one of the tour’s most reliable contributors in its traditional slow-climb form. But this one is anything but routine, led by Fishman down a dark alley in the 7th minute with a jazzy drum part that somehow triggers Trey’s PTSD from the Worcester Wolfman’s, leading to the darkest Slave jam ever – never mind the traffic lights, it’s an expressway to yr skull. Half of me loves the naughtiness of subverting fan’s expectations for a straightforward, religious Slave experience, half of me thinks its a violation of trust. 

Neither of these jams are an unqualified “success” – the scare quotes again – but they’re certainly fascinating examples of Phish pushing hard against its standard operating procedures. Only a band at the height of its cockiness would even attempt these experiments in songs that are so resistant to reinvention, and the unorthodoxy speaks to their persistence. It’s telling that this show is one of the longest performances of the tour, nearly three hours when the mean is closer to 2-½, as though they kept searching for the spark that came so easily to them in the weeks before. If it falls short of the incredibly high standards of the tour, it’s not for lack of trying – even the runt of the litter is taking chances that were seldom seen in Phish’s past.