Scent of the Sea
11/15/98, Murfreesboro, TN, Murphy Center
SET 1: My Friend, My Friend, Ghost > Driver, Scent of a Mule, Cavern > Limb By Limb, Roggae > La Grange
SET 2: Runaway Jim > Stash, Mike's Song > Simple > Wading in the Velvet Sea > Loving Cup > Weekapaug Groove
ENCORE: Rocky Top
After two Ohio shows full of questionable setlist decisions, Phish brings out the big guns in this beautiful venue known as “The Glass House.” Just look at that murderer’s row in the second set – with the exception of the near-obligatory ballad spot, that’s a powder keg of improvisational opportunity. Perhaps the semi-rare second-set appearances of Jim and Stash, segued together no less, will provide the fireworks? Or maybe a smartly-packed Mike’s Groove, one that revives the ol’ Mike’s > Simple transition, will be the highlight. The possibilities are endless.
No really, they truly are, because all of those songs are pretty routine tonight, and the most interesting parts of this show instead come from…Mule and Velvet Sea. I know I said just yesterday that My Soul and Funky Bitch are my anti-dream pairing, but here are two more songs that have spent quality time near the top of my shitlist. On different trajectories, though – Mule used to charm me but has worn me out over the last four years of show-by-show listening, while Velvet Sea struck me in the 90s as absolute treacle unbefitting of the Phish songbook (I’m kind of warming up to it now, in my sappy old age).
Set your expectations accordingly – these are miniature moments of exploration. Mule gets its number called presumably because 30 miles SE of Nashville is the most appropriate stop on the entire tour for a hootenanny*, and plays out as normal even into the first few moves of the Duel. But Trey immediately takes his cross-examination into new territory with, of course, a loop. A very gentle one, at first barely audible beneath the crowd’s hootin’ and hollerin’, but soon building in intensity and inviting the rest of the band in. Fish chooses a “White Rabbit” drumroll, and suddenly they’re off into a couple minutes of Reich-ian trance that is a million miles from the slamgrass of the source material. It’s the season’s entropy approach to jamming, but applied to a song where the “jam section” is already minimally structured.
Velvet Sea saves its surprises for the very end. After a more robust Trey solo than the lullabye in Chicago and the customary final return to the chorus, the band refuses to let the song go. Fishman chitters on his cymbal as Mike and Trey conduct a gentle dialogue, and what feels like an extended fadeout unexpectedly blossoms into a novel theme. Trey plays a lilting riff, Page shushes with his synth, and the band falls into the Siket Zone for a tantalizing two minutes. Fishman even teases the My Left Toe beat two times around at the very end, before Page thunders in with those Nicky Hopkins chords and they’re back to regularly scheduled programming.
These passages might not even make for the best performances of the night – I want to give a little love to a predictably structured but excellent Ghost that spends its last four minutes in an exquisite cowfunk glide and a Stash that gets proper gnarly with the tension for a few minutes in the middle. As with the previous night in Cincinnati, none of the heavy hitters flop, exactly, they just kind of do what one expects them to do. Which is fine for somebody seeing their one Phish show on this tour, and less ideal for sickos like me.
But as The Siket Disc style continues to nibble around the edge of this tour, it seems to find the thinnest points to break through in the quiet or oddball songs where novelty is rare. The two standouts tonight are in the same neighborhood as the Denver Frankie Says, surprising moments of post-rock tranquility that are seemingly harder to access from the classic jam vehicle suspects. And until they figure out how to bridge that gap, it’s going to produce shows, like this one, that keep listeners guessing.
* - See also the obligatory performance of Rocky Top in the encore…Phish really can’t resist giving the Tenneseans what they want.
I've been looking forward to reading your essay for this show, as it was one of the few I got to in the 90's. I'm from Chattanooga, so it felt nice and extra intense since this was the first Phish show I got to attend with friends who had started lovin' Phish as much as I did. My friend Mary did not enjoy Ghost as it jarred her wandering mind and led her to believe she was gonna be a ghost soon- cuz she was dying- eeek. She recovered eventually. Maybe it was the LaGrange that did it for her, cuz it did it for me that night- Mike stretched the Glass House for sure during it. Also, the MYMY opener is still one of my favorite opening songs of theirs. Such grandly, progressive and frenetically explosive as they come. I included it in a medley of songs as i smoked crack in a short film i made in school. It starts with The Horse, too. It's called Shower Babies.
Anyways, I went camping on the banks of the TN River in the gorge near here the other night, the night of the 14th, and I took a little Ellis, D. I was laying there watching a barge go by when Reba from Cypress played on my shuffle. I've heard it, and i know it's not one of their greatest Reba's, but I don't KNOW it KNOW it. But still, about a minute in I was like I should listen to something MORE. I then remembered the date, and how nice it would be to listen to a full show the night before reading your essay about the show for once. I immediately risked burning thru my phones battery by streaming this show on phish.in, since i don't have this one on my phones' shuffle. Alright, I've rambled again, but I agree with your assessment of the shows' "miniature moments of exploration". I also agree that the Stash goes smartly gnarly asap and the jam after Sea is wonderful. I started to wonder if Phish knew the college campus they were playing on was known for their Music Department? Listening the other night I noticed quite a few more of those miniature moments of exploration, and they came across as newly interesting, and fully new adventures in their ongoing songageing. Even the f'n Rocky Top that was encored again * didn't deter me from feeling like I'd just listened to a new show!
*at my first show 11/6/96 in Knoxville, TN they encored Rocky Top as well, and I thought they'd learned it for this one show and it gave me one of the best laughs of my life, since it's the fight song of the UTK football team, and prob other UTK teams, and if you go to a UTK home football game you'll hear it a good 25 times. It gets annoying. So, i didn't quite like this encore, since the show was already kinda short and I'd since learned Phish had been playing it since like '89- the song as a stand-alone encore in TN was already feeling like moldy nostalgia to me, but to a buncha other fans there it probably gave them a grand laugh! That's Phish!
Thanks for your consistently unique ways of looking at shows from angles I haven't thought about before. Makes for great reading.