Midweek Assessment

12/15/99, Washington, DC, MCI Center

SET 1: Down with Disease, Farmhouse, Bathtub Gin, Wolfman's Brother, Guyute, Train Song, You Enjoy Myself

SET 2: Sample in a Jar, Maze, Free > Dirt, Reba, Halley's Comet > Suzy Greenberg

ENCORE: Frankenstein > Rocky Top

Listen

Here’s the question: Is December ‘99 one of the great Phish tours? I have to admit I always thought so, due to a mixture of personal experience, odd-year bias, and more recently, Brian Brinkman’s excellent series on the trilogy of Decembers ‘95, ‘97, and ‘99. But compared to the two earlier winters, Phish Inc. has done 1999 dirty, releasing only two full shows compared to five and six for those earlier years*. So is this month’s reputation overinflated by the heavy gravity of Big Cypress? Is my rosy take on the tour out of sync with the band, Kevin Shapiro, or the general fanbase? Or is it the children that are wrong?

A Wednesday night show at DC’s soulless downtown multi-sport arena might be a weird time to test this hypothesis. Yet the argument could be made that we should judge tours not by their historic highlights, but by the workmanlike nights in between. By Phish.net ratings, tonight sits at the top of the tour’s lower tier – not the tour’s worst night, just a couple ticks below the median. If it’s easy to find notable moments in this type of show, it says a lot about the overall quality of the tour.

And they make it super easy, as the first 40 minutes of this show are fascinatingly rich. Rested after a rare day off – there’s only three this entire tour – they tear into Disease at a tempo more characteristic of its early days. But in a year where the Disease jam can be a lot, they get the pyrotechnics out of their system early, and settle back into a more cosmic zone by the 7th minute. It progressively and constructively builds back to the finish line, returning to the closing riff out of exhilaration instead of exhaustion.

After a Farmhouse to catch their breath, the band dives right back into deep waters with Gin, extending the song’s hot streak for another night. Once again, easing off the gas pedal is the move, but this is trademark arena ambient, dreamy but propulsive. Around the 10th minute, Fishman hits upon a Latinish cymbal pattern, Mike starts playing oblong basslines, and the band is suddenly applying a jazz fusion filter over their millennial sound. It sounds fantastic when Trey starts nudging it back towards the Gin theme, marking two songs out of three where they find a fresh way to end a song in its traditional fashion.

When they call for Wolfman’s right after, it seems like the night is headed for instant classic status, but that jam flounders, and the show never quite recaptures the momentum of its opening quarter. The second set, in particular, sounds like a much lower-energy band, with that Sample opener, a Free that contains one of the more tedious Trey synth jams, and a Halley’s that abruptly ripcords into Suzy instead of going for 12/7 heroics. Only the tour’s lone Reba – the first in 25 shows! – benefits from the sleepier pace, its twinkling jam capturing frosty Winter Phish at its best.

Photo by Todd Wickersty on Flickr

So, a flawed show, but one with some gems for sure. And that’s how I’ve felt about all of the lowest-rated shows this tour we’ve encountered so far – I easily found stuff to like in Rochester, Philly night 1 and Cincy night 2, and only night 1 of Hampton remains among the tour’s rotten tomatoes. Listening to the fall tour felt like a chore by the end, but the winter tour has revealed something new almost every night, despite what seems like only subtle advancement from two months prior.

That’s enough to make it a very good tour, but is it a great one? I’d argue what nudges it into the company of ‘95 and ‘97 is less about consistency than assurance. Winter 1999 feels like the fulfillment of what they have been working on all year, the satisfying payoff after months of transitional and occasionally frustrating shows. It finds them arriving at a fully-developed sound that is truly unique to that era, a mixture of material, tones, and improvisational approach that is distinctly of its year.

I’d even argue that 1999 set a higher degree of difficulty for that achievement than 1995 and 1997, years where they were focused on a more discrete idea: let’s play as big as the venues we now inhabit, or let’s find a style that lets us all equally contribute. The thesis for 1999 is muddier, and involves combining remote threads of Siket Disc atmosphere, TAB groove, and Farmhouse songcraft. That they were able to wrangle these divergent impulses into one cohesive month of shows is an impressive accomplishment.

So why is it controversial to call December ‘99 a great tour? I’ve been surprised by comments on some of the essays resurfacing old frustrations with these shows. I think it boils down to the fully-realized vision of December ‘99 not being as popular as those on display in ‘95 and ‘97. There were some fans who bristled at the changes of 1997, but most came around eventually. 1999 seems to have created some schisms that still haven’t healed, and the arena ambient sound might just be Phish cilantro – some people love it, some people think it tastes like soap. This deep dive has only confirmed that I’m in the former camp, now that they’ve finally fixed some of this era’s flaws. But as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.

* - These numbers include New Year’s runs, but the band’s refusal to release Big Cypress – even for its 25th anniversary! – is just more evidence of 1999 snubbery.