So Stupendous
12/7/97, Dayton, OH, Ervin J. Nutter Center
SET 1: AC/DC Bag -> Psycho Killer -> Jesus Just Left Chicago, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own > It's Ice -> Swept Away > Steep > It's Ice > Theme From the Bottom, Tube, Jam -> Slave to the Traffic Light
SET 2: Timber (Jerry the Mule) > Wolfman's Brother -> Boogie On Reggae Woman > Reba, Guyute > Possum
ENCORE: A Day in the Life
The only thing more addicting than seeing a great Phish show is missing one. Dayton will forever be my show that got away, because dumbass college freshman Rob thought it would be irresponsible to see a Sunday night show 3 hours away from Ann Arbor. Basically every single one of my future Phish fan friends made the trip, and they’ve never missed a chance to rub it in that I was back in the dorm studying organic chemistry or reading Virgil that night. In subsequent falls, I would do my best to try avoiding making that same mistake, to the slight detriment of my attendance and grades*.
To be fair, I’m not sure I had a ride to this show if I did want to go – I ended up meeting that UMich Phish crew the following weekend when my Michigan Daily review of 12/6 earned me an invite to an old-fashioned tape-dubbing party. That night, we each went home with a stack of four tapes, Palace and the Nutter Center, forever connected in my mind as a conjoined pair even though I only witnessed the first half. When people have asked me for my ideal Phish show, I usually cheat and choose the first set of Dayton grafted to the second set of Auburn Hills, an imaginary show that would be a perfect 10 to my taste.
But while The Palace show stands out as a triumphant realization of many important Fall 97 threads, Dayton makes its name by being a truly unorthodox conjuration of that same aesthetic. That 12-song first set seems much too busy for a tour known for its stingy setlists and long jams, and most of the fall’s heavy hitters are absent: no Ghost, no Tweezer, no 2001 or YEM or Mike’s. The one 1997 headliner present is Wolfman’s, which gets its slightest performance since its Hamburg breakthrough. Meanwhile, five songs in that first set make their Fall 97 debut, and two important covers make their first appearance in 4 and 9 years, respectively.
It doesn’t matter a bit, because Phish are Locked. In. I’m not sure they ever achieved a higher level of Locked-In-ness than they did in the second set of Palace and the first set of Dayton, when their collective mind had a mind of its own. It’s almost even more impressive tonight; while last night’s telepathy took place over the course of a set of extended improvisation, tonight’s better half weaves in and out of segues and songs from all over the stylistic map. Throughout, the band is working as a single unit, eight arms to destroy you.
The first set is bookended by three-song runs at the peak of this synchrony. This AC/DC Bag, falling as it does between two titanic versions, is almost a fakeout, only allowed to graze on cowfunk pastures for a minute before sliding into Psycho Killer, a revival that – unlike Boogie On, which was soundchecked – seems entirely spontaneous. And yet, Mike only has to play the bassline 3-1/2 times before Trey catches on, with Page following a bar later (Fishman, somehow is already there). It’s not the most complicated song, but there’s a high rhythmic bar to make it sound more than just goofy (see the other three times Phish attempted it), and in 1997, they’re in shape to pole vault well clear of that mark.
The passage after they wisely skip the song’s bridge is a marvel, the dynamics of entire 15-minute jams from earlier in the tour condensed into four. There’s a return to cowfunk, a killer “bweeoooo,” Trey composing an instant earworm riff with Page and Mike immediately finding the perfect counterpoint, a moment where they reprise the two-note transition between the funk and guitar-glory sections of the last night’s Tweezer, before Fishman slices his drum part in half and it’s suddenly Jesus Just Left Chicago. Liquid football!
At the end of the set – after an absolutely perfect turducken of Swept Away > Steep inside It’s Ice and a regal Theme – lightning strikes the Nutter Center a second time. That they didn’t think to dust off Tube until this point in Fall 97 is criminal, and you can hear them realizing that as they’re playing it, first when Page goes into an organ part that’s supposed to trigger Trey’s bluesy return to the second verse and they leave him hanging in order to jam further, then when they’ve actually finished the song. “You want to start that jam again?,” Fishman asks. “Start it over, just the jam,” Trey replies. “Yeah.”
A jam reprise! And yet not, because it only takes 20 seconds for Page to lean on a swooshy synthesizer key and completely change its flavor, a long-sustained note that changes the grime of 1997 into the cosmic voyage of 1998 ahead of schedule. At 3:55, Trey suggests the song that will eventually happen, but they spend a further 2-½ minutes before fully committing, one of the most patient segues ever, sitting in the quantum zone between what was Tube and what will be Slave. Again, who needs Black-Eyed Katy – in less than a month, Phish has reinvented their reinvention, bending time to get to the point both faster and slower.
The second set of Dayton underscores just how hard it is, even for Phish in a godlike trance, to maintain this level of performance. Every song in this set is played great, including the lovably ragged return of Boogie On Reggae Woman, a song that they had no business playing in the 80s but which they’ve finally grown into. But it never regains the feverish genius of the first half, that Bag > Psycho Killer or Tube Jam Reprise feeling that the setlist decision tree just got astonishingly wider and wilder.
We all want to see the best possible Phish show, but maybe it’s kind of a relief that they can’t sustain the brilliance of the mutant Dayton 1/Palace 2 hybrid? If all shows were that good, if all tours were as special as Fall 97, none of them would be. Contrasting the absolute genius of those two sets against the merely excellent Palace 1 and Dayton 2 allows their partners’ exceptional qualities to stand out in sharp relief. The addictive behavior inspired by Fall 97 was already dangerous enough; for the sake of our GPAs, if nothing else, they had to ease off occasionally.
* - Dear college kids of today seeing Goose or Phoebe Bridgers or whatever: it didn’t matter at all! Get out and see those shows!