Music for Amphitheatres
7/7/99, Charlotte, NC, Blockbuster Pavilion
SET 1: Back on the Train, What's the Use?, Billy Breathes, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own > Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley, Axilla > Rift, Wolfman's Brother > Maze, Loving Cup
SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Down with Disease > My Left Toe -> Wading in the Velvet Sea -> My Left Toe > Bug > You Enjoy Myself
ENCORE: Possum > Funky Bitch
Now that the parameters for the 1999 sound were established, it was time to see how that approach – like all great Phish evolutions – could transform the shape of a Phish show. We didn’t have to wait long; tonight in Charlotte signals its intentions by bringing back What’s The Use? for its second appearance just one song into the show; they just can’t wait to dig back into that Bearsville vibe. This show is the only one to include multiple Siket Disc songs, but by the end its apparent that the experimental ambient style has slipped free of the boundaries established by Phish’s version of an SYR release.
Consider the second set, where only four of seven songs contain lyrics, and one of those (YEM) only barely. It’s eight full minutes before the drumbeat for 2001 kicks in, and almost six more before the band hits the first peak – basically 14 minutes before the band plays anything pre-composed. The show is nearly a half hour old before the first vocals come in, and after 11 minutes of Disease rawkin’, they disassociate it right back down to the free-floating ooze of My Left Toe – two songs out of three that are delineated by a drum pattern and little else.
My Left Toe builds glacially to Velvet Sea, but then melts back into My Left Toe – or so the setlist says. I want to believe, but there’s really nothing that definitively marks the two-minute coda as the Siket Disc track, it’s just another quiet, droney interstitial bridging an old ballad to a new one. But I love the suggestion that Siket-style ambience is constantly lurking in the background of this set, providing creative bleed between songs and knitting them into a seamless, elegant suite. It even rubs off on YEM, which gets an unusually minimal treatment in the jam section with a very LOUD Mike surrounded by Trey and Page chitters.
It’s not a flawless maneuver, at least not this early in the year. The 2001 builds upon its space opera trilogy from the previous year, with the band’s cosmic restraint letting it sprawl out over more than a quarter of the set. But there are moments within that lack their usual communication and confidence. The first is subtle; Fishman suggests a slight but thrilling variation of the beat at 10:24 and Mike latches right on, but Trey…either misses or vetoes it, and I’m not sure which is more disappointing. After the first peak segment, Trey moves to his new keyboards and throws a wrench into the gears of the groove, causing Fishman to almost drop out completely at 15:42. If it’s intended as a cowfunk-style breakdown, it’s an awfully clumsy one, and they never really recover their stride…gawk, if you must, at another uncharacteristic Fish flub at 19:24.
There’s also a valid question of how this deep and abstract set played in the room, or rather, the North Carolina shed named for an extinct video store chain. It’s a Wednesday night, so maybe 20,000 Phish fans didn’t expect to throw down that hard, but a second set with 30 minutes of noise jamming and two slow songs – one getting only its second performance ever – is still a bold choice. We’re only two years removed from reliable funk dance parties and two further years from Phish at peak classic rock flammability. Most fans in attendance were likely not equipped, emotionally or pharmaceutically, to take a deep dive into structure-free loops and synths on a cool July night.
Phish, of course, coated their experimental medicine in plenty of sugar, leaving room for an encore full of Blueshammering with special guest Derek Trucks. The first set is also an amicable mixtape of genres and deep cuts, with Sally and Wolfman’s providing plenty of time for fans to show off their Soul Train moves before Phish switched to the material more suited for chin-stroking.
But this show reveals the tension Phish will face as they decide to go deeper down the path they started in 1998, chasing an evolutionary branch that, for the first time in the 90s, didn’t make them either more suitable for large venues and/or danceable. The closest comparison might be the mega-jams of Summer 1995, but those were thorny and abrasive, confrontational improvisations that demanded attention. In its early stages, 1999 is a gentler beast, revealing a style that rewards close listening – which is tough to do when you’re way out on the lawn.
You ask the question “how this deep and abstract set played in the room?”. I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me that for 25 years. Thank you! The answer is, “pretty poorly”.
I did 18 shows this tour. 37 in 99. I was memorably sober 7/7, because I was driving to and staying at my Aunt’s house after the show.
There was a palpable weird vibe the whole second set. It felt like something was wrong with the band. That 2001 Fishman flub you mention, felt in the moment like he was falling asleep or just otherwise totally losing his concentration.
The long my left toe->waiting section felt like something was wrong. We did not know my left toe was a song. Maybe 3 nerds in attendance knew. Nobody I knew had heard the silket disc before the tour. On 7/25 we still didn’t recognize it as a song.
So everyone was just standing around waiting for Trey to do something, because it appeared as if they were doing nothing. And after the patient wait, the hyped up, pressied up crowd did not want Wading. They wanted to dance.
I have to imagine if you were high at this show, and you caught the energy of this section early, you probably rode that wave to its conclusion, and had a magical Phish experience.
If you didn’t find this groove early, you were standing around waiting for your groove for a long time. You couldn’t just hop back on in the middle.
When the band started YEM my buddy and I had a conversation like “Why the fuck would they play YEM right now? Trey can’t even play guitar!”
And sure enough, Trey barely even tries to pull off huge chunks of the scripted sections. He flubs, jams through or just straight up skips big chunks.
But what’s more revealing, is Trey does nothing during the jam. Trey does nothing. It’s a huge Mike/Things that make you go Hmmm jam. No Trey.
And walking out of the concert, everyone was having similar conversations about how weird that all had been. Some were calling it the worst concert they’d seen.
In the moment, I assumed a band member or 2 were just too high on something. That’s just how it felt.
I give the show 4.273 stars. I rank it the 8th best show of one of my favorite tours.
I’ve listened to the Sally, 2001 and YEM an infinite number of times. Some of my favorite jams of all time.
But I personally hear nothing of interest in the my left toe->waiting.
To anyone who read this far, thank you!
This was the first Phish show I attended that I wasn’t entirely sure I loved. Possibly for reasons elucidated by Rob. Upon relistening this past weekend, I feel comfortable in calling it a damn good show that even hits some transcendent moments in set two, but the shadowy, goopy, hazy, and oppressively hot character of the Summer ‘99 vibe could get a bit sinister, disorienting, and uncomfortably introspective in the moment. I had pavilion seats to this show (a first for me at the time), and being separated from my buddies on the lawn might have contributed to the “not in Kansas anymore” feeling of the early stages of this tour. Where was guitar hero Trey? Why all the swirly, loopy synths and effects pedals droning in the interstitial spaces?
The era between Lemonwheel and Big Cypress feels as close as Phish ever got to contemporary electronic music in my opinion- more on the Boards of Canada-esque downtempo end than thumping Ibiza sounds to be sure, but the repetition, textural minimalism, and de-emphasis of guitar were a big change to digest in real time. I got used to it pretty quickly- rapidly enough that “What’s the Use?” became (and remains) a Top Five Phish song for me. Fair to say it re-wired the band’s approach as well.