Salt Lake’s Eleven

11/14/97, West Valley City, UT, The E Center

SET 1: Runaway Jim, Gumbo > Maze > Fast Enough for You, Also Sprach Zarathustra > Funky Bitch, Guyute, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Wolfman's Brother -> Piper > Twist > Slave to the Traffic Light

ENCORE: Bold As Love

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If the Fall 97 tour is a heist film, then these first two shows are the obligatory “putting the team together” montage. Yesterday, we talked about the strain of unsettling intensity that runs through the month, and today’s show 420 miles away introduces a few more crucial ingredients that will make the rest of the month an efficient and well-rounded operation. Some are just aesthetic/symbolic: as of Vegas, Fishman is back in the dress and tonight, Trey busts out the Pepe Le Pew shirt for the second set. Others are structural and musical, hinted at in night one but intensified on the tour’s second stop.

The first of these is a matter of time. Tonight’s second frame clocks in just barely above 56 minutes, featuring only a quartet of songs. It’s one of several sets in this tour that hover around the hour mark, including certified classics on 11/21, 11/22, 12/6, and 12/11. The fetishization of sets with a songlist that can be counted on one hand was born here, but often overlooks the fact that the sum product could fit on a single CD, with room left for filler. 

In Fall 97, that’s usually a feature, not a bug. One of the innovations of 1997 Phish is that they could be ruthlessly efficient, something that was previously not a priority in the days of kitchen-sink setlists meant to cast a wide net at their prospective audience. After dabbling with brevity in Europe, Phish perfected the hit-it-and-quit-it in November and December, sequencing set-long narratives so satisfying that few minded the early exit.

But here in the suburbs of Salt Lake, I’m not so sure that’s quite true yet. The quartet of songs construct a choppy pace – two songs dwindle away into whispers, two build to a furious climax. The Piper > Twist pairing at the center is mostly fascinating for how much more mature it will sound in just three weeks’ time, reversed in Auburn Hills. It’s a fascinating and cerebral chunk of music, but it never really congeals into a narrative arc – a solid first draft, but revisions needed.

One element of the band that needs no further warm-up is standing right-of-center: Mr. Michael Gordon, who has himself one hell of a show. It’s hard to tell if the People for a Louder Mike movement gained much traction in the summer of ‘97, as many of the circulating AUDs don’t do the low-end much favor. But tonight’s tape captures the assertive Mike hinted at on the European tours and officially canonized by the release of Slip Stitch and Pass. 

The Eddie Bauer era is already over.

The first set finds Mike fully inhabiting his more traditional rhythm section responsibilities without sacrificing his character. The now regularly-extended Gumbo and 2001 jams call for Mike to create and hold a pocket in ways that older Phish material rarely required, pushing him away from his naturally busy instincts. But the subtle, inventive variations he comes up with in those jams – and in Maze, where he upends the usual game of “listen to Trey in Page’s solo and vice versa” – reveal a whole new strength of the bassist. Then in the second half, he’s given the spotlight as the unequivocal lead instrument for long stretches of Wolfman’s and Twist, an important step forward for the band’s historically most passive member and another key to the democratic Fall 97 sound.

Those same jams (Gumbo, 2001, Wolfman’s, Twist) set the mood for the night, which is once again out of line with the traditional impression of Fall 1997. While arguably all groove-based, each of these performances prioritize texture and eschew the standard jamband path of building to a peak, instead moving laterally or patiently unraveling like the yarnball on the cover of their brand new live record. A 15-minute Wolfman’s, on the heels of Slip Stitch’s release, might seem like the obvious place for a funk workout, but it’s an awkward middle-school dance, perpetually on the brink of collapse. Twist starts out shaky but finds a couple minutes of transcendence when Trey loops a high drone around the 9-minute-mark, and the band quickly folds multiple layers around it, a dense, almost Reich-ian collage of musical clockwork. 

I forgot the ticket stub yesterday, didn’t I.

It’s a style of jamming that feels a couple jumps ahead of what’s about to unfold for the rest of 1997, closer in spirit to the Island Tour Twist and its announcement of Phish’s next chapter. And it once again brings to mind the Bearsville sessions that immediately preceded this tour, where the band focused on impressionist soundscapes instead of songwriting. The Siket Disc has always felt a bit anachronistic for being recorded in 1997; it feels much more resonant with the band’s live approach in late 1998 and 1999, when it was finally released. 11/14/97 challenges that notion, suggesting that those post-rock experiments were present beneath the surface much earlier. Put a pin in it, as we progress through the next month.

In a way, this entire project has been about tracking the ingredients of Fall 97 as they slowly emerged across the mid-90s. And it only makes sense that, as we near that goal, the accumulation of these factors would accelerate. For all that the solid nights in Vegas and Salt Lake don’t fit in with the cool kids of Fall 97, they’re still essential as a last-minute stocking up on the materials they’ll need the rest of the way.