Scene Missing
10/3/99, Rosemont, IL, Allstate Arena
SET 1: First Tube, Farmhouse, Dogs Stole Things, Divided Sky, Heavy Things, Horn > Carini, Ginseng Sullivan, Back on the Train, Maze, Bouncing Around the Room > Guyute
SET 2: Twist > Possum > The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu > Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, David Bowie, Wading in the Velvet Sea > Harry Hood
ENCORE: Funky Bitch, Messin' with The Kid
I suppose it’s a privilege when you get so deep into your Phish fandom that you forget that you attended a show. I’m not talking about substance-induced amnesia, but the phenomenon where your habit reaches such a high pitch that certain nights just don’t sink in. 1999 may have been a light year for the band, but it was the peak of my Phish activity – I managed to see 14 shows that year, thanks to their frequent Midwest crossings and my mid-college schedule flexibility. And I have vivid memories of them all…except for this one.
There’s a number of reasons why. Given that I saw eight shows in summer and five in winter – two of them the biggest shows of all – this lonely date in the fall was always going to slip between the cracks. It didn’t help that it was at the Rosemont Horizon, a hometown-ish venue that I don’t have very warm feelings for, even if it’s the local version of the minor league hockey arena environment where Phish typically thrives (go Wolves? I guess?). Even the specific imprint of seeing Phish in Rosemont is dominated in my mind by their 2000 run there – the final shows I would see in the 1.0 era, and a truly unpleasant experience*.
But when you get down to brass tacks, it’s the show that deserves the blame. It’s a songy night by 1999 standards, and one without a signature jam. You could charitably call it a mild bustout show, with a scattering of songs in the teens and twenties on the gap chart, but those resurfaced songs aren’t too thrilling to a jaded vet. Dog Stole Things and Divided Sky aren’t even new to this tour, TMWSIY > Avenu Malkenu is in the middle of its strange run where it was played exclusively in the Chicago market – UIC ‘98, Alpine ‘99, and here…I’m sure there were a lot of fans, like me, seeing it for the third time in a year.
The big surprise is that Avenu doesn’t work its way back to the other half of its usual sandwich bread, but instead jumps into the pit with BBFCFM. And this performance does provide the one image that has stuck in my long-term memory: Trey doing his guitar waving trick in the middle, another unwelcome reminder of the still-recent Alpine debacle. And while they were triggering all of my worst Phish traumas, they also reprise Tinley Park ‘97 with a big blooze encore again featuring Sugar Blue, again playing Junior Wells’ “Messin’ with the Kid.” Because if there’s one thing we don’t hear enough of in Chicago, it’s blues music.
The other half of that encore is a more welcome rerun: Son Seals reprising his Oswego guest appearance to play his Funky Bitch with the band, this time in front of his hometown admirers. Once again it draws an immediate crowd roar when they hear how it’s supposed to be sung – sorry, Mike – and Seals stays around to add his singular scratchy rhythm to Sugar Blue’s feature as well. Maybe it would have been nice to save Possum for the encore to see these two legends reinvent a Phish song instead of work through blues sides they’ve played a thousand times. But given how long it takes the elderly guests to work their way on stage – that’s not really a 23-minute Hood, it’s a standard 16-minute version followed by an exceptionally long encore break – it was probably wise to play it safe.
Aside from that sequence, this show remains slippery, practically forgotten as soon as I finish it. I thought maybe revisiting this show with the context of hearing the entire tour preceding it would help me find a handhold, but it just makes the novelty of seeing some TAB-to-Phish transfers for the first time far less novel. The Bowie did capture my pre-Halloween spirits; there’s a seasonally-appropriate creepy intro out of BBFCFM and a crazy subwoofer-rattling drone at the start of the jam that could work as horror movie sound design. But either through the lens of my 1999 touring or my 2024 listening, this stop in Rosemont remains a cautionary tale: once you experience Phish at a high enough frequency, some frames are bound to go missing.
* - Seeing some fun shows there in 2018 finally exorcized those bad feelings. But now that they’ve pulled off a United Center run, there’s really no reason for them to go back.
I’m looking forward to the newsletter about the 2018 rosemont shows in 19 years.
Funny - this and Normal were my only fall 99 shows, and they are also the black holes in my Phish memory. The only thing I remember is feeling a sense of darkness seeping into the scene, and Trey raising his guitar to the sky, which to me, was just the most outward sign of those dark vibes I felt brewing in the scene and the music. It didn't sit well with me, and after a really weird time at Big Cypress, I also took a phish sabbatical until 3.0.