Squeezed Dry

8/16/98, Limestone, ME, Loring Commerce Centre

SET 1: Ginseng Sullivan, Bathtub Gin -> Rift, Punch You in the Eye, Lawn Boy, Ya Mar > AC/DC Bag > Frankie Says, Birds of a Feather, Guyute, Possum

SET 2: Down with Disease > Piper, Ghost > Fluffhead, When the Circus Comes > Wading in the Velvet Sea, Hold Your Head Up > Sexual Healing > Hold Your Head Up, Run Like an Antelope

SET 3: Sabotage -> Also Sprach Zarathustra > Wilson > The Mango Song > Character Zero > Bittersweet Motel, While My Guitar Gently Weeps

ENCORE: Harry Hood -> Jam -> Baby Elephant Walk

Listen on phish.in

The other question raised by that masterful late night set is this: why didn’t more of that spirit of self-perpetuating, subtle invention seep into the rest of the weekend? As I said yesterday, Lemonwheel feels like the least loved of the 90s summer festivals; a faint damnation to be sure, but still a surprise given its circumstances. In trying to sniff out why, I’ve arrived at a very simple conclusion – there’s just so much of it. 

Weighing in at over 10 hours of music (11 if you count the soundcheck on 8/14), all those onstage references to the Garden of Infinite Pleasantries start to sound like a threat. By comparison, Clifford Ball was just about 8 hours, soundcheck included and orchestra performance excluded, and The Great Went clocked in a shade over 9. A year and a half later, Big Cypress would weigh in at a whopping fifteen hours of music, but those were, of course, special circumstances. In 1998, Phish returned to Limestone determined to give fans their money’s worth for that long-ass drive north.

Now, I fully acknowledge that’s more of a problem for a 2023 guy exhausted after finishing up seven weeks of intensive, chronological listening versus a 1998 fan spending their last weekend of summer in total Phish immersion. When you’re seeing Phish in person, more Phish is almost always the preference. But from a vantage point 25 years and 1200 miles away, I’m going to go out on a limb and say Phish went a bit overboard, and it highlighted the pain points of 1998 instead of the year’s abundant strengths.

Take the opening set of the weekend, a gargantuan 111-minute curtain-raiser. Bookended by Mike’s and Weekapaug, it has to be the longest one-set Mike’s Groove ever, filled with a feast of ten songs. Obviously with that huge cast of characters, there’s no real chance of building a cohesive narrative, and the middle is a grab bag of Story of the Ghost songs, fan requests, covers, and Divided Sky. When Weekapaug rolls out of Cities, it feels almost regulatory, like the only way Phish could force themselves to stop playing and take a break*. 

That repeats the first-set jitters of last year’s 115-minute opening frame, though this year the band’s no-commentary rule probably prevented another Trey locker room rant. But unlike The Great Went, they don’t settle into more reasonable portions thereafter, with three additional sets making life hard on people who trade exclusively XLII 90s. Those super-size festival sets only exacerbate the flow issues nibbling at the entire tour; a set like 8/16 II would be much better regarded had they learned from Night 2 Set 2 the previous year and called a stop after four or five songs instead of tacking on a lot of bonus material.

8/15 I also means Mike’s Groove gets played in two consecutive sets, and while that’s not really an issue when they’re played a 10 hour drive (before traffic) and three days apart, it makes it hard not to notice that the Lemonwheel Mike’s > Simple doesn’t quite match its immediate predecessor. It kicks off a recurring theme, where basically every song is outshined by a version they had played earlier on the tour. Perhaps that’s an unfair expectation for a festival, but then again, they’re playing a venue they’ve created for themselves with no curfew or casual fans to worry about – Festival Phish is held to high standards for very reasonable reasons.

The exceptions on the first night are another really nice Gumbo that begins by trying out the same gambit at 8/3/98, even based on a very similar lick, but instead ends up exploring a creepy, ascending chord progression like Tweezer Reprise’s evil twin. Then there’s a Bowie that spends almost nine minutes inside its intro, a welcome moment of self-indulgence in their self-built environment. But there’s also a Tweezer that regresses back to before its 97/98 transformations, slowdown ending and all, ho-hum versions of Cities and Limb By Limb, and an unjammed Halley’s wasted in the encore. A handful of 1998 all-stars, whiffing in their final at-bat of the summer.

Night two is the better one, but has a similar issue with versions of Gin, Ya Mar, Piper, and 2001 that are all very good, yet can’t help but play second fiddle to massive performances earlier in the tour. The first two both seem like they could be gearing up for big things when they get cut off by a double-edged sword: Trey stumbling into a really good segue idea, producing a fun setlist moment but also squandered jam potential. Piper executes the slow build to patient perfection, but provides no postscript, and 2001 is too pepped up after a Sabotage lead-in to recapture the weightlessness of The Gorge. 

There are a few moments where the magic of the Ring of Fire set peeks through – an early Frankie Says gets enticingly wobbly for a couple minutes on its way out, and a late-night Wilson opts for a heavy drone instead of heavy metal. But the highlight of the night and the non-special-set weekend entire is the Ghost, which skips straight past rote cowfunk into a sustained, one-chord gossamer glow, the kind of “big bang ambient” arrived at yesterday as the purest form of Phish expression.

Photo by keplermikebee on Reddit.

The final statement of the weekend could have been a similar wall of abstract sound, as Hood detours unfinished into a tremendously weird collage of loops, feedback, and Fish trombone toots. But the previous festivals have set the expectation that there must be a finale stunt, and an elephant statue that sat on the periphery of the grounds all weekend lumbered into life as the band goofed on a Henry Mancini theme for a cartoonish ending that left an unsettling, deranged aftertaste.

Like Vernon Downs, the elephant was another case of Phish striving to not take themselves too seriously even at a level of success they never imagined, where they could quite literally build themselves a city to live in. But it was also accidentally prophetic about the time bomb ticking inside of the band as the 90s ran out. Phish spent that decade dreaming bigger and bigger, and improbably realizing those visions. But there comes a point where a material, no matter how elastic, can no longer handle increasing volume without showing strain. Lemonwheel, sized extra-large from its infrastructure to its entertainment, was yet another triumph for Phish. But it’s also the point where the band’s hunger for perpetual growth started to backfire.

* - Now if they had saved Weekapaug for the ending of the entire weekend…that’s some setlist chicanery I can get behind.