Polar Vortex
12/13/99, Providence, RI, Providence Civic Center
SET 1: Tube, Cars Trucks Buses, Gumbo, The Moma Dance > Piper > Theme From the Bottom
SET 2: Gotta Jibboo > NICU, Sand, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Mountains in the Mist, Limb By Limb, Golgi Apparatus > Slave to the Traffic Light
ENCORE: Silent in the Morning, Heavy Things
One of the recurring themes around these parts is the seasonality of Phish, the tendency of the band to sound subtly but significantly different across the calendar year. Given an unlabeled tape, most seasoned Phish fans could probably suss out whether it was a summer or a fall show by the end of Side A – there are elements of song selection, jamming style, even crowd noise that can act as clues. Indoor/outdoor venues are a confounding factor – and when they don’t line up with the season, it can really throw off the vibes – but Summer Phish and Fall Phish are generally as distinct of breeds as Festival Phish or Holiday Phish.
So 1999 poses an interesting experiment: what does Winter Phish sound like? Sure, the December tour wraps up before the winter solstice, so it’s technically still fall, but no reasonable person considers the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas to be autumn. Particularly not where Phish charted their three-week run; the itinerary is solidly snow country, with most of it spent in the Great Lakes and the band’s northeastern stronghold. And while they played December shows in the same regions in ‘95 and ‘97, those tours had some fall weather build-up, while this one dropped right in with no preamble – the first show even included a Christmas carol, for Santa’s sake.
This context was more obvious to me as I wrote about the last couple shows on a trip to Arizona; it felt particularly incongruous listening to Hartford and Providence next to the pool, surrounded by cacti. There is an iciness to their sound on this tour that just doesn’t sound right in bright sunshine, a deep chill that’s better suited to short, crisp days and long nights. Some of that is related to elements we’ve already discussed, such as the relative lack of humor and the inherent frostiness of the newer, trancier material. But there are other wintry elements that add up to a distinct flavor for this tour, many on display in Providence.
Gumbo is one of the best thermometers for Phish’s seasonal differences. In summer, it’s a song that can perfectly capture the humid, gooey atmosphere of an outdoor Phish show; my beloved 8/3/98 version is an ideal example. In fall, it’s more sedate – consider the loopy, starstruck 11/11/98 take as a counterpoint. Providence’s Gumbo goes a more sinister route, starting from some of the same licks as those two earlier performances but steering into melancholy territory. There’s a haunting melody introduced in the 7th minute that would likely never occur in the party time of a summer shed, and it wistfully unwinds with the sad serenity of an early sunset.
Sand, with its stiff groove and digital tones, is a song ready-made to feast upon this frigid mood, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that it matured just in time for this uniquely-timed tour. Tonight’s Sand is the longest of its signature month and all of its best 1999 features are here in abundance.
Maybe it’s the soundboard effect, but it’s particularly striking how Page plays a more assertive role in the jam’s first half – his soft Rhodes accents smooth out the industrial noises from stage left, and when Trey gets fixated on a single guitar line for several minutes in the middle, Page’s grand piano carries the weight with stark ECM (the most winter of all record labels) beauty. When the guitarist breaks out of his repetition and retakes the lead, the jam’s tone remains so chill that they spend a long stretch circling around an Izabella segue that they can’t quite stoke the fire high enough to execute.
Even the questionable song selection that follows fits the seasonal framing. Maybe it’s my soft spot for John Fahey Christmas records, but Inlaw Josie Wales works great here as a comedown from the heaviness of Sand, a perfect instrumental for watching a blizzard through the window. Mountains in the Mist captures that same cozy peace, which could also justify the extremely mellow encore of a Horse-less Silent in the Morning and Heavy Things. It’s a weeknight show for sipping cocoa under a quilt, not a rager that calls for a loud exclamation point.
Given all the wintry atmosphere on display, it’s ironic that the month will end in the swampland of Florida. But those of us who were in attendance at Big Cypress – not that we ever brag about it or anything – will tell you that it was quite chilly at night in the Everglades and, thanks to the set times and the tilt of the Earth, most of the music took place in darkness. So the winter games of December contributed to the marathon training as well, sharpening a shiver that will work as well in the wee hours of the South as it did in the single-digit temperatures of the North.
This Sand is an absolute joy. Interesting show all around, with a really fire-looking set 1 that sometimes does indeed come off a little winter doldrum-y to my ears. I’ve still never broken through with this Piper the way I have with most of the other type 2 jams this tour, possibly because I unfairly compare it to my beloved 12/8 Piper. It also reminds me a bit of some of the Fall 00 Pipers that I honestly: just don’t really like, and are some of the strongest signifiers of a tired-ass band that for the first time ran a stylistic thread into the ground before they were able to fully break new ground on a new direction, though there was some ultimately unfulfilled promise with the Darien Drowned, we’ll get there next year. My listening experience today has been a lot more positive with this set, which is what I was hoping for.
This Jibboo has an interesting story to tell, as Trey would relate that they all walked off stage pissed about it, feeling like the song was a chore that simply wasn’t paying off. They were fighting to achieve something, and it felt like a struggle on stage. It was a notable collective abandonment of the “no analyzing rule,” but what they discovered listening back to TAB versions was that Russ would swing on the ride during the jam, whereas Fishman would often take a straight-ahead tack towards a more metronomic beat that tensed everything up. Funny that this breakdown occurred right after its best version yet in Philly, but the next version would again be a marked improvement during the otherwise uneven 12/17 show. Compare some versions before and after this by listening to when Trey drops the siren loops going into the jam, usually around 3:00-ish and listen to the beat Fish lays down for an example of the microcosmic struggle they were having.
It’s easy to dismiss some of the “TABification” as the band just playing ad nauseam over a rote or static beat, but it was a much more important and advanced exercise for them that they approached with the same seriousness with which they did their fugues and improvisational exercises. They were doing an incredibly deep and granular dive into what made a groove work. They weren’t just slapping down some lazy, white boy, vaguely funky slop and layering mixolydian and dorian jams over top in order to get stoners to wiggle awkwardly in sheds and basketball arenas across the country. That’s always been the real difference between Phish and “jam bands” for me. Nothing was ever free for them, absolutely everything was earned, struggled for, fought for, and dearly bought. Even the silly little groove under the nonsense lyrics about having to jibboo. And as far as the origin of the groove coming from other players, that never seemed to matter to the band, at least from what they said. In the Phish book Mike was enthusiastically declaring “I don’t care if I didn’t write a bass line. If it’s a great line and fun to play, I love playing it.” Still, this Sand was one of the first examples of him breaking out of the line-as-written and creating new, exciting variations that slowly evolved with the groove into something new, but still as patient and delicate. By Providence they had collectively earned it, and by late night on 12/31 they’d show that they had fully mastered it as Sand warped and twisted into Quadrophonic Toppling. How sweet it is.
Great write up as always! The SBD of “Sand” really accentuates how subtly they’re playing through that jam. Doesn’t really translate on the AUD. I wish the “piper” could have the same treatment.