Side Piece

8 Foot Fluorescent Tubes, 4/17/98, Winooski, VT, Higher Ground

SET 1: First Tube, Sand, Mozambique, Mr. Meat Man, Naturally To Blame > Wighat, Silicone Fairy, Last Tube > Higher Ground

SET 2: Tore Up, Magilla, Sunny, Stir It Up, Crossroads, Come On (Part One), Soul Power Jam > Pass the Peas, Drums

Listen on Relisten.

At the start of the Island Tour, I wrote about how 1998 was the last time where, if Phish were bored, they were bored together. For their first fifteen years, the foursome spent most of the calendar in each other’s company, either touring, recording, or rehearsing. Eventually, success afforded longer vacations, but they largely stayed faithful to each other during these breaks, aside from the occasional sit-in or small side project. Bad Hat, Surrender to the Air, Pork Tornado – while these were serious (well, 2 out of 3 of them) artistic pursuits, they didn’t offer serious competition with the main gig. 

The one-off 8 Foot Fluorescent Tubes show would seem to be another member of this category. It’s heavily overshadowed by the monumental Phish run earlier in the month, has a really clunky name, and seemed, at the time, pretty divorced from what was going in the main Phish storyline. I remember seeing the setlist at the time and thinking it felt pretty inconsequential – First Tube, Last Tube…if Trey didn’t bother to properly name these songs, were they even worth our attention?

From today’s vantage point, the Tubes’ (not those Tubes) show looks like a fork in the road. For the first time, Trey debuted a significant slate of new material outside of the context of Phish – Bad Hat did mostly jazz covers, Surrender to the Air had no songs at all. Half of the band he assembled for this night would rejoin him for his first solo tour the following year, and form the nucleus of the Trey Anastasio Band for the next two decades and change. It’s a weekend fling that would turn into a whole secret family. 

Backing up: the 8 Foot Fluorescent Tubes was Trey’s gift to his brother-in-law Kevin Statesir, who had just opened the Higher Ground club in Winooski. For the show, Trey recruited local ringers: drummer Russ Lawton, bassist Tony Markellis of The Unknown Blues Band, singer Heloise Williams of viperHouse, and guitarist/keyboardist Tom Lawson of The Pants (whose 1996 demo was produced by Trey). He also invited a bunch of weirdo friends to dance around the venue with the titular light bulbs, and familiar faces such as the Giant Country Horns’ Dave Grippo and James Harvey and Bobby Hackney of Death and Lambsbread pass through the stage at various points.

For that Burlington music scene supergroup, Trey debuted eight new songs, the latest leg from his 97-98 songwriting rally. But unlike the Trampled By Lambs and Pecked By The Dove material, these aren’t Trey/Tom compositions; instead, they’re credited to the new power trio of Anastasio/Lawton/Markellis. Most of them would return as the repertoire of the next year’s TAB tour, but messily, two would also cross over to become regular rotation members of the Phish songbook. So what we have here is the Voters for Choice Benefit/Third Ball/Bradstock of 1998, but only one member of Phish is on stage*. That’s a big development.

But those Phish debuts wouldn’t happen for another 17 months, despite making a couple teaser trailer appearances during the Island Tour – most famously, the Mozambique segment of the 4/3 Weekapaug, but also hints of First Tube in the 4/4 BOAF**. At this point, it’s not even clear that these songs would work with Phish, as Trey clearly challenged himself to get out of his comfort zone and write in a different style. The influence of minimalism and Eno-era Talking Heads is still strong (the poster promised “80’s Dancing!!”), but taken to an extreme that his day-job co-workers might not have appreciated.

That’s most apparent in the rhythm section, and the bass parts in particular. Tony and Mike couldn’t be farther apart in how they approach the bass guitar, with Markellis from the classic school of providing a steady and fixed anchor and Gordon a pupil of the John Entwistle/Phil Lesh school of melodic counterpoint. A big contributor to Phish’s 1997 transformation was Mike learning to be more like Tony, but it was never a complete defection; Mike’s instincts are always to keep sculpting and resculpting his parts, even when he’s asked to hold down traditional rock bass responsibilities.

By the late-90s, I’m pretty sure Trey was no longer scripting out Mike’s parts in new songs as he did in the early days, and he trusted his bassist to fill in his space with what comes natural. With the Tubes material, Trey denies that freedom to his collaborators – songs unfold over fixed bass-and-drums parts that never shift or evolve, apart from a blues key change here and there. It’d be rude to describe it as akin to a looped sample, as Tony and Russ are savants at establishing that organic and elusive musical concept of a “pocket.” But Trey’s goals with this set of songs are clearly formalist, an experiment in writing and performing over the kind of repetition that Phish has always avoided.

Yet where a lot of guitarists would use that infinite scroll groove as an excuse to play endless ego-stroking solos, Trey carries over his recent Phish resistance to playing the golden guitar god. His parts in the Tubes’ songs are mostly rhythm guitar and long, written-out paragraph melodies that coil around the groove – First Tube being the immediate Platonic form of this songwriting wave. When he does play a solo, they’re in the Adrian Belew zone, all weird effects and noisy crescendo. Even the lead vocals are spread around, or subsumed into group chanting. 

It’s intriguing that Trey still didn’t feel like he could play like that with Phish, and that he wouldn’t have the confidence (or persuasion) to ask Mike/Fish to play those unrelentingly static parts in Sand and First Tube until late in ‘99. There’s a tension there that seeps into the rest of 1998, and that would absolutely impact 1999 after Trey gets a full tour of shows in with his side band. From this point on, Phish no longer existed in a vacuum, it would constantly be in conversation with Trey’s solo gig, for better and worse.

* - Fishman joins for a chunk of the second set jam session, and Mike is thanked for “carrying the cactuses onstage,” as one does. Page’s whereabouts: unknown.

** - Thanks to reader David Bartner for pointing that out!