Manic Episode

7/5/98, Prague, CZE, Lucerna Theatre

SET 1: Birds of a Feather, Taste > Cavern, Reba, Fee -> Water in the Sky > Lawn Boy > Chalk Dust Torture

SET 2: Bathtub Gin > The Moma Dance > McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters > Jam > Axilla > Harry Hood > Rocky Top

ENCORE: Funky Bitch

Listen on phish.in

One remarkable thing about 1998 was how Phish started in midseason form from the very start, whether you define that departure point as the Island Tour or this run of European shows. Due no doubt to the spring mini-tour and the lengthy recording sessions around it, Phish avoided the usual warm-up rustiness on both the composition and improvisation fronts. Songs old and new are played pretty clean, and long, communicative jams emerged almost immediately in both April and June/July launches. 

Yeah well, that surprise trend reverts back to the mean on the first night in Prague, which finds Phish about as sloppy as they get outside of hazy nights in Amsterdam. Taste, Reba, and Fee all get inhumanely massacred, with Trey giving up on the lyrics halfway through the latter and concluding “Fee got that bottle upside the head and you know…he jumped over the side of the ship and the sharks ate him. Chorus.” The mistakes are frequent enough that I suspect this is the show that inspired Trey’s famous “I couldn’t fucking care less if we miss a change or a number of changes” hotel rant in Bittersweet Motel. 

Trey’s rebuttal to Brad and the chorus of nit-pickers – “it’s all about energy” – is generally one I’m sympathetic to; as you can tell from this newsletter, I’m not interested in grading the band each night on whether they nail the fugues. But in this show, that energy is distinctly unpleasant, the manic ugly-Americanism of Trey waving around a gun at the pawn shop*. A shrill soundboard doesn’t help, nor do two sets that clock in under an hour. 

The second set is more polished, but the featured jams are a butt-rock Gin and an all-thumbs Hood, chased with a “let’s get this over with” Rocky Top. If you’re intrigued by a 13-minute Fee and that post-McGrupp “Jam,” keep your expectations low; the first is a cartoony theme with a hint of mockery, the second is a Trey/Mike duet that sounds like they’re vamping on “I Saw Three Ships” while Fish sits in the penalty box for muffing the Moma vocals. It’s as clumsy a show as they’ve played in almost a year, with none of the laid-back quietude of Copenhagen. And Moma aside, it’s almost entirely funk-less, lacking in both the earthy 97 and orbital 98 varieties. 

It raises a new puzzle for Phish to solve, 8 shows into their latest metamorphosis – how do you handle the occasional nights where the band’s needle is in the red? That was practically the default state in 1995, and in 1997 they became adept at flipping the switch between minimalist funk and maximalist hard-rock when the spirit took them. But in 1998, where the keywords are patience and texture, the occasional hyperactive night can be a handicap.

It’s not an impossible challenge for a veteran band to tackle; in fact, they’d do a pretty good job the very next night of corralling a high tide of energy before it spills over and makes a mess. But it hints at a bifurcation that will play out over the next two years. One show/jam could be an unhurried, atmospheric voyage, the next could be a full-throttle shredfest long on volume and short on nuance. Neither branch requires the band to hit the changes, but the split proves that going all in on energy can be a fickle mistress.

* - This might also be the show Trey and Mike are discussing at the start of the pawn shop scene. Mike’s review: “I thought you were kind of going off a little…you were just playing a lot of notes.”