Soft G
7/20/99, Toronto, ON, Molson Amphitheatre
SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, Sample in a Jar, Cars Trucks Buses, The Sloth, Divided Sky, Waste > Ghost, Wilson > You Enjoy Myself
SET 2: Twist > The Moma Dance > What's the Use? > Train Song > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Misty Mountain Hop
ENCORE: Guyute, Hello My Baby
Scheduling a Phish show in Canada in 1999 was a bold choice. There’s never a great time to put carloads of jamband fans under scrutiny by Border Patrol, but at the end of the decade, the scene was headed deeper into sketchier drugs and skeevier behavior. Timing this dip directly after the mid-tour festival also made sure that nobody would be answering probing customs questions with the sharpest of mind, whether due to the lingering effects of heatstroke or other causes. So the Toronto date felt like the tour’s most skippable for prudent and/or fatigued fans.
Which is why my underage friends and I – too scared to even bring a case of beer to Oswego – were psyched for Toronto. It’s Phish forecasting 101 that the seemingly inconsequential shows are where the magic happens, and all signs pointed to a Tuesday night in Toronto being this summer’s Salt Lake City – the show after the high-profile event, in a city that was not really along the way from Oswego to Star Lake, never mind the whole border-crossing risk. All we needed was poor ticket sales and a Brad Sands pep talk to get something special.
Well, that didn’t happen. Instead, we got the opposite for the band’s first Canadian visit in 3 years: the most forgettable show of my Summer 1999 run. Now that I’ve listened to all the shows I missed, I’m ready to declare it the dullest point of the entire tour. At the risk of offending any of my northern neighbor subscribers, it’s a very Canadian show, in that it is polite, competent, and just a little bit boring.
Unexpectedly, all the bustouts and narration and general tomfoolery I wanted from this show turned up in the third set of 7/18 instead, so we were playing with house money. But it’s a night so uninspired it repeats four (four!) songs from the previous show, and not even new heavy rotation tunes either. Goes to show ya, never try to predict Phish.
Because it doesn’t contribute much to the overarching narrative of the year, Toronto is an opportunity to take stock of band dynamics as they round the corner into the summer’s home stretch. And thanks to a very good AUD (even the venue acoustics in Canada are friendly), the contributions of one Michael “The G is Soft” Gordon are in sharp focus. Back at the start of the tour in Kansas City, I half-joked that he moved to the middle of the stage because he’s the bandleader now, and tonight makes that claim seem slightly less frivolous.
That’s most apparent in the night’s best jam, a twilight Ghost that was upgraded for Live Bait 16 but sounds just as good from the taper section. Mike is in the driver’s seat before the song even begins, with a cool little figure as Trey sets up his bweeooos out of Waste, and then asserts control from the very start of the jam. This is another Summer ‘99 Ghost that is interested in deeply exploring one groove instead of traveling more widely afield, and it’s Mike that keeps it interesting throughout, constantly throwing in new variations while maintaining the theme that anchors the entire enterprise. Slow it down a little and you can start to hear the marathon Sand jams of late ‘99; it’s a perfect midpoint in the repetition style Trey started with TAB and perfected with Phish.
Mike is similarly the jam captain in YEM and 2001, though with somewhat less success. I hesitate to assign him any blame – in both jams, he’s doing what he normally does, and it only wears out its welcome because it’s so front and center. All summer, the YEM jam has essentially become one giant bass and drums segment, and Mike’s very busy playing in that section can wear a dude out when it’s stretched that far. In 2001, he’s left carrying the melodic load while using a laser bass tone that would be a nice complement to a more engaged Trey lead, but it sounds a little chintzy on its own.
Which means we need to talk about Trey. There were and continue to be complaints that he “stopped playing guitar” on this tour, a criticism I find kind of silly; I generally like when he dives deep into shoegaze mode instead of blasting off in every jam. But I’ve frequently noted times in this tour where his effects pedal tinkering seems to short circuit a jam, creating previously rare situations where the rest of the band isn’t really sure what to do. Tonight’s most obvious occurrence is in Twist at 9:30, where Trey stops soloing and unleashes what can best be described as a series of cat noises, and the jam – and set – just kind of fizzles out from there*.
Too much is made about the similarities between improvisational music and comedy, but the old “Yes, and…” rule does fit both fairly well. When Summer 99 struggles, what I hear is Trey not holding up his part of that bargain, choosing to go in experimental directions that don’t offer an easy “and” for the rest of the band to build upon. Meanwhile, Mike – standing in the place where Trey used to stand – is throwing out an idea every bar, a multiverse of potential jam directions that only rarely find fertile soil. Happily, it’s not the way most shows or jams this summer go, but on uneventful nights like this one across the border, the tension is more audible than usual.
* - The debut Misty Mountain Hop zaps it back to life with a vengeance, but the oft-teased cover feels a little like a “Play Zeppelin In Case of Emergency” situation after a snooze-y set.