Reverse Card
9/26/99, New Orleans, LA, Kiefer UNO Lakefront Arena
SET 1: Sweet Virginia, First Tube > AC/DC Bag, Dirt, Guyute, Bouncing Around the Room, Cars Trucks Buses, Funky Bitch, Mozambique, Cavern
SET 2: Twist > Piper, Mountains in the Mist, Heavy Things, Birds of a Feather, Meat, Down with Disease
ENCORE: Meatstick > Rocky Top
I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about Phish scene lore, and given the lucky timing of my fandom, I was there for the genesis of memes such as wooks, gooballs, and Antelope Greg (RIP). But I must confess: I never understood the Uno card thing, and I still don’t. It was probably around 1999 that I first started noticing the cards tucked into people’s baseball hats or clipped to their bags, and was occasionally offered one on lot or in the seats. But I didn’t understand the backstory or the point, and even now, a Google doesn’t really clear it up.
Whatever the ritual’s provenance, I’m guessing that this show was a big one for the Uno kids – it’s right there in the name of the venue! And I’ve played enough of the actual game to know exactly which Uno card this show brings to mind: the reverse card. Not as overtly malicious as the dreaded Draw Two/Four/Press the Uno Attack Button, the reverse card can nevertheless be a little stinker, breaking up the flow of a game and disrupting the plans of the person to your right or left. It’s also, like all Uno cards, wonderfully 70s in its design, with two big chonky arrows pointing opposite directions. Tonight’s show feels like that card looks, pointing towards both the past and the future and making some abrupt decisions that trip up momentum.
The most obvious backward-facing detail is that this is, somehow, Phish’s first show in New Orleans since Jazzfest, nearly 3-½ years prior. That’s a long time to avoid a city that adores improvisational music, although Fishman managed to find his way onto NO stages with Jazz Mandolin Project and Galactic in the interim. It also means it’s Phish’s first arena show in NOLA, coming deep into the arena-rock era – the last time they played a non-festival show here, it was at the 3,300-cap State Palace Theatre.
When I covered that show, I talked about how Phish’s stops in New Orleans have always felt a little bit awkward, like a collective case of imposter syndrome in a city with such deep musical roots. But as with Jazzfest, ambassador Michael Ray is there to play the gracious host, this time bringing along saxophonist Tim Green and sticking around for a longer spell. Ray’s wild versatility – the man played with both Sun Ra and Kool & The Gang! – is served by contributing to a wider range of material than just Page’s instrumental New Orleans tribute, while Green, a lesser known but highly respected local, is equally adept (I particularly like his raunchy solo in Funky Bitch). But the most notable takeaway from the sit-in is Mozambique, where Trey apparently liked hearing it with horns so much he never played it with Phish again, moving it to the soon to be brassed-out TAB for good.
Earlier in the set there’s another, more eerie premonition, as Phish debuts a track from what will become their Halloween costume a full decade later. Sweet Virginia is an odd deep cut to choose from Exile on Main Street, particularly when they are not playing a show in…Virginia. It’s also just a little bit annoying that they don’t use the horn players at hand for a song with a great Bobby Keys solo on the original. But if there was ever a time for Phish to do the slimy, burnt-out sound of Exile justice, it’s this tour; they sound perfectly raw/hungover for this one-off performance. When they next do it at the first post-reunion Halloween, it will be poignant but too polished – this version is squarely in the debauched era that the 2009 band feels lucky to have survived.
Set 2 reverses course to face the past with the classic Twist-Piper pairing, one I’ll always associate with their debut year of 1997. Unlike my treasured Palace show, the first song provides the improvisational meat, and there’s more of the calm, conversational improv I described with Limb By Limb and Coil yesterday. It’s an interesting style emerging in the middle days of this tour, one that could come off as static or mere Type I noodling without a close listen, but surprisingly layered on further inspection, offering a democratic counterpoint to the totalitarian TAB material. Here, it’s well served by Twist’s Latin-jazz aura, creating its own tidal build in advance of Piper’s slow-motion crescendo.
That’s a promising start to a second set, but after that the reverse cards start flying fast and furious. Mountains in the Mist is rapidly maturing into a gorgeous breather song, but doubling down with Heavy Things – which the second set should get a restraining order against – saps the remaining energy. After an unusually long pause where someone (Mike? Trey on some very low synth notes?) mysteriously teases “Call to the Post” twice, it feels like they need a reset. And a patient Birds almost provides it, before they go low for Meat, high for Disease, and back low for Meatstick – the ol’ Diseased Meat Sandwich.
So a strong show, but one that feels episodic, like an Uno round where some wiseacre keeps changing the color in play. As in other cities with deep musical history (see also: Nashville), Phish can’t help using guest sit-ins to establish their ties to the local culture, when a confident display of how they’ve absorbed those legacies might be more effective. Instead of reversing back and forth so frequently they end up standing still, the clever strategy may have been to play a wild card and pick a color.