Slowcore Deliberations
7/9/99, Columbia, MD, Merriweather Post Pavilion
SET 1: Limb By Limb, Farmhouse, Back on the Train, Divided Sky, Train Song, Llama, Driver, Runaway Jim
SET 2: Punch You in the Eye > Free > What's the Use? > Meatstick > Mike's Song -> Twist > Weekapaug Groove
ENCORE: Harry Hood
Three shows ago, I talked about how Phish slowing down helped offset the heavier sonic palette they were running with by the end of the decade. With Trey using loops to duplicate, triplicate, and further Madrox himself, Page deploying weirder and weirder synth sounds, and Mike sitting higher in the mix, Phish playing at its usual highway speeds could trigger information overload. Introducing The Siket Disc tracks with their calm, late-night tempos and wide open spaces lowered the band’s collective heart rate so that some of those new sonic details could stand out, even in the sub-par acoustic settings of summer tour.
But playing at a more deliberate pace can be a controversial move for a jamband; just ask Dead & Company. Even if the motivations are artistic instead of age-related, a noticeable downshift can be easily misinterpreted as a lack of enthusiasm. Manic energy was a key component of Phish in the 90s, whether they were staging intra-band tempo competitions or running through segues at the speed of thought. When that delirium is MIA, it’s hard to tell whether the band is making a stylistic choice or just simply not feeling it.
I’m mostly inclined to think 1999 shows are the former rather than the latter, but this date is an exception. It’s a show that starts out chill and only gets more placid as it goes, despite the occasional attempt at forced caffeination. The positioning of What’s The Use? in the middle of the second set could be a clue that this was an intentional move, but if so, it’s taking the slowcore Phish experiment to an extreme that just isn’t going to fly on a Friday night in the Maryland suburbs. Charlotte’s minimalism made for a sparkling, serene second set that only felt out of alignment with the setting; tonight’s just sounds groggy.
It’s promising at first, where the band seems content to sit in the intro of PYITE as long as possible before having to actually play the song. But Free noticeably lumbers, its BPM down considerably from its mercury early days, clipping the wings of its glorious intro riff in favor of deepening the heavy stomp of its jam section. WTU lightens the mood considerably, but maybe does its job all too well, putting the band into a Benadryl trance that’s hard to escape.
After the fourth Meatstick in five shows (maybe a bit excessive), it’s Mike’s to the rescue, or so it would seem. Instead of ramping up like Mike’s of old, this one collapses in on itself, with Trey disappearing into his loop shed to the point where it almost sounds like he’s sitting out for a few minutes in the middle. The band gets so low volume you can hear the crowd attempting to clap them back to life like they’re Tinkerbell. And when they return it’s with a very half-hearted “Sweet Emotion” jam that would be unrecognizable without the vocals – the Bomb Factory wept.
It’s followed by a Twist that immediately takes the same diminuendo path in its own jam, the second song in a row to strip all the way down to Fishman playing nearly unaccompanied. Weekapaug finally succeeds in a late-set resuscitation, with another Trey-slow/band-fast segment that hilariously reveals itself as a jam on “Macarena” – hey, you gotta get inside the head of the competition in order to beat it. The Hood encore is much better suited to the show’s tranquilized atmosphere, and it manages to rally for the traditional peak that the band had been avoiding or abandoning all night long.
Their ability to flip that switch late implies that the earlier jams were the result of a deliberate choice to probe in a quieter direction. Maybe tonight was just a case of finding the outer bounds of that approach, after initial attempts in Alpharetta and Charlotte proved promising. But pulling back on the volume and tempo only works if the sonic textures are compelling enough to sustain attention, and that part of the equation doesn’t show up at MPP. It’s a swing and a miss, but as long as it was driven by curiosity instead of apathy, it’s a worthy experiment.
In honor of how much I respectfully disagree with your take on this show, I am now blasting 7/9/99 Mike’s from Live Bait 9. One of the more interesting and different takes on Mike’s. And one of my very favorites. Mike is a bass God here.
The meat of this 2nd set is absolutely fantastic Phish, for me. Celebrate the quietness and space in the music, as the run up to the greatest show in the history of rock and roll approaches.
Finally hit my first show! Just want to say how much I appreciate this whole project!