Melting Point
7/29/97, Phoenix, AZ, Desert Sky Pavilion
SET 1: Theme From the Bottom, Beauty of My Dreams, Gumbo, Dirt, Sparkle, Ghost > Swept Away > Steep > Loving Cup
SET 2: Olivia's Pool, Run Like an Antelope > Wading in the Velvet Sea, Twist -> Taste, Sample in a Jar > Rocky Top, The Squirming Coil
ENCORE: Possum
The 1997 U.S. Summer Tour followed a pretty brutal itinerary. In 8 days, the tour has already traveled over 2500 miles, including a thousand-mile drive between the last show in Austin and this one in Phoenix. Phish forced its most intrepid fans to drive from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in nine days, then turn right back around and go from Southern California to the northern tip of Maine in two-and-a-half weeks. Even at 90s gas prices, that wouldn’t have been easy – maybe Europassing around the European tour was the budget plan all along.
The route also put Phish in some of the hottest parts of the country during the dog days of summer. The entire tour thus far has stayed inside the Sun Belt, and if the Weather Underground historical data can be trusted, both Texas dates hit the high 90s before showtime. Here in Phoenix, the thermometer was into the triple digits at 5:00 p.m., before dropping to a refreshing 97 degrees at showtime. Phish may have set out to destroy America in the fall, but the country was doing its best to melt the band and their fans in the summer.
These conditions can’t help but affect the band’s playing, and the combination of factors – travel, heat, or otherwise – produce a show in Phoenix that feels like it’s constantly oozing apart. I expected the first show post-Gullotti to snap back to the funk party jams of the tour’s first weekend, but the four main points of improv in this show all assume a more amorphous shape. Represented on the streaming sites by an AUD that’s just as steamy as the weather report, it’s a slightly delirious experience, like sitting in the sauna too long.
First, the funk virus claims another victim, as the band collectively realizes that Gumbo has just the right viscosity to support their new preferred genre. With the encouragement of an audible “yeah man!” from Trey at 3:42, Page never finds his way to the traditional ragtime outro, ceding the spotlight to Mike instead and making itchy noises on the clavinet. For ten minutes, the jam saunters along in this fashion, never reaching a post-funk peak, just getting progressively slower and hazier.
It would have made for an ideal segue into Ghost, but they make it wait two more songs; the intervening Sparkle maybe an attempt to break the heat trance. If so, it’s unsuccessful, as the Ghost too is swampy and languid, proceeding entropically until it dissolves to Swept Away > Steep. It’s the jam equivalent of futilely fanning yourself on the porch, without the catharsis of someone cracking open a fire hydrant – at least until Loving Cup, which the crowd receives rapturously.
Nighttime temps in Phoenix may have reached the low 90s, but the second set’s centerpiece jams remain in the same torpid zone, now with the funk gene excised. Both Antelope and the first American Twist flirt with the 20-minute mark, but ebb and flow (mostly ebb) in more of a rock idiom. Attempts to shake off the doldrums – the normal ramp structure of Antelope’s middle section, a brief attempt at a blues jam in Twist – wilt in the summer heat. Trey sings “rye rye Rocko” at close to a whisper, Twist ends with the same end-of-the-world wah solo as Austin’s Ghost and a soupy ambient coda.
These descriptions may all sound negative on paper, but it’s not a bad show, just an unusually single-minded one. Counter to my comments a few shows back, I’d love to hear this one in SBD; my suspicion is that the more abstract passages at the end of these jams have some texture that’s lost in the taper section. The show makes an argument that working on the atmospherics wasn’t just a temporary accommodation for the extra drummer, it may instead have been an adaptation to the elements and the long road between shows. Even for ‘97 Phish, there’s such a thing as too hot.