Simple Oversight

12/9/97, State College, PA, Bryce Jordan Center

SET 1: Mike's Song > Chalk Dust Torture, My Soul, Stash > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Dogs Stole Things, Beauty of My Dreams, Horn > Loving Cup

SET 2: Julius > Simple -> Timber (Jerry the Mule) > Contact, Axilla > Harry Hood

ENCORE: Fire

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At first glance, it’s hard to understand why this show is down in the “no respect” tier with Cleveland and Denver’s first night. It opens with a substantially-stuffed Mike’s Groove, and returns after setbreak with a six-song sequence, anchored by a Simple that falls just short of a half hour – the tour’s fourth-longest jam. Many of the heavy hitters they steered around in Dayton show up here: Mike’s, CDT, Stash, Weekapaug, Hood, and even a secret bit o’ Bowie. 

Yet sadly, Phish’s final stop of the year in Big Ten country is stuck in the memory hole between Palace/Dayton and Rochester/Albany on the tour’s final week. As with Cleveland, it’s a victim of circumstance; place this show into practically any other week in Phish history, and it’s likely a standout. But also like Cleveland, there’s not really a contrarian case that their visit to the Penn State campus, as a whole, is an overlooked gem – Fall 97 has been so thoroughly scoured, there’s no such thing as a sleeper show left to find. But inside this show, there might be a few precious minerals yet to be pickaxed. 

Not in the first set, which is one of the few segments in Fall 97 that plays out worse than it looks on paper. Launching straight into Mike’s Song is an auspicious sign, and when the band changes keys and drops into another set of isolation breakdowns around minute 9, one might fairly conclude that It Was On, yet again. But for whatever reason – maybe the day off? Tuesday night malaise? Late tour fatigue? – they’re not feeling it this time, and Trey barges into Chalk Dust after Page’s mellow turn in the solo spotlight.

When they get to My Soul, it feels like a capitulation, or a reset. Stash tries its level best at exchanging a party vibe for an evening of Evil Phish, with a sinister Mike bassline at the outset of the jam, but it regresses to the mean. An intriguing post-”maybe so, maybe not” jam quickly becomes Hydrogen, and Weekapaug never finds the space to get freaky instead of just fast. There’s an overall sense that they might already be tiring of the tricks and maneuvers that have fueled the tour thus far, that the bloom might already be off the cowfunk rose.

So they try something else in Set 2: a Simple jam that doesn’t conform to the Fall 97 reputation already being written into Phish lore. It is by far the most mellow of the tour’s longest improvisations, without the finger-blistering of the Winston-Salem Gin, the restless segmentation of the Worcester Jim, or the heavy metal bludgeoning of the Worcester Wolfman’s. It bubbles along to nearly 30 minutes without ever grabbing the listener by the neck; anyone doing a full-tour background listen might not even notice it putting up such a gaudy runtime. I know I only did after my third or fourth time through the show*.

Unclear if they got matching 97 jerseys this year.

Trey barely touches his wah pedal in this Simple, there’s no deafening psychedelic rain of notes or stop-start funny business. Where it calls back to earlier moments on the tour, it’s the dreamy, late-night Siket Disc trance of Vegas and Salt Lake City, but stretched out to XL size instead of just a few minutes here and there. I don’t think they ever change keys, and there’s hardly ever a point – until the weird fakeout of the last five minutes – where you couldn’t hum the Simple riff over the top. It just percolates sideways, through some rolling hills of volume, calmly disintegrating, finding a Weekapaug-esque chord progression to quietly explore, then orbiting some of the most gentle bweeoooos and synth drones of the era. 

The most similar Fall 97 jam I can think of is the 12/3 Bowie, though that one’s darker in spirit and finds its way to one extended major-key flip. It’s maybe best compared to a jam almost exactly one year earlier: the 12/6/96 Vegas Simple, another calm eye in the middle of a very manic show. But even that jam gravitationally arcs towards a big loud arena-rock ending, and the softer sections don’t have the depth of texture that Phish is capable of in 1997. 

Even as they’re playing it, the crowd sounds quite restless and distracted. Patience is absolutely one of the defining characteristics of Fall 97, but it is almost always paired with high intensity, a paradoxical urgency that would keep the crowd on the edge of its seat, if anyone was actually sitting. This Simple is a post-rock Sleepytime Tea of a jam, much better suited to a headphones listen (and deserving of a Live Bait SBD release next time they play Pennsylvania, nudge nudge Shapsio), and so defiant to fan expectations that they end it with an extended Bowie intro that declines to actually become Bowie

It’s a remarkable performance, but well outside the parameters of what people talk about when they talk about Fall 97. Paired with the abbreviated cowfunk of the first set, this Simple suggests that Phish is already thinking about their next move, only 23 days after the Denver Ghost solidified the current one. Place it in a 98 or 99 show – or even Japan 2000, which might be its best fit – and it would be more narratively harmonic. But in 1997, it’s a significant moment hidden in the shadows of one of the tour’s few forgotten nights.

* - A level of research only possible because I have somehow, miraculously, stayed a few nights ahead on writing these things this time around…until now, whoops.