Relaxation Space

11/4/98, Denver, CO, McNichols Arena

SET 1: Buried Alive > Character Zero, Guyute > Bathtub Gin > Ya Mar, Birds of a Feather, Brian and Robert, Frankie Says -> David Bowie

SET 2: Runaway Jim > The Moma Dance > Piper -> Also Sprach Zarathustra > Chalk Dust Torture, Loving Cup

ENCORE: The Squirming Coil

Listen on phish.in

Compounding the misery of the theoretical fan who skipped Salt Lake City to go straight from Vegas to Denver, the latter show turned out to be “just” a normal 1998 Phish show. Trey promised as much the day before on the radio, when the DJ asked if they had any surprises in store for Colorado: “The surprise is that we’re not going to cover an entire album by a different band, at this point that’s a surprise…we’ll probably play a lot of stuff off our new album.” He sounds like he’s joking – the session is laden with sarcastic “The Story of the Ghost in record stores now!” type comments – but true to prophecy they do 5 of its tracks tonight as well as ‘98 regulars such as Gin, Piper, and Zero. 

But that Platonic ‘98 setlist puts the emphasis on an emergent property of the fall tour: the mid-first-set chillout zone. With the exception of the high-octane weekend in Vegas, Phish has called timeout three or four songs into the show and turned down the volume, usually with Trey switching to acoustic guitar. It’s a little taste of the Bridge School concerts for the regulars, placed tastefully in the least offensive part of the show and brief enough to avoid delivering irrecoverable damage to the crowd energy. For fans with a full bladder, it might even be an appreciated hall pass.

In Denver, the band keeps up the new practice but doesn’t make the switch to partially acoustic. Instead, they play the new album’s two quietest tracks, and in some respects, the most interesting: Brian and Robert and Frankie Says. In the Greek essay, I mentioned the SotG/Siket Disc dichotomy, but these two songs better than any other* straddle both worlds, capturing the late-night atmosphere of the Siket instrumentals but processed into more traditional song format. Both pre-date the Bearsville sessions – B&R getting a Trampled by Lambs demo and Frankie originating in a Timber jam played almost exactly one year earlier in this same room – but both still represent the quiet, texture-first playing that sprouted from the seeds of cowfunk. 

Given those qualities, they were always going to be a challenge to translate to the live stage, and they’ll both be played sparingly after this tour ends. But for Fall ‘98, they occupy this chillout zone so well, perhaps even better than the slighter and newer acoustic songs. Brian and Robert live is missing the Frippian e-bow drone that half-inspired its name, but there’s still something compellingly contradictory about its melancholy loneliness in the middle of the communal ecstatic experience of a Phish show. Frankie Says, meanwhile, has that skin-crawling riff and hypnotizing mantra, like a sneakier cousin to Stash that never blows off its tension.

It establishes an uneasy mood that feels genuinely fresh and interesting for Phish, and happily this version spends a lot more time in it than usual. Perhaps in celebration of its impromptu and unofficial birth in Denver, the band takes Frankie out to twice its normal length, with a mesmerizing jam that revisits the elusive free-floating sensation of Lemonwheel late-night. Instead of getting restless waiting for a Denver Ghost sequel, you can hear the crowd ooh and ahh, a sure-fire sign that Kuroda was also inspired by this unorthodox soundscape. It’s that Fall 98 entropy emerging from within a song instead of intruding upon the usual course of a jam, and it feels wholly organic instead of disruptive.

But you can only keep that feeling afloat for so long in a rock and roll arena show, and after resolving to Bowie, the rest of the night abandons those eerily calm waters. The night’s other centerpiece jam – a lengthy second set Piper – is the inverse of the Frankie, the type of sound wall that sounds great in the room but gets tired fast on a washed-out AUD recording. It flies out of the slow build and rages for several minutes before finally taking a deep breath and finding some productive space, but basically just as a lead-in to a short (for the era) 2001 and a closing run of crowd-pleasers.

It’s a conundrum – what does the band do when the most compelling improvisation springs from a song that they’re unlikely to play in the second set? The next year, Phish will translate some of The Siket Disc creations to the stage and Trey will loan a batch of songs from his side project to fill the role of “atmospheric jamming that doesn’t lose the crowd.” But for tonight, the unassuming mellow portion takes center stage, while the uptempo material sounds like business as usual.

* - Okay, maybe “End of Session” too, but they didn’t play that one until much later.