Nude & Rude

11/6/98, Madison, WI, Kohl Center

SET 1: Possum, Wilson > Roggae, Maze, Meat > Sparkle > Split Open and Melt

SET 2: Makisupa Policeman > Funky Bitch, Simple -> Prince Caspian > Fluffhead, Hold Your Head Up > Bike > Hold Your Head Up, Harry Hood

ENCORE: Birds of a Feather, Hello My Baby

Listen on phish.in

Call me an old fuddy-dud if you will, but I’ve never felt the urge to crash Phish’s stage, never mind in the raw. I’m more of the quiet observer type, and if I find myself within sight of the band, I’m going to do everything I can to not distract them from their work. Just being part of the invisible energy transfer back and forth between audience and band is enough for me. But especially now that all the shows are webcast, there’s a whole subset of fans who want to make themselves part of the show – I spent too much time at the United Center this fall distracted by this type hamming it up on the rail.

You can possibly trace this obnoxious behavior back to 1998, when there was a sudden rash of stage-crashing incidents. There’s a notable one near the start of the year, in the middle of Phish’s statement set; there’s another in Europe, when Pete Carini suffered bonkus of the konkus; and then there’s this one, so famous it was immediately and permanently enshrined in Mr. Carini’s namesake song. If you want to see it, it’s here – tastefully framed by the bootlegger to be safe for work.

It’s kinda funny that a dude was inspired to go streaking in the middle of a Caspian, as well as by this overall show, which is fairly mid. It has the loose, disconnected energy of a bustout show, without any bustouts – even Bike was played a mere 19 shows prior at Deer Creek. There’s some really good stuff here, including one of the dancier Melts you’ll ever hear and a Simple that harnesses the Fall 98 entropy to explode into a cloud of glitter. But it doesn’t have the kind of momentum or sustained intensity that makes it somewhat understandable that someone was so swept away they got their dick out. 

These repeated incursions reflect the weird energy building over the course of 1998; it feels of a piece with Trey’s abrupt walk-off in Vegas, or the mishaps and rude band behavior of the European tour. We’re about to enter a week of shows that I had tickets for, so I can speak from experience here that there was something in the air equal parts thrilling and dangerous at the time. Fall 98 was incredibly fun, but in light of the years that followed, it feels like a turning point in the Phish atmosphere that wasn’t, in the end, a positive development. 

One can only speculate about the band’s role in this shift, though there are a few suggestive clues. There’s Trey’s very unsubtle riffing on the “E Centre” name in Salt Lake City: “I love everyone here, I love everything, I feel so warm and full of love.” There are the rumors that surround what happened in Halloween Set 3. And most well documented, there’s Parke Puterbaugh’s biography, which states that Fall 98 is the first tour where the “Betty Ford Clinic” backstage became an officially designated zone, with special passes given to lucky patients. 

It was “the party right next to the band room,” Trey explained – the original concept being a way to thwart the isolation and loneliness of an arena tour and give the band a place to hang out with their inner circle – but it quickly turned into something darker. “It used to be friends, family, and music geeks standing around and chatting about music or whatever,” Tom Marshall told the biographer. “Then it became rich kids with drugs who were disappearing with the band members into the bathroom to turn them on.”

But there’s a classic chicken-and-egg blame game here. Phish doesn’t sound the least bit addled in this Madison show; the playing is sharp and honestly too focused for my taste. It’s the scene surrounding them that’s showing signs of going one toke over the line – not just in the nude stage-crashing, but in whatever inspired the Makisupa with the “university rent-a-cop” keyword and the noxious sound of glowsticks clunking against the band’s instruments in Hood. By 1998, Phish had officially won the battle to be the Dead’s successor, and part of their reward was attracting the negative elements that had plagued Dead tour in the early part of the decade, now with the added influence of club drugs leaking over from the thriving rave world. 

It all may have been less noticeable in the half-daylight of a summer tour, but the all-indoors, after-dark intensity of fall really brought it into relief. The band-audience energy exchange is absolutely one of the most special things about Phish, but that doesn’t mean it’s always a pure and positive phenomenon. Some poisonous threads were starting to appear in that two-way channel by Fall 1998, and the flurry of stage crashers – clothed or otherwise – may have been the canaries in the coal mine.