Something Old, Something New

12/11/99, Philadelphia, PA, The Spectrum

Photo by moosigny on Reddit.

SET 1: Harry Hood > Mike's Song > Simple > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, When the Circus Comes, Scent of a Mule, Cavern

SET 2: Boogie On Reggae Woman, Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley -> Ghost -> Also Sprach Zarathustra > Down with Disease

ENCORE: Possum

Listen

I haven’t harped on setlist construction too much this tour because a) it’s possibly my laziest fall-back analytic crutch and b) it’s been much improved relative to the shuffle mode that plagued the fall tour. But when I stumble into a show with a setlist like this one, I start to wonder if I should be holding Phish to higher standards. Flash this bad boy in front of the median Phish fan and you’ll get them going “awooga!” and bulging out their eyeballs like that cartoon wolf. Apart from the last three songs of the first set, it’s an all-killer, no-filler evening of the sort we haven’t seen since the hallowed days of Fall ‘97 and the Island Tour.

In fact, the makeup of the first set heavily recalls one of that era’s signature shows, the 11/22/97 instant legend at Hampton Coliseum, a show I declared to be no less than the ideal Phish live album. It’s flipped around – Hood > Mike’s Groove instead of Mike’s Groove > Hood – but for a band that doesn’t like to recycle setlist combinations it’s a notable similarity. And a bold choice, for that matter; probably the band wasn’t aware of the historical echo as they were playing it, but I’m guessing more than a few fans in attendance were immediately weighing the nearly like-to-like comparison.

Given my public stance on discs 3 and 4 of Hampton/Winston-Salem ‘97, I don’t think it will shock anyone that I place the 1999 iteration a distant second; it’s always going to be unfair to compare Phish back to their consensus peak era. More interesting are the sonic differences. The ‘99 Hood feels more interested in the intro than the jam; the former is a loopy wonderland, the latter gets trapped in little repetitive rivulets instead of the smooth build on display two years earlier.

Then while both Mike’s Songs launch their jams with a loop-based approach – there’s a very similar bweeoooo in the first minute of both – the ‘97 edition sounds downright sparse and skeletal by comparison to its ‘99 counterpart. It could be an artifact of SBD-to-AUD comparison, but it’s crazy just how much louder and denser the band’s sound has grown over the last two years – and in some ways it’s a full circle back closer to ‘95 than ‘97.

As such, it makes sense that the ‘97 Mike’s winds down directly into Hydrogen where the later version first needs to deploy Simple to burn off the excess energy. On the other bookend, Weekapaug is evidence that the cowfunk has lost its fertility, as there’s none of the wah-pedal, Crosseyed-adjacent interludes of the earlier performance. It’s not a regression exactly, but it’s striking how much of the 1997 ingredients are gone, and at least in this Mike’s Groove there’s not much fresh 1999 flavor to replace it.

They hoard it all for the second set, which creates its own mythology instead of mirroring the past. There are no songs of recent vintage, but Sally > Ghost > 2001 > Disease is a dream sequence that had never happened before and reads like a dying fan’s Make A Wish setlist. And the playing throughout is thoroughly 1999. The funk is back, but much darker; just listen to how syrupy that Sally > Ghost segue is. The first and only (!) Ghost of this tour is worth the wait, fighting its way out of its early gloom into a ripping but not cliched peak, then spending its final five minutes in a synthy nightmare before the inevitable 2001 drop.

Because Trey’s already got the keyboard tricks out of his system in the Ghost coda, he spends more time on guitar in this 2001 than is typical for the year. But for the first stretch, he mostly sticks to playing one chord and fractalizing it with effects over a Mike bass pulse hinting at “Once in a Lifetime,” while Fish lets the disco cymbals fly loose in the second half. Disease uncorks the potential energy that’s been shaking under the abstract and mellow jams of the prior 20 minutes, giving the Philly fans a reason to headbang instead of throwing glowsticks at Page’s piano*.

Go figure: the sequence that plays to their current strengths works much better than the “classic” sequence of yesteryear. And ain’t that always the way with dream setlists; the fans want to see the show they wish they had seen years ago, while the band has already moved on to a different phase that would usually be better served by different material. That brilliant second set splits the difference – it’s all familiar and seasoned tracks, but presented in unprecedented proximity to show off the lessons drawn from newer songs that don’t make the cut tonight. Feeling classic and new at the same time…that’s how you know when Phish is on fire.

* - Seriously, there’s like a half-dozen heavy thunks on this tape, the throwing-batteries-at-Santa joke writes itself.