SET 1: It's Ice > Runaway Jim, Wolfman's Brother, Taste, Ginseng Sullivan > Sample in a Jar, Fast Enough for You, Train Song, Stash, Cavern
SET 2: Down with Disease > Prince Caspian > Maze, Billy Breathes > Swept Away > Steep > Character Zero, Theme From the Bottom, Slave to the Traffic Light, Hello My Baby
ENCORE: Julius
The jump from Missouri to Washington was accompanied by a rare two-day break, an odd enough occurrence that a chatty Trey mentions it twice from the stage in this show. The mid-tour downtime doesn’t suit them (though I welcomed it). Tonight in Spokane is a flub-filled show, which outdoes Memphis for Billy Breathes promo (8 out of 13 tracks) and suffers from incredibly weird pacing. They can’t even get their facts straight — Trey introduces Ginseng Sullivan as a Tim O’Brien song, then has to correct himself at the end of the set, correctly attributing it to Norman Blake. What momentum was gathered in the Midwest didn’t make it across the Rockies.
But even on the off nights, they’re always working on something. The second set, as bipolar as it turns out, has multiple instances of a basic musical element Phish has usually avoided: repetition. At its simplest, pop music is all about repeating itself — find a hook and play it again and again. So of course, from the very beginning, Phish has avoided it, in both their songwriting and their improvisation.
Early Trey songs might have a hook (my 4-year-old has been requesting “bag it, tag it” a lot lately), but usually chase that melody with several different sections of proggy complexity (he always asks me to turn it off after the first 2 minutes). On the jamming side, one of Phish’s core exercises was about running away from repetition: the Hey Hole game, where as soon as they all lined up, someone was supposed to introduce a new idea to lead them away from that synchronicity instead of following it. Fall 1994 and Summer 1995 saw this rehearsal room approach crossing over to prime time, as the band played long, ADD jams that rarely settled in one place for more than a couple minutes.
By 1996, that aversion was starting to dissipate. The relative directness of the Billy Breathes material (as well as Hoist before that) is a big contributor. It’s also a corollary to the minimalism the band has been developing this tour, as a band that’s more comfortable with patience and a leaner approach must also get used to staying still.
Prince Caspian is the song that bests encapsulates this shift in Fall 1996, as it starts to stretch its legs; tonight’s version is over 9 minutes, the longest yet. It hadn’t really occurred to me before this tour, but Caspian is a kind of rough draft for Piper — in its original slow build form, the band’s deepest, most revelatory experiment in repetition. The two-chord intro, added for the studio version of the song, is a miniature (90 second) version of Piper’s repeated chord sequence; the jam circles back to that progression in the quiet period before the closing riff.
In Spokane, the band also uses one of its older songs that’s happy to go through the same four chords over and over again. Slave to the Traffic Light inverts the usual early Phish song formula — it’s busy up front and then settles down for the back half. Trey will sometimes use this as the foundation for a long solo, but in tonight’s version he sticks stubbornly to the chords for several minutes; if anyone is the lead voice, it’s Mike. Again, you can hear the conception of Piper in real time.
As for jamming, the submission to repetition is more subtle and yet to take root. Disease, the longest track of the night, is relentlessly straightforward for most of its 13 minutes. But there’s a point about 9 minutes in where Mike and Fish conspire around a syncopated beat, playing it four times around before Trey rushes off to the next thing. It’s the kind of pattern that the band would later lean into, especially in the more fluid modern era, but here it’s discarded rapidly. Later, Maze sits inside its intro for an extra few rounds, finding another cool stop-start pattern that the crowd immediately fills with claps (the woos of yesteryear).
That these flashes are so brief emphasizes how hard it is to deprogram from years of running from repetition. Phish’s default setting is “busy,” due in equal parts to their songbook and their easily distracted leader. Teaching an old dog new tricks takes time, and confusing dud shows like this one, with its fast-song/slow-song whiplash, tend to happen in the meantime. But sometimes the fastest way to move forward is to run in place.