Ride The Lightning
7/22/97, Raleigh, NC, Walnut Creek Amphitheater
SET 1: Runaway Jim -> My Soul, Water in the Sky, Stash, Bouncing Around the Room, Vultures, Bye Bye Foot, Taste
SET 2: Down with Disease -> Mike's Song > Simple -> I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Hello My Baby
ENCORE: When the Circus Comes > Harry Hood
The Raleigh ‘97 show never would happen today. The modern lightning storm policy of “please find safety a place where we are not liable for your injuries and/or death” would have evacuated the venue long before that first thundercrack in Taste, and probably would’ve scuttled the second set as well. The best moment we get from extreme weather nowadays is Page defeatedly interjecting “Oh to be Prince Caspian, people” before telling everyone they need to GTFO in an orderly fashion.
Things were a lot more reckless in the 20th century. Phish, playing Taste and seeing 13,000 or so fans on the lawn under siege from the heavens, didn’t get the throat-slitting motion from their crew, so they just played harder, as you can clearly hear on the SBD or sorta see on the Walnut Creek DVD. Instead of sending folks back to their cars and extending the curfew, the band took a short set break and rushed back out for a second set barely an hour long. Whether it was the weather or the band’s new get-in-and-get-out approach to sets, Raleigh is an unusually short show, albeit an extremely dense one – a torrential downpour instead of a long drizzle.
If Phish were hoping to ease back into large venues, these circumstances said otherwise. In Europe too, a storm show was unlikely to happen – they were either playing inside, or else playing to an outdoor audience so insignificant that there’d be no hesitation to cancel for weather. Their closest analogue was playing an infamously muddy edition of Glastonbury, but even then they were the first band on the first day, hardly at the peak of the weekend’s adverse conditions (and again, if they canceled, hardly anyone would’ve noticed).
Back in the USA, the show must go on. And Phish, as they love to do, use the environment to their advantage. After a somewhat wobbly first set that seems mostly concerned with handing out American debuts to some b-tier material – My Soul, Water in the Sky, Vultures, and Bye Bye Foot – the show ignites with that electric (sorry) Taste, one of the stars of Europe, as the storm kicks up. It’s not a song with the kind of straightforward intensity you would pick to accompany a natural fireworks display, but it does the job, particularly when Trey switches on his Leslie midway through his solo and the song almost cracks open.
The severe weather subsided in time for the second set, but Phish still offered shelter with a continuous and classic setlist. Faced with a big, wet, and muddy crowd to entertain, Phish puts the new material to the side for an hour and plays what seems like fan service: Disease > Mike’s Groove (Simple-inclusive edition). Aside from an a capella dessert, that’s it, that’s the whole set, the stuff of fantasy setlist dreams, a set flow cheat code.
But instead of being a safe fallback to what they know works, Raleigh II becomes a broader American debut of its own, a bulletin that the beloved songs of the past were not immune to Phish’s reinvention. Disease had gone big before, but this one feels like it has finally settled into where we now expect it today: opening up the second half and (ideally) visiting several different territories to establish the landscape of the set to come. It’s the Diseases of Europe, spread to America, colonist-style.
The slow segue into Mike’s is one of Phish’s sneakiest, and the jam quickly dips into cowfunk and Trey-loop madness, before ending on a doom metal riff plus keyboard drones (is this dungeon synth?). If you want a 35-minute overture for everything to come in 1997, the dance-party euphoria and its Satanic complement, you can’t do much better than this Disease > Mike’s. Even the clumsy but satisfying segue into Simple (the opposite of the previous transition) fits a year that’s more about energy about execution.
It’s a show that passes a lot of tests: Can Phish translate their European sound to a large venue? Check. Does it translate to, and maybe even thrive in, adverse weather? Also check. Can two 60-minute sets feel as satisfying as the 90-minute sets of old? Checkity check. More quickly than expected, Phish was challenged to hold fast to their 1997 approach in larger spaces and unpredictable conditions. Having proved storm-proof, the cross-Atlantic jitters were put to rest.