Sayonara

6/16/00, Osaka, JPN, Zepp Osaka

SET 1: Limb By Limb, Back on the Train > Sample in a Jar, First Tube > Golgi Apparatus, Heavy Things, Dirt > My Sweet One, Reba, Character Zero

SET 2: Runaway Jim -> Theme From the Bottom -> Dog Faced Boy, Driver > Slave to the Traffic Light > Julius, Bug

ENCORE: Bouncing Around the Room > Harry Hood

Listen

From the comforts of home, the Japan 2000 tour is far too short. By the end of the run, there still felt like plenty of potential to mine from the tiny clubs and quiet audiences of the Far East, with the sonic leap forward of 6/14 coming only 48 hours before the final performance. But given that the soundcheck is mostly Trey improvising lyrics about their return travel itinerary and singing “I can’t wait to go back home,” it sounds like Phish didn’t share the same opinion. Seven shows in eight nights is a torrid pace for the band this deep into their career, especially with late-1.0 party habits and 13 hours ahead of their natural time zone. They’re tired and they want to go to (their own) bed.

So this last night seems fittingly split between taking advantage of the environment one last time and letting old home-style habits creep back in. It starts with an exquisite Limb By Limb, a further elaboration of the song’s gorgeously patient versions from 1998 and 1999 and one that flirts with What’s The Use? without actually taking the dive. But then the set settles in for a sampler tray of lighter fare and work repolishing the Farmhouse tracks for the home stand; though the new album was put on the back burner for much of this week’s shows, there’s still units to shift in their primary market. It’s nice to get a Reba – with a Bowie intro fakeout – in a club setting before they head back to sheds, but Zero is loud and tedious, reviving Trey’s fake theremin shtick at the end.

Thankfully, they muster themselves after the set break for one more Japanese-style experiment. Jim > Theme is a 40-minute segment that can hang with any highlight from this remarkable tour, and is the likely reason why this show became the second from the tour to garner a LivePhish release. Notably, it doesn’t really sound like its officially sanctioned counterpart 6/14 – both jams are heavier, befitting a venue twice the size of Drum Logos (“Zepp Osaka looks just like Zepp Tokyo,” as Trey sings pre-show*).

The Jim neatly splits the difference between the two volume extremes I described on 6/10, building a Hokusai Great Wave that accumulates texture and gathers massively for the jam’s first 12 minutes while remaining under firm control, unlike that earlier night’s Piper. When the wave finally breaks, it eases gracefully into a Trey keys and effects segment for the final ten minutes – dangerous waters, as I’ve often written.

But Japanese training camp has fixed, for now, the vulnerability at the core of these passages, with Mike, Page and Fish responding much more creatively when Trey stops playing guitar. Here, Trey picks out a somewhat irritating pitter-patter synth melody, but instead of treading water in a mindless groove, the rest of the band pulls back and gets weird too. Mike starts playing charming harmonics on his bass, Page applies a funky “Where It’s At” Rhodes shimmer, Fish frolics on his cymbals. It’s such an interesting trio performance, it pretty much relegates Trey to providing texture on the margins instead of leading the jam – which may have been his intent all along.

It almost slips into Fukuoka Jam ambience, spending two minutes in an Eno zone before Fishman’s quiet ticking leads them into Theme. After a hazier than normal intro, the song is mostly standard issue until the 8-minute mark, when it shifts back into a twin of that perpetually-cresting Jim jam. For five minutes, It stubbornly refuses to resolve into the stabbing chords that initiates the closing “from the bottom/from the top” sequence, building up tension through shoegaze layering over one gnarly chord.

I’m probably guilty in this here newsletter of ascribing too much foresight to Phish, but they did spend their whole soundcheck thinking about getting back home. In that light, this whole sequence presents a refinement of the Japan sound that should work much better shoreside than the extreme atmospherics of Fukuoka. Though it feels like a significant advance of the arena ambient of late 1999, it’s also somewhat fraught – what worked at Drum Logos probably won’t fly at Alpine Valley. A week of shows abroad was clearly enough to give Phish an escape route from the unfollowable act of Big Cypress and their broader artistic malaise. They’d just have to make sure those lessons made it through customs on the way back.

* - If you’re as confused as I was about the repetitive Japanese venue names: Zepp is a chain of concert halls across East Asia. The Zepps Phish played in 2000 are both now closed, but there are now 11 locations – including two outside of Japan, in Taiwan and Malaysia. Phish could easily go back and do an all-Zepp tour!