SET 1: Julius, Bouncing Around the Room > Uncle Pen, Sample in a Jar, Theme From the Bottom, Prince Caspian -> Twist > Piper, Harry Hood > Love You > Hold Your Head Up > Poor Heart > Character Zero > Good Times Bad Times
ENCORE: The Squirming Coil
Phish isn’t the most verbal of bands, especially in the 1.0 era. Narrations and Fishman band introductions aside, they don’t often talk to the audience, and they spend even less time talking to each other, letting the music handle the communication. There are no closed-circuit monitor tapes to be found for Phish, though perhaps a bootleg of Trey giving Page instructions via that Thermos on his amp in the late 90s will someday emerge.
For whatever reason, the onstage, intra-band chatter increased off this very low baseline in 1997. As part of the band’s reinvention, some verbal cues were apparently necessary, and hot mics occasionally catch Trey giving instructions to the rest of the band during jams – “Stay on F” the most famous of all. There’s plenty of body language communication involved too, as Trey scoots around the stage conducting the band through stop-start jams and segues.
During this odd one-setter on the shore of Lake Como, the microphones catch a few of these stray comments. There’s a couple off-mic “back of the worm” references; first in Sample, of all things, and later in the climax of Harry Hood. After a break in Nüremberg, the in-joke lives on – when there was only one set of slither marks in the sand, that’s when the worm was carrying you. Hood also contains a very much on-mic stage instruction to Chris Kuroda, when Trey asks him to turn off the lights so they can admire the Alps behind them as they play a truly gorgeous jam, foreshadowing a highlight of The Great Went in a month or so.
But the most interesting chatter comes in the soundcheck, an unintentionally public rehearsal the day before the summer’s most famous. To the delight of what sounds like many folks who came early to crash the “venue” – just a public square by the water – the band leaps into Funky Bitch, thus far unheard in the summer. Unusually, Trey sings the second verse, then Page takes a level-checking solo that migrates from piano to organ to clavinet. Delightfully, the band then more or less soundchecks their standard cowfunk jam, half practice of their new favorite improvisational method, half practical run-through – if they’re going to play a funk jam every night, then Paul has to get the levels set on how Page’s clav and Trey’s wah pedal mix together in the open air.
If you crank your headphones mid-funk (at 5:30), you can hear the most interesting Trey commentary of all. My transcript might not be 100% accurate, but he says something along the lines of, “If we halved up right now, we’d be back at the tempo we started, before we spread out.” The band then drops, in unison, to a slower pace, to which Trey exclaims (to the best of my hearing), “Yeah! Now we’re playing this!”
If you wanted an instruction manual of how Phish put its older material through the cowfunkifier, you can’t do much better. As heard in the Amsterdam Cities, tempo is all-important; the song immediately changes character, from hyperactive Vermont kids speedrunning the blues to a swampy creep worthy of the song’s name and closer in tempo to how its originator played it. The shift buys the normally highly-structured song nine more minutes of improv, never flying free of the 12-bar structure, but coloring much more interestingly within those lines. “Only a soundcheck,” Fishman says, as either an apology…or a boast.
There’s nothing quite so revelatory in the show itself, though as a one-set, sort-of festival appearance, it’s got more meat on its bones than their sets at the orders of magnitude larger Glastonbury and Roskilde festivals a week ago. Twist > Piper is the most 1997 segment, and it’d be a nice, tidy essay if they applied some of the slow-and-low method to the former’s jam, but it’s a pretty frenetic flavor of cowfunk that spills over into a raunchy “Groove Is In The Heart” cover. Aside from the Hood mentioned earlier and a companion piece in Coil pre-Page-solo, the GTBT provides some extracurricular fireworks, briefly interpolating “Walk This Way” – as you can probably surmise from that combination of classic rock giants, it’s not a subtle ambient jam, but Trey is doing more than the typical guitar hero-ing throughout its nearly 10 minutes.
We’ll surely revisit this theme tomorrow, but one element all fans’ Europe tour stories share is unprecedented access to the band, who played chess before shows, took headless photos with fans, and employed a laissez-faire approach to soundcheck security. Even from thousands of miles and 25 years away, the small venues and quick-on-their-feet tapers provide a peek behind the curtain, just at the point where the inner workings of the band were most fateful. By the end of the month, they’ll be back in the cocoon of American shed backstage areas, unreachable to the masses aside from the occasional golf-cart lot visit. So treasure these scraps of onstage conversation, they’re about to get harder to hear.
[Photos and flyer scan from Larry James.]