Safe Spaces

6/25/97, Lille, FRA, L’Aeronef

SET 1: Olivia's Pool, Dogs Stole Things, Taste, Billy Breathes, AC/DC Bag, The Old Home Place, Theme From the Bottom, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Saw It Again, Limb By Limb, My Soul

SET 2: Down with Disease -> Piper -> Down with Disease -> Meatstick -> McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters > Makisupa Policeman, Cecilia > Hold Your Head Up > Rock A William, Run Like an Antelope

ENCORE: Guyute

Listen on phish.in

If my post yesterday came off as disrespectful to The Funk, today’s show is a brilliant example of how its service as a passageway can be incredibly valuable. Phish jams can be thought of as, to use a technical term, a game of Keepy-Uppy. Pushing these improvisations out of the standard channel and extending them to the lengths that fans crave requires a steady stream of new ideas. When that fuel dries up, Trey’s ADD or crowd-pleasing instincts usually leads him to awkwardly end the song and/or pull the dreaded ripcord, closing off jams and adding speed bumps to set flow.

But the stream of ideas isn’t always perfectly continuous, and the best eras of Phish find productive holding patterns where they can wait for the next creative spark to arrive. In late 1994 and summer 1995, they accomplished that through technical means, using the “Hey Hole” game of their practice room to keep a jam afloat, cycling through theme after theme until landing on one they wanted to explore further. That strategy produced improvisations of 20, 30, even 50 minutes, but could feel inorganic — too much head, not enough butt.

Phish in 1997 found a method that reversed that equation. When a jam reached an impasse, without a clear next step, they defaulted to their new favorite trick: cowfunk. Just like Phil Lesh saying that Dark Star is always playing somewhere and the Dead just occasionally tap into it, 1997 Phish is constantly playing a funk jam, and when a song threatens to fizzle out, it’s always there to fill the gap. 

Take tonight’s Down with Disease, which could easily have come to a typical end around the 9-minute mark, similar to the summer’s previous, underwhelming version on 6/14. Instead, they flip the funk switch and play a pretty heavy, but straightforward slow groove for the next four minutes. When Fishman kicks it up a notch just before the 13th minute, it moves into a torrid section that likely could not have come direct from your “standard” DWD jam; it’s an idea that could only have sprouted from funk jam soil. 

It would be logical for that white-knuckle segment to resolve into the closing DWD riff, but instead it returns to the safe space of the funk jam again at 16:00. Here, after six more minutes of slow-dissolve vamping, the outcome isn’t another improvisational passage, but a whispering segue into Piper — a very good idea in itself, especially when it returns back to Disease for a wild reprise. 

At this point, the set has bullet-train momentum. Phish flirts with Can’t You Hear Me Knocking for the second night in a row, returns to yet another, even more bizarre funk segment, singing the words of the freshly-written Meatstick over the top, then stumbles into a funk version of McGrupp, which turns into a reggae version of McGrupp that sounds like Makisupa, which turns into Makisupa, which turns into the first Fishman cover of the summer (the, uh, singular version of “Cecilia”), which becomes the first instrument-switch song of the summer, Rock A William. God, it rules.

It’s fair to assume that none of it would’ve happened if Phish didn’t have the funk jam in their pocket to fill the awkward silences, a liminal space to wait for inspiration to strike. Calling it a “holding pattern” is almost too diminutive; while the specific funk jams in this show are nothing special in the context of the year to come, in Summer ‘97, they still definitely had a novelty effect. And it must be said that even your standard cowfunk is always entertaining — danceable, of course, but also full of weird noises in Phish hands. 

With the funk jam, Trey doesn’t need to worry that they’re losing the audience while waiting for the next musical lightbulb to appear over their heads. Furthermore, against the minimalist, democratic backdrop of funk, those lightning strikes can come from any member of the band and be quickly seized upon, no matter how left-field (did I mention that wild McGrupp?). It’s the best of all worlds, a flexible, reliable default mode that keeps the party moving, and an incubator for new ideas that stretch jams out and stitch sets together.