Refusal to Coast
SET 1: Funky Bitch -> Also Sprach Zarathustra > Camel Walk, Taste > Bouncing Around the Room, Tweezer > Train Song > Character Zero
SET 2: Saw It Again -> Piper > Swept Away > Steep > Prince Caspian > Jam -> Izabella > Tweezer Reprise
ENCORE: Guyute, Run Like an Antelope
Sometimes I think of a Phish show as water running down a hill. At the start of every show they dump a big bucket of water at the top, and the liquid flows down the path of least resistance. But it’s an intricate network of channels, splitting and reconnecting, carved out by rehearsals and the ever-growing historical weight of the shows played before. In some eras, Phish has excavated wide canals reflecting their preferred directions. But even as the creativity flows to its final puddle, they’re busy tweaking those potential passageways, building in new detours or mergers, or adapting when random chance throws in an unexpected obstacle or diversion.
Extending that metaphor, many bands would dig their preferred channel and let the water run down the same way, night after night, tour after tour, year after year. But Phish are perfectionists, never satisfied, and even by the end of possibly their most highly-regarded tour, they’re already moving on to the next thing. It’s not even a month since the second night in Denver solidified all the threads they’d been weaving since the start of the year – or arguably, since the last time they played Albany in 1995. But on the final weekend of the tour, they’re already searching for the next thing, reengineering that hill’s network yet again.
The two-night finale begins with what is starting to feel like a rote display of Fall 97 fireworks, opening with another Funky Bitch that refuses its normal ending, loopily leaking into a 2001 with the requisite “Super Bad” tease. Camel Walk is another “what took so long?” revival a la the Dayton Tube, but doesn’t ignite like its sibling. It’s not a bad way to start a show, by any means, but it is starting to feel a little…predictable. Sure, many of the fans back at this show hadn’t heard every show leading up to it, but the band had, and they’re maybe starting to sense diminishing cowfunk returns.
Two songs later (one of which is another terrific Taste), Tweezer plays the pivot, with a funk jam so slow it sounds like its batteries are dying. This time, when Trey plays that transitional two-note refrain at 12:55 – the signal that launched the second half of the Palace Tweezer and the silky smooth Jesus Just Left Chicago segue in Dayton – it instead starts a slow ambient fade into Train Song. It’s impressive that two consecutive Tweezers can head in such opposite directions, and also suggests a band not wanting to drive the same route twice.
Speaking of which, hey, look what shows up for the first time this tour to open the second set. I try not to get too deep into reading the setlists tea leaves, but I’m a truther when it comes to Saw It Again, which always feels like they’re sending a message. Here, it’s an eerie, aggressive heads up that they’re not going to try to recreate the already legendary sets of the month prior.
The one common thread is jams in unusual places, but they’re determinedly not a funky good time. Saw It Again itself gets taken past its screamy outro, with a tantalizing Floyd-y sequence that sadly can’t land everyone on the same chords. But Piper and Caspian both connect in a big way, the duo (connected via Swept Away > Steep) essentially comprising a live songwriting session for Birds of a Feather, not scheduled to debut for another four months.
BOAF is a counterpart to Moma Dance in terms of songs that were written to frame the energy of Fall 97 and hang it on the wall for later admiration. But while Moma is a postcard from the early, giddy days of discovering funk jams, BOAF is what comes out the other end of Fall 97: an anxious, darker strain of funk, the sound of wanting to tease Talking Heads but just barely resisting, the successful absorption of both sounds into Phish’s past strengths and future aspirations.
In both cases – yeah, even Caspian – the BOAFy pre-teases come after a spell of hard-rock shredding at a gallop, and Fishman’s repeated refusal to slow the pace as Trey shifts to rhythm guitar and the jam quiets down is the disorienting, itchy-groove inspiration they chose to later build a song around. It’s not an abandonment of the cowfunk sound, it’s just the band tinkering, adding new feeders: a little bit of Fall 95 tempo battles, a little bit of Mike’s new melodic prominence, a little bit of Trey’s more textural use of loops. It’s the minimalism and democracy of funk, but played fast and loud.
It’s not a new sound; it sorta throws all the way back to 11/14, the show I am most excited to revisit in the distant future when I’m recovered enough from these essays to dip back into Fall 97. Connecting the dots with that show, the cowfunk epics that Fall 97 is best known for feel almost like a brief fling in the larger arc of Phish, with the more Siket Disc-y sounds that will come to the foreground in 98 and 99 the true evolution taking place outside of the spotlight. Or perhaps it’s both, two channels with so many rivulets connecting them that it eventually becomes a robust, singular torrent. The work is never done, and the water never flows the same way twice.