Quadrennial Topplings

7/1/00, Hartford, CT, Hartford Meadows

SET 1: Buried Alive, Wolfman's Brother > Axilla > Poor Heart > Sample in a Jar, Tube, Beauty of My Dreams, Roggae, Vultures, Dirt, Split Open and Melt

SET 2: Gotta Jibboo, Bug > First Tube > Mike's Song -> Swept Away > Steep -> I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove -> Nellie Kane, Ghost

ENCORE: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Listen

2000 may feel like a singular year in Phish history, with the hiatus a traumatic event that left the year as an unresolved stub. But if you ignore the significant hole where a proper fall tour and New Year’s run should be, 2000 looks a lot more precedented, and you don’t even have to look too far back. In fact, if it wasn’t for the interruption, 2000 would be a dead ringer for another underwhelming Phish year: 1996. Allow me to explain.

In 1996, Phish was coming off a landmark concert played on New Year’s Eve. They spent part of the spring in the studio, finishing up an album that would come out later that year. Before their traditional U.S. summer tour, they journeyed abroad to play clubs and build out a new foreign audience. While there, they played some weird music, including a very unusual and jammy show that just might have been under the influence of an intoxicating substance. But when they came back to America, they didn’t really have much in the way of original material, and they spent most of the year searching for a new direction while also promoting an album that felt, to many fans, like old news before it even hit stores. Also, Trey had a non-guitar instrument that often distracted him.

I’d put money down that absolutely nobody considers 1996 to be their favorite Phish year, but it does have its moments. There’s the Clifford Ball, for one, a twin to MSG ‘95 for “look ma, we made it” milestones. There’s Halloween, for two, which laid down the creative blueprint for the rest of Phish’s wild 90’s. And there are very good shows sprinkled across Noblesville, Omaha, Seattle, and Las Vegas. But there’s nothing really connecting that latter group, no unified sense of purpose that stretches across those highlights, and none of them are really start-to-finish jaw-droppers. They stand out based on one or two great jams on older material, a few clever setlist choices, or several dancing Elvii.

In 2000, we didn’t get a festival or a Halloween. We didn’t even get the meager amount of debuts that 1996 had. That year debuted 29 songs, though most of them were new covers, while in 2000, even counting covers, Phish only played 10 (!) new songs all year, and two of them were cold TAB leftovers. That leaves 2000 with only the last positive from 1996: scattered good shows with flashes of greatness that don’t really add up to a defined narrative – or at least not one with a satisfying ending.

The Swept Away > Steep duo popping up here, for the first time in a year, put me in this 1996 state of mind. No other songs are as tightly associated with that year; to this day, more than a third of the versions Phish has played fell within ‘96. The pair was arguably the most interesting part of Billy Breathes and “The Blob” experiment that they attempted, but its atmospherics never really translated live. The ambient era of 1999-2000 would seem like a good time to give it another go, and using it as a Hydrogen substitute (before playing Hydrogen itself) is a good idea. But after this show, it’ll disappear again, this time for almost a decade – another loose thread left by the hiatus and breakup.

It’s a moderately exciting bustout in a moderately exciting show. In the first set, Vultures creeps into The Zone with a particularly headbanging rendition, while Melt has a bizarrely optimistic jam, like one of those “songs in a minor key flipped major” memes. The second set opens with an unusual Jibboo where Trey plays mostly rhythm guitar, bucking the usual TAB trend, and then Weekapaug gets abruptly steered into Nellie Kane, a tease that refuses to let go.

But the night’s most characteristically 2000 performance is Ghost, a late jammer that raises the tempo until it goes plaid. In earlier times, Trey and Fish would’ve kept it under control while they egged each other on. Here, it flies off the rails and can’t get back, even after Trey bids everyone good night. It brings up another parallel to 1996, one that requires a little more stretching.

That was the year that Phish inherited the traveling circus of the Dead, forcing them to adjust on the fly to the logistics of larger crowds. This time around, it’s the raver-to-Phish pipeline bringing new faces on tour, and like the Deadheads who came before them, they’re there for the general experience, not the musical specifics. In 1996, Phish felt weighed down by the pressure of their suddenly expanded following; in 2000, they again feel like they’re trying to run in a high-gravity environment. For the first time in four years, they don’t seem to have a firm grip on the cross-country juggernaut they assembled piece by piece. It’s a question relevant to both 1996 and 2000, is the band driving the train or is the train driving the band?