Small in Japan

7/31/99, Niigata, JPN, Naeba Ski Resort

SET 1: My Friend, My Friend > Golgi Apparatus, Back on the Train, Limb By Limb, Free > Roggae, Sparkle > Character Zero

SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > David Bowie, Wading in the Velvet Sea > Prince Caspian, Fluffhead > The Squirming Coil

ENCORE: Jam > Brian and Robert, Simple

Listen

Like a lot of American views on Japan, the way we discuss their appreciation for our music quickly gets weird and condescending. There’s the whole “big in japan” trope, false impressions inspired by Cheap Trick at Budokan that Japanese crowds are all coordinated, chanting teen girls, giggles when they take American genres and put their own cultural spin on them. But Japan generally strikes me as admirably curious and adventurous in their consumption of music. Many eccentric American artists – in experimental jazz, noise-rock, or ambient music – have made a second home in the Far East and influenced Japanese artists in fascinating ways*.

Basically, Japan appreciates a good cult band, and by the end of the 90s, there was none bigger in America than Phish. That probably explains why they received such red carpet treatment from the Fuji Rock Festival on their first visit to the country. No other band on the bill got anywhere near as much time to play, never mind their own custom performance area – Limp Bizkit didn’t get a Field of Nookie stage to headline when they weren’t on the main stage. I highly doubt Phish had sold many records in Japan before they arrived, but their reputation as a too-weird-for-mainstream band that draws upon jazz, prog, indie, and Americana set them up perfectly for a Japanese crossover.

Given that all three shows circulate as soundboards, it’s hard to draw too many conclusions about the audience reception. But tonight’s crowd feels a little more engaged than the first night’s (by the third night they’re chatting “Wilson” with a detectable accent), and you can feel the band responding in kind, with the deepest improvisation of the weekend in 2001 > Bowie. And the experience of feeling like just a humble cult band again – instead of their country’s improbably largest cult band – gets them into a zone they haven’t explored in quite some time. 

Because while Phish was adept at balancing their cult side and their commercial side throughout the 90s, it still produced some tension. By 1999, Phish had spent four years playing nothing but arenas and sheds in the U.S., and were used to making the kind of grand gestures you had to occasionally do to keep those large rooms happy. That they still stuck to their core weirdness through that transition is what kept (and keeps) them special, but it was one of those old-timey scales tipping back and forth between crowd-pleasers and inside jokes.

In Japan, even more than with the expat-heavy crowds of Europe, Phish could just go back to being the geeks building a fanbase one club-sized audience at a time. Tonight’s show has plenty of recent material, but there are segments that feel like the early 90s: the MFMF > Golgi opener, the Fluffhead > Coil closer, 2001 in its original post-setbreak spot. We even get a bit of vacuum – was Fishman lying in the first show when he said it didn’t make it to Japan? Or did they scrounge up a replacement Electrolux? – though its use in a duet with Tibetan monk Nawang Khechog is a little more high-brow than usual.

Still, the time machine can only take you so far back. The 2001 is deeply 1999, a noisy swell that takes 4-½ minutes for the drumbeat to kick in and 5 more minutes to start scaling its first peak. It’s the Bowie that’s the real throwback, though it doesn’t go all the way to the early 90s. Instead, it stops at Summer 1995, the first year where Phish was consistently playing venues above its cult-band weight class, when they responded by going deeper instead of shallower. For 25 minutes, it zig-zags between themes, wagging its finger at any obvious off-ramps to the song’s conclusion, dipping down to near-silence and building up to pyrotechnics. 

It gives the new Japanese fans a genuine taste of what they had missed along Phish’s long 90s path. And it gives Phish an opportunity to go back to pure fundamentals after a summer tour that felt, at times, indecisive or disconnected. That’s a different experience than they got in Europe, where the intimate venues became a place to workshop the future. In Japan, they found an audience eager to experience what they already were. 

* - I love that the band Phish hung out with the most during this spell in Japan was Boredoms, who are kind of the perfect cultural exchange pairing.