Murmuring Rock

6/22/97, Sankt Goarshausen, GER, Freilichtbühne Loreley

SET 1: Taste, Water in the Sky, Stash, Dirt, Uncle Pen, Character Zero > Theme From the Bottom, Hello My Baby, Ghost

ENCORE: Limb By Limb

Listen on phish.in

I may have been too quick to praise Phish’s approach to festivals in the summer of 1997. The now-compulsory preponderance of new songs aside (Limb By Limb streak: 7!), this set is as custie as they come, and the music is just as conservative as the setlist suggests. It would be the most forgettable night so far this tour, but for one special feature: it was filmed and televised, and you can watch it right now. 

The WDR Festival was a one-day gig organized by the station that broadcasts Rockpalast, the TV show that also gave us precious footage of the band’s previous visit to western Deutschland. The 1997 installment was headlined by Steve Winwood — no “Light Up or Leave Me Alone” sit-in, sadly — and also featured Primus, John Hiatt, and once-buzzy British band Reef. Phish went on second-to-last, in the late afternoon, playing a quite picturesque sculpted-rock amphitheater that was, rather unfortunately, built by the Nazis. But before that historical ignominy, the Lorelei rock formation was famous for the echoing murmur of a nearby waterfall, inspiring legends that dwarves resided within. 

This broadcast is not quite as rich with insight as the February footage, but it’s still a worthwhile visual check-in. The band is playing to maaaaaaybe 500 people in the Thingplatz, and based on how often the same wooks show up in crowd shots, only a few dozen were super into their performance and not merely waiting for Winwood or bummed that they weren’t seeing Fish from Marillion. The band looks a little naked in the daylight with a borrowed, stock light show, but at least they’re dressed like normal (1997) people. Trey’s Residents shirt is in the wash, Mike’s got his polo tucked like he just played a tight 18, and Fishman’s in his three-piece-suit phase with his head shaved, lookin’ like Boss Baby on drums.

I mostly watched the 78-minute set looking for signs of the cockiness I’ve heard in the first week of shows. And even though the band is pretty listless, it’s subtly there. It’s a low-key baller move that Page plays most of Water in the Sky with his legs crossed, as though the song’s boogie-woogie piano is equivalent to chilling with a book on his porch. 

Ghost provides the year’s first document of Trey’s aggressive cowfunk stance, a weird crouch that I understand is necessitated by the physical logistics of the wah pedal, but which would come to signify the ultimate in Phish swagger through the fall’s classic jams (and does he say “fuck yeah” at 58:28?).

That Ghost is probably the most important turning point this footage documents. Once again, it goes for big-boy minutes, 11 strong, but it also sounds and *looks* livelier than the rest of a set where Phish is on auto-pilot. We get to see the band using almost all of the new toys I featured three days ago — Page is especially busy, hopping back and forth between clavinet and CS60 — and the jam, in its fifth airing, is settling into the Funk Freakout > Big Rock Peak template it will occupy for the rest of its life. If it wasn’t clear enough from the audio that Ghost and its siblings were a shot of adrenaline for Phish, the moving pictures here confirm it. And oh, how they danced, those children of Lorelei.