Radio Static
5/21/00, New York City, NY, Radio City Music Hall
SET 1: First Tube, Wolfman's Brother, The Squirming Coil, Possum, The Moma Dance > Limb By Limb > Character Zero
SET 2: Gotta Jibboo, Down with Disease > Dirt, Twist > Piper, Harry Hood > Wading in the Velvet Sea, Guyute
ENCORE: The Inlaw Josie Wales, Loving Cup
It’s easy to forget that this week’s mini-tour of unusual NYC venues was part 2 of the Farmhouse promotional cycle, albeit one closer to October 1998’s more organic buzz campaign. The Roseland Ballroom stop on 5/23 is the obvious “special small show” date, but these Radio City appearances are also intimate by the high standards of Phish at this stage. Though it was the world’s largest auditorium when it opened in 1932, the Rockefeller Center venue holds less than a third of Phish’s usual NYC residence, and tickets were impossibly scarce, adding to the stakes of the first “normal” post-Cypress show.
Those lofty expectations were destined to crash against the reality of album promo – six Farmhouse songs appear tonight, four tomorrow – and the rust of five months off the road. If it wasn’t for a particular jam on night 2, this mini NYC run might be a forgotten footnote between Big Cypress and the cult favorite Japan tour. It’s nice to hear Page and Trey talk about how special it is to play the famous room, but it would have been a more significant date five or six years ago on Phish’s way up…like it was a few years back for a certain other jamband.
What’s most underwhelming about opening night at Radio City is that it terminates an important tradition of Phish’s mercurial 90s: the new year statement show. These performances – sometimes private, sometimes public – kicked off each year from 1995-1999 with a fresh slate of songs and/or jamming styles, enticing rough drafts that Phish would iterate on all year. There’s the Voters for Choice benefit, The Third Ball, Bradstock*, and the entire Island Tour, and while 1999 doesn’t have an obvious Phish candidate, Trey’s TAB tour ended up playing the same agenda-setting role.
Each of these shows carried a bold message: you should not expect the Phish that ended last year to be the Phish of the year to come. Even if the band had been off the road for several months, they were reassurance that the work never stopped. Whether in the studio or on a songwriting retreat, they were exploring new definitions of what Phish could be. Even if those ideas were still pretty raw and some were destined for the scrap pile – poor Glide II – it was always a fresh, exciting start.
So the bummer of tonight’s show is not that they were playing a lot of Farmhouse tracks, that’s only natural five days after its release. It’s that there are no new songs at all. If you count TAB debuts, all the songs on the new album were at least a year old by the time their studio versions were released and some, like Twist, Piper, and Dirt, were well into their toddler years. The band had gone back to The Barn after Big Cypress, but that was apparently just for final touches. Meanwhile, all of Trey’s creative juices were seemingly poured into Oysterhead instead of Phish, Mike was finishing and premiering his movie, Fish was gigging with Jazz Mandolin Project and Pork Tornado, and Page was, I don’t know, mourning the Mets’ release of Bobby Bonilla?
A familiar setlist could still work if the band brought some new elements to the new millennium, even something as simple as standing in different places. But aside from slightly tweaked arrangements for Twist and Piper – the latter a downgrade – there’s nothing in this show that couldn’t pass for 1999. As far as jamming goes, they sound like a quartet that has spent a few months apart, awkwardly reconnecting with improvisational small talk across the first set.
That low baseline sets up a little early-season thrill when they finally click in a pretty-good 20-minute Disease. But the jam eventually falls right back into last year’s habits: a very busy Trey solo, followed by pedal experiments that often sound disjointed from the rest of the band. And sure enough, around 15 minutes in, the squeaky-toy keyboard comes out; five months into 2000 and Phish are still partying like it’s 1999.
Only a slowly disintegrating Twist offers a palpable callback to the late-night set at Cypress, and a preview of the excellence shortly to come in Japan. For a couple minutes, if you squint, you can see a promising new path for Phish 2000, a further leap forward for the Siket Disc/arena ambient explorations. But that will prove to be a tough sound to translate from a Japanese club or 4 a.m. in a swamp to large American venues or a grandiose room like Radio City. And at a point where they really needed a new creative spark to get over the post-Cypress hangover, those fancy trappings were the only novelty they had at hand.
* - Not, technically, the first show of the year, but a symbolic curtain raiser for sure.