Rearranged (But Not Refined)

6/30/99, Bonner Springs, KS, Sandstone Amphitheatre

SET 1: Bathtub Gin, Farmhouse, Tube, Horn, Back on the Train, Maze, Limb By Limb, Golgi Apparatus

SET 2: The Squirming Coil > Free, Birds of a Feather > Simple > Swept Away > Steep > Piper, Bug -> My Left Toe, Stash

ENCORE: Bouncing Around the Room, Sample in a Jar

Listen

Phish had never made its fans wait as long as they did in 1999, narrowly missing a full half-year before playing their first show on the calendar*. In the years since Phish stopped touring in spring, every year had still provided either a European trip or a smattering of special shows to tide fans over until summer and provide a teaser trailer for the year to come. In 1999, the closest thing we got was Trey’s solo adventures, a run where the TAB project’s relationship to Phish – firewalled separate band or incubator for the main gig? – was still unclear. 

Compounding this long absence was a radical shift before Phish even played a note in the suburbs of Kansas City. On lights down, Phish came out from backstage and…walked to entirely new parts of the stage, the first permanent change of their stage setup since the Vermont days of yore. Page got to stay in the same place, but Fishman had moved to the center and back off the front line, enabling Mike to slide to his right and be leapfrogged by Trey, now set up far stage left.

In one of those details that would sound completely insane to anyone outside of Phish fan culture, this small change was earth-shattering. The four-across lineup was an element that felt absolutely essential to the Phish experience and ethos, a necessary adaptation to the narrow Nectar’s stage that the band had stuck with even as the venues around them swelled to the biggest rooms in the country. It became a symbol of how Phish was different from other bands: there’s no frontman here, no featured member/backing musician hierarchy, just four equal contributors on a level playing field.

As such, “merely” rearranging the band’s gear raised all sorts of questions. Was Mike moving to (roughly) center stage a reflection of his more assertive role in the band since 1997? Was Trey trying to subvert his Type A tendencies by moving to the wing? Was Fishman moving to the back somehow a demotion? Was Page like, “hell no, I ain’t moving all this stuff”? 

Everything in its wrong place (except Page).

There was nothing to do but wait and hear how the reshuffling would play out musically, and with an n of one, the results were inconclusive. Tonight’s show feels slightly askew, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the new stage arrangement or the accumulated rust of six months spent apart. Certainly, Trey’s setlist-crafting skills aren’t quite in midseason form; Gin is a ballsy call to launch a tour, but opening set two with Coil and closing with Stash is opposite day stuff, and what did the people of Kansas do to deserve that encore?

Within this erratic setlist, the band also sounds sluggish, understandable given the midsummer Midwestern heat – another drawback of the late start. Maze wobbles with Trey and Page standing farther apart than they ever have; Trey basically sits out Page’s solo, and the silliness of the multiple endings feel like the two trying to reconnect from an unfamiliar distance. Elsewhere, Birds of a Feather is miserably off-key for the first verse, and many jams tread water as Trey struggles with his pedals and tone. 

But all that is typical opening-night jitters, and they’re matched by some intriguing glimpses of the tour to come. Both can be found in that opening Gin, an apple to the orange of the frantic funk show opener 11 months earlier on the other side of I-70. This version settles into a languid pace, with Trey dipping into his effects quickly and unspooling slow, majestic lines over a static backdrop. It feels a bit like the loud “Phish Ambient” of 1998 fused awkwardly to the locked groove of TAB, and that’s a tension they will explore a lot in the sheds and arenas of 1999.

A more optimistic sneak preview comes at the end of set two with two late, complicated debuts. Bug, which Trey had tried out a couple times on his spring tour, immediately sounds better in Phish’s hands, with delicate-to-soaring dynamics that TAB could never match. It’s also the first electric TAB song to make the transition, after Back on the Train broke the acoustic seal in the front half, signaling that the full slate of solo songs were available for call-up to the big leagues. 

The other debut was pulled from Phish’s “new” album, mail-order only release The Siket Disc, which came out at the start of the month. Fans still weren’t quite sure what to make of this oddity, which pulled mostly-instrumental excerpts from studio jamming way back in early 1997, and it seemed like a longshot that these unorthodox tracks would appear on stage. But oozing out from the end of Bug was My Left Toe, essentially just a Fishman cymbal pattern with improvised ambient layers on top. 

If you’ve been reading the essays for a while, I’m sure you can anticipate my reaction to this development: it absolutely rules. Since at least early fall 1997, it has sounded to my ears like Phish was trying to recapture the magic of those late night Bearsville sessions in front of a crowd, and finally they found a way to do it – just pretend the best studio jams were compositions as worthy of live performance as Meat or Shafty or Frankie Says. Poetically, they debut My Left Toe just a couple songs after a now-rare performance of Swept Away > Steep, the last time they attempted to port a studio-as-instrument experimentation to the live setting. This time around, it would work much better, creating some of the band’s most open platforms for textural improv.

So three debuts with unusual pedigrees, a jumbled up setlist, and band members standing in different places – the long wait for Phish 1999 was over, but off to a disorienting start. And by the time they end it playing their most ambitious concert ever, all of these curious seeds would bloom into themes that define what is one of the band’s most interesting and divisive years. All the unsettling and unfamiliar sensations of opening night weren’t going to dissipate quickly, instead hovering over an era where the band’s feverish pace of reinvention may have finally brushed up against its limits.

* - Not counting the sadly uncirculated Carreystock, a private show held at The Barn for cast and crew of the Farrelly Brothers comedy Me, Myself & Irene that is maybe the perfect convergence of late 90’s culture.