Playing Ball
10/15/98, San Francisco, CA, The Fillmore
SET 1: Ghost -> Water in the Sky, Wolfman's Brother, Gumbo > David Bowie, Brian and Robert, Reba > Character Zero
SET 2: My Soul > Chalk Dust Torture, Roggae, The Moma Dance, Wading in the Velvet Sea > Prince Caspian > Frankie Says, Birds of a Feather, Lawn Boy, Harry Hood
ENCORE: Dirt, Limb By Limb
The all-star charity gigs of Farm Aid and the Bridge School Benefit obscure it somewhat, but let’s not delude ourselves about what Phish was doing for most of October 1998: the dirty work of album promotion. The Story of the Ghost, Phish’s seventh and best studio record, was hitting stores on October 27th, and for the first time since Hoist Phish grit their collective teeth and played industry good boys before proceeding on a more typical fall itinerary.
The festival appearances pulled them out of their solitary orbit to play in front of unfamiliar crowds and in the context of classic rock greats and late 90’s soft-alternative darlings, rubbing shoulders with more reliable unit-shifting acts such as R.E.M. and Barenaked Ladies. There was the now requisite Letterman appearance, their fourth, but also a taping of the tony Sessions at West 54th to introduce themselves to the PBS demographic. And there was this show, quietly announced hours beforehand and taking place in the historic Fillmore Auditorium – a lovely surprise, until you look a little closer.
Phish.net recounts that in the scramble at Pier 32, “roughly four hundred lucky people were able to buy vouchers entitling them to a pair of tickets.” But the modern incarnation of The Fillmore can pack in north of 1,300, meaning a little less than half the room was already spoken for by (presumably) friends and associates of Elektra Records and the broader Warner Music Group. Instead of the truly secret shows of years past – the bar-band intimacy of the Third Ball or the friends-only Bradstock – this club date carries the faint stink of record biz favor-trading, a VIP sweetener for regional sales managers and radio promoters.
That taint isn’t dispelled by the setlist, which fully understands the assignment. Phish plays 9 of the 14 songs on The Story of the Ghost and deliberately leaves out the weird stuff: Fikus, Meat, Shafty, End of Session, and Guyute. In between, they play the older “hits” – Wolfman’s, Reba, Chalk Dust, and Hood among them. There are no debuts or rarities or hijinks aside from some banter needling Fishman over his hatred of yellow lights. It’s too well-behaved to offer much beyond the romance of seeing Phish play kinda sorta the same room where the Dead grew up thirty years prior.
And yet, this show starts stronger than its setlist, reputation, and questionable circumstances suggest. With only two months off the road between Lemonwheel and this show, they don’t really need a warm-up gig (some flubs in Roggae and Hood aside), and they hit the ground running with a nearly 17-minute Ghost that stubbornly remains radio-unfriendly. The first set looks predictable on paper, but every jam delivers, particularly a Wolfman’s and Gumbo combo where the former borrows the theme from the latter’s massive 8/3/98 version, forcing Gumbo to find a different, darker direction that opens a portal to Bowie.
It’s the second set that feels like a letdown, with the pacing kneecapped by the impulse to fit in as much of the forthcoming LP as possible. After a sleepy Velvet Sea > Caspian > Frankie Says sequence in the middle, I’m not sure how many of the music industry power brokers were still around when Phish finally played their new single three-quarters of the way through the show. Despite its promising start, the show can’t escape the same trap the band often faced in Europe – trying to find the right balance between winning over new fans and satisfying the converted, and ending up doing neither.
That indecisiveness stings more here, because of this date’s place in the lineage of 90s Phish “secret shows.” In the Bradstock essay, I talked about how these off-tour surprises felt like decoder keys for the year to come, and by that standard this one’s hidden message is as unsatisfying as “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.” It’s a touch unfair, since by October 1998 we already had a several months of data to work with, and the band only had eight weeks off to whip up something fresh. But if the urgency to run down to the wharf and snag a ticket voucher for this show was the rare chance to see Phish in an intimate space without traveling abroad…well, those lucky fans got the wrong part of the European experience.
Then again, maybe the uneasy cohabitation of the commercial and the experimental does set the tone for Fall 98, a tour I saw a healthy chunk of myself and enjoyed quite a bit, but one that does seem more transitional than defining. You could call it an even-years curse of the late 90s, but it’s really an album-cycle curse, as the post-Story of the Ghost tour takes on a little bit of the stiffness of the post-Billy Breathes tour two years prior (and post-Farmhouse ain’t top shelf either).
They’ll deal with the conflicting impulses much better this time around, playing some bonkers Fall 98 shows and continuing to evolve towards their last great metamorphosis of the decade. But for all that Phish resisted the standard paths of the music industry and played by their own rules, there’s something about a record release that always made them temporarily too well-behaved for everyone’s good.