Missing Puzzle Pieces

11/20/98, Hampton, VA, Hampton Coliseum

SET 1: Rock and Roll Part Two > Tube > Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) > Funky Bitch, Guelah Papyrus, Rift, Meat > Stash, Train Song > Possum, Roggae, Driver, Split Open and Melt

SET 2: Bathtub Gin > Piper, Axilla > Roses Are Free, Farmhouse, Hold Your Head Up > Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It > Hold Your Head Up, Harry Hood > Character Zero

ENCORE: Cavern

Listen on phish.in or Spotify

If you only knew Phish in 1998 based on their live albums – kinda weird, but possible – you might have been under the impression that they didn’t have that many songs. Between A Live One and Slip Stitch and Pass, Phish had officially released over 200 minutes of live performance that featured only 21 tracks, and that includes Montana and Hello My Baby. It’s a total that would be tripled by their third live release, the two-show, Grammy-nominated* box set Hampton Comes Alive.

Phish could have picked any number of excellent shows from Fall 98 to release, so it’s notable that they chose just about the songiest, goofiest two-night run of shows they could as their first full-show live album. Forty of the songs on the set made their live debuts in the official discography, 20 of them had never appeared on a Phish record at all before this point. At last, if you wanted your noob friends to hear rarities like Tube or BBFCFM or Ha Ha Ha, it was just a matter of punching in the right slot on the six-disc changer.

The impact was deeper than just the math. When these two shows in Hampton were released a year after they were played, it was still the early days of burning Phish shows to CD, and most of those .wav files were not SBD mixes. If you only had a CD player in your car, your options for mobile listening to pristine recordings were limited, especially when it came to the late 90s. While no reasonable person could ever get tired of listening to the ALO Hood, the live discs available only captured a fraction of the Phish songbook, never mind the full experience.

Because more broadly, the Hampton shows fill in a couple pieces of the live Phish puzzle that wouldn’t be apparent if you’d only experienced it from the comfort of your home stereo. The big one is the covers; while Slip Stitch featured their takes on Talking Heads, ZZ Top and Michigan J. Frog, Hampton Comes Alive provides a comprehensive cataloging of their influences across space and time – everyone from Basement Tapes Dylan and Hot Rize to recent hip-hop and alternative rock radio hits. It’s a bit misleading – I don’t think there is another cover turnaround as quick as “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” (released January 1998) until Fish sings Katy Perry in 2009 – but it at least establishes that Phish doesn’t completely have their head in the classic rock sand.

Photo by @funkentechno on Twitter.

The box set is equally notable for what it doesn’t have: big jams. Phish wasn’t shy about including one of their most experimental improvisations up to that point on A Live One and a completely new style in its infancy on Slip Stitch and Pass. But Hampton Comes Alive contains almost nothing that fans would consider Type II apart from a quite gorgeous ambient jam out of Simple. There are small little creative quirks here and there – the droney synth solo out of Meat, Fikus haunting Stash for a second time, the abrupt interruption of Ha Ha Ha in the middle of Free – but the longer tracks mostly color within the standard lines. 

Instead of burnishing their jamming credentials, Hampton Comes Alive plays up Phish’s quirky side. A lot of those rarities making their debut have been rattling around the songbook for years, but were usually considered too strange for album inclusion, even as recently as Story of the Ghost**. Most of them are in styles that don’t fit into the popular conception of Phish as proggy nerds with long guitar solos – from the folky whisper of Driver up to the hardcore thrash of BBFCFM and Sabotage, or from bluegrass to disco (covering “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” means covering “He’s The Greatest Dancer” by Sister Sledge.)

In a year with a lot of Grateful Dead nods, it mostly sounds nothing like them, aside from Roggae and the impressive 1000+-show bustout of their shared Quinn the Eskimo cover. Instead, it comes closer to the shit-posting anarchy of Trey and Fish’s beloved Ween, a mischievous mish-mosh of genres and inside jokes. The $60 sticker price likely discouraged any casual buyers, but any who did stumble into the box would be perplexed by the traditionally sarcastic Tom Marshall guest appearance, the instrumental Argent snippets wrapped around the Will Smith cover, or just the dizzying array of genres on display, in no coherent order.

Because the Hampton shows thumb their nose at my recent complaints over set flow – all four sets are programmed with a random song generator. But it still gets by on pure enthusiasm and swagger about the ability to play virtually anything in their own catalog and some other bands’ to boot. The result is the paragon of something I’ve been trying to put my finger on with 11/19 and 11/8, which I’ll call Playlist Phish – shows where the lack of “significant” jams and overarching narrative are just about made up for by an expert ear for picking the right song at the right moment again and again, like a hot streak at the craps table.

That’s a bigger part of Fall 98 than I previously appreciated, and Hampton Comes Alive captures it in vivid color.  It means, ironically, that the first complete shows Phish ever released are completely listenable in almost any order. The packaging even augments the theme – the mix-and-match puzzle pieces of the CD slipcases making it easy to shuffle them into any order you wish, and all six discs providing an evenly rewarding experience, unlike the lopsided quality of some other full-show releases. And today, they’re modular pieces that can be mixed up with whatever more jam-heavy streamable release you prefer, filling in the songy side of Phish that often goes neglected.

* - It was nominated for the packaging, which was indeed cool, if a bit hard to store.

** - Where the recording sessions included attempts at NICU, Ha Ha Ha, and Tube.