Parts of the Sum

7/19/98, Mountain View, CA, Shoreline Amphitheatre

SET 1: The Moma Dance, Beauty of My Dreams, Sample in a Jar, Guyute, Ghost > Limb By Limb > Roggae, You Enjoy Myself

SET 2: Llama, Wolfman's Brother > Piper > Tweezer -> Jesus Just Left Chicago, McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters > Jam -> Down with Disease

ENCORE: Possum > Tweezer Reprise

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I’ve been a pretty big 1998 booster so far this year, despite some hiccups in Europe. But as the U.S. summer tour settles in, it’s time for me to admit one thing that 1998 doesn’t do better than some other peak eras of Phish: set flow. When Phish is consumed by a new direction or idea, as they were in Fall 97, that energy tends to produce sets that tell a broader story, building their own internal logic as they go. But a side effect of the ‘98 calm confidence I’ve been trying to define over the last three shows is the loss of this momentum-driven storytelling, leading to shows with excellent individual components but more choppiness holistically.

It might seem like a weird conclusion after the brilliance of 7/17/98 Set II, but that no-fat four-song set is more the exception than the rule. Phish’s third headline appearance at Shoreline is a more typical ‘98 setlist – not an excessive amount of songs, plenty of highlights, but lacking the longform structure of the most legendary shows. If you can bear with what’s now the only AUD island in the tour’s first five shows, there’s plenty to like here, but it can’t help but feel like a slight step back from the opening trio, and the sequencing is partly to blame.

For starters, it’s nice to have a big first set jam, but always a little disorienting when the deepest improv of the night comes before the sun’s even all the way down on a West Coast night in July. The first Ghost of the American summer steals the show, from the opening chorus of bweeoooos through the lightly disco-fied jam through the rock-star finish. The Limb By Limb that takes the baton ain’t too shabby either, another version where the band frolics at the limit of the song’s structure (even flirting with that Taste closing riff again) without ever crossing the boundary. Throw in a brief ambient coda and a serene Roggae chaser, and it’s forthcoming album promotion of the best kind. 

But Set 2, particularly with the magic of The Gorge fresh in the memory, feels like one of those sweaty sets where Phish just can’t find a comfortable spot to sink into. Llama’s your fiery set opener, Wolfman’s, for the moment, doesn’t have the juice (though it does play around with a lick that I will get to soon), and Piper does its glorious slow-build thing but not much else. Tweezer is just about to get spooky when it gets distracted by Da Blooze and becomes Jesus Just Left Chicago instead. 

It’s left to McGrupp, of all songs, to provide both the breather and the most open jamming of the second set – for the second time in a row after Prague. Like that version, it starts out as a largely drum-less segment, but Fish eventually comes in to offer some structure, and it moves into a Siket Disc-y space that could almost be a My Left Toe jam. Yet even this promising spark fizzles back to an unaccompanied Trey as the crowd gets audibly restless, until Disease, Possum, and Tweeprise provide the expected fireworks to send them home happy.

There’s possibly a way to shuffle these puzzle pieces around to make the show feel like more than the sum of its parts – maybe by uniting Limb and McGrupp’s atmospheric transitions or letting the cobwebby corners of Ghost and Tweezer play off each other. But artificial resequencing can’t ever live up to in-the-moment, organic flow, and the four-or-five-song sets we were spoiled by last fall have returned to rare occurrence, making a cohesive statement harder to pull off with 8-10 entries instead. That’s okay; only the most exceptional years — months, even — of Phish reach that lofty bar. Appreciating the pleasures of 1998 means recalibrating the expectations and not losing sight of the trees in favor of the forest.