Run Like An Interlope

7/25/97, Dallas, TX, Starplex Amphitheater

SET 1: Beauty of My Dreams, Wolfman's Brother > Maze, Water in the Sky, Bathtub Gin -> Makisupa Policeman -> AC/DC Bag

SET 2: Chalk Dust Torture -> Taste -> Ya Mar -> Drums -> Ghost > Character Zero

ENCORE: Theme From the Bottom

Listen on phish.in

Lately, I’ve been tossing around a lot of weighty terms, like reinvention, transformation, and The New Phish, which might strike some readers as hyperbole. But for all the deserved love that 1997 gets, I still don’t think it can be overstated how dramatic this evolution was. It’s easier to identify in retrospect, and fans at the time might not have noticed a distinct break from the past – I was at three shows this summer, and I’m not positive I picked up on it at the time. But Phish was in the final stages of a complete redefinition of how their four pieces related to one another, in both their songwriting and their improvisation.

At this pivotal stage, it’s a weird choice to add in an external fifth element to that mix. But for this two-show Texas swing, Phish reunited with drummer Bob Gullotti, who previously sat in for half the show ten months ago in Hartford. Phish wasn’t guest-free in Europe, with quality sit-ins from The Flecktones and The Son Seals Band earlier in July. But neither of those got anywhere near the same amount of stage time as Gullotti, who plays the entire second set tonight and the full show tomorrow. 

I mean no disrespect to the recently-departed Gullotti, a beloved figure in the New England jazz scene. His presence links Phish back to Trey’s Surrender to the Air project, the free-jazz fantasy camp that undoubtedly helped break the guitarist out of his earlier habits. There and here, he meshes well with Fishman, a singular drummer whose style does not leave a lot of space for a second drum kit. And as I mentioned last year in Hartford, he must have been supernaturally capable of picking up new material on the fly – Phish doesn’t simplify its catalog at all to accommodate him, and Phish songs are not easy songs to learn.

In 1996, Gullotti’s visit and Karl Perazzo’s earlier multi-show sit-in helped nudge Phish in their current direction, shifting the balance away from Trey’s leads and towards the rhythm section. But now we’re deep into 1997, when Phish has taken those lessons and assimilated them into their new style (for one, Trey’s guitar is part of the rhythm section now too). The emphasis now is on texture, layering, playing less, playing slower, playing with more space, priorities that are undercut by adding in another voice, and a loud one at that – despite Gullotti’s jazz pedigree Fishman eggs him on to a big, unsubtle Double Drummer sound for the majority of these shows.

It’s most apparent here on the first night of Gullotti’s residency, when the night is divided between quartet and quintet Phish. Set 1 is perfectly in sync with the themes of 1997 so far: they waste no time diving deep, with significant jams sprinkled throughout; Wolfman’s and Gin both drop quickly into cowfunk but use it to find new destinations that rescue it from static repetition, and the closing Gin > Makisupa > AC/DC Bag trio sports transitions that require the telepathy of an ensemble that has played thousands of hours together. 

The second set, with Gulotti, is also very jammy and a continuous hour of music. But the flavor feels slightly off. Almost none of the five songs are finished, but they feel more like they’re losing their way instead of finding a compelling new path. It’s great to hear Chalk Dust break out, but it sounds more aimless than the razor-sharp jamming of set 1, encapsulated in a point around the 10-minute mark where Trey moves to the wah but the drummers plow right through. The delicate weave of Taste is rent by the clutter of extra drums, there’s a very long drum duet in Ya Mar (what is this, a Dead show?), and Ghost’s creepy slink is turned into a poltergeist banging pots and pans.

That last one – the failure of Ghost to find its now standard cowfunk path – turns out to have some pretty interesting ramifications that I’ll get back to tomorrow. And for a tour that already faces some accusations of repetitiveness, this set is absolutely a change of pace. But it doesn’t feel like the right time for Phish to be pushed out of its comfort zone…especially when they’ve just discovered a new and fruitful one. There are times in Phish history where an apprenticeship with an outside expert made sense, and there are times when they needed to find their own path. With apologies to Prof. Gulotti, in 1997, class is no longer in session.