Null Slipcase

7/8/00, East Troy, WI, Alpine Valley Music Theatre

SET 1: Punch You in the Eye > NICU > My Soul, Poor Heart, Wolfman's Brother, First Tube, Llama, Guyute, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Heavy Things > Piper -> Rock and Roll, Tweezer -> Walk Away, Twist, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Possum

ENCORE: Suzy Greenberg > Tweezer Reprise

Listen

For anyone who wasn’t a Phish fan in 2001, it’s hard to articulate just how monumental the first wave of Live Phish CD releases felt. Overnight, the number of officially released full shows on compact disc increased 350% from 2 (Hampton Comes Alive) to 7, with an eighth following just one month later. At a time when the band was still inactive, with no end to the hiatus in sight, it was a welcome proof of life. It even came in some snazzy, unconventional packaging…that ruined the discs after a few years. Oops!

That said, the choice of shows in that initial crop was somewhat puzzling. Nobody balked at getting a December ‘95 show or the very fun “Comet” Harpua Sugarbush show, backfilling coverage of the band’s mid-90s heights. But the remaining three of the first five volumes were much fresher, all coming from Phish’s final pre-hiatus year. The recency bias felt like a statement that Phish were not ready to become a nostalgia act, even as they took time off and wedged open their vault. As fans begged for August ‘93 or Fall ‘97 soundboards or older, uncirculated shows, Phish (or at least Kevin Shapiro) instead decided to make their case for 2000 as an equally important year in the pantheon.

To be honest, volumes 3 and 4 make a pretty solid argument – we’ve covered my feelings on Drum Logos and we’ll get to Darien Lake soon enough, but both SBDs reveal new facets of Phish’s recent sonic experiments that could be lost on high-generation AUD cassettes. But then there’s volume 5, today’s show, a performance that’s only remarkable for how unremarkable it is. And I say this as someone with both attendance bias and a contrarian urge – try as I might, there’s no hidden value here waiting to be excavated. It is just a plain, median Phish show.

It’s a pretty funny decision for an official release. I guess I can see why a band like KISS or Peter Frampton would want to put out an accurate, unexceptional document of what ticket-buyers can expect to hear when they come to town. But for a band like Phish, where variance is the point, picking the statistical baseline is an odd choice unless you were trying to set expectations low or not scare anyone off. As an inaugural member of Phish’s new fan-service archive series, it’s even stranger, to the point of being almost insulting.

The longest track here is Piper, at a modest 14:49; despite a generous helping of jam vehicles, the others all stay resolutely Type I. Essentially every song played on this night has a better or more interesting version somewhere else in Summer 2000. The setlist is fairly scattershot, and any show that opens its second set with Heavy Things should be immediately disqualified from consideration. There are some interesting segue chains…I guess? And the rarest song is Walk Away, which is also part of the Drum Logos set. What are we doing here?

To find a reason this show made the cut, you’ve got to dig deep. Could it be the soundcheck jam included as a bonus track on the CDs? It’s certainly more interesting than anything in the actual show, though that’s a pretty low bar. Neither is it one of those closed-door sessions that transcends its technical purpose – you get a front row seat to hear Page testing all his keyboards, and the last few minutes are just Fish and Mike warming up their pocket.

So maybe it’s just the old soundboard upgrade effect bringing new appreciation to a jam where the details are washed out on AUD? To test this hypothesis, I subjected myself to my Summer 2000 nemesis, Piper, in both amateur and professional recordings. From the taper section, the fast-and-noisy segment goes down smoother with full wooden-roof acoustics as it earns repeated crowd pops, but the (slightly) restrained last five minutes feel hazy and far away. On Live Phish 5, you upgrade from the lawn to pavs, and it’s easier to make out all the cool, fluttery drum tricks Fish is doing to keep it spry in that final section. Call it a draw.

But those same close-up soundboard benefits apply to any show from 2000, and they’d be magnified for one with more subtlety, like 6/28, 6/30 or eithernight in Camden. Hell, throw a dart at the Summer 2000 calendar and you’d probably end up with a better representative, unless the point stuck in Walnut Creek. If the first five selections of Live Phish were sending a subliminal message in 2001, it may have been that Phish still didn’t know what to make of 2000, unable to fully distinguish between the magical and the mediocre.