The Band That Brings You Roses

12/11/97, Rochester, NY, Rochester War Memorial

SET 1: Punch You in the Eye > Down with Disease -> Maze, Dirt, Limb By Limb, Loving Cup > Rocky Top

SET 2: Drowned -> Roses Are Free -> Big Black Furry Creature from Mars > Ghost -> Down with Disease -> Johnny B. Goode

ENCORE: Waste

Listen on phish.in

As Phish reinvented itself across the months of 1997, part of the process was a familiar tactic: cover songs. The cover debuts and revivals of the year neatly paralleled the story of the band’s gradually narrowing focus. Winter in Europe started with a shotgun blast of genres, curiously tinted towards American roots: the zydeco of My Soul, the crooning of Love Me, the twang of Beauty of My Dreams. The summer returned to Phish’s sweet spot of 70s classic rock, but with a strain of heavy funk: Sly & The Family Stone’s Stand! and Hendrix’s Izabella. November 1997 leaned into that direction even harder, with the Stones’ Emotional Rescue and Buddy Miles’ Them Changes, the latter pulled straight from the band’s CD rotation on the tour bus.

Some of these stuck around for the long run – especially, sigh, My Soul – but many were largely discarded after 1997, only brought back when the band wanted to nod back to that transformative year. But December 97 brought a trio of debuts/revivals that went straight into the rotation and stuck. First there was Boogie On Reggae Woman, dusted off in Dayton for the first time in 9 years and played 83 times and counting thereafter. On the NYE run, they’ll do a similar 80s-era reclamation for Sneaking Sally Through The Alley, a cover-of-a-cover played semi-regularly ever since. 

The third leg of this tripod is a proper debut, which comes at the center of what is, after the mellow evening at Penn State show, in an extremely high-energy and heavy show, possibly amped up with intent for Todd Phillips’ cameras. Ween’s Roses Are Free might not seem a likely partner to the deep-groove likes of Stevie Wonder or a Meters-enhanced Robert Palmer, but as Deaner revealed to phish.net, it was Ween’s attempt at doing drum-machine era Prince, filtered through the band’s brown sound. And while Phish’s version disguises that influence further, it still turns out to be a natural fit for where they’ve arrived in late 97, a song that sounds like a) they wrote it, and b) they’ve been playing it for years.

The Phish-Ween dynamic is pretty fascinating. Phish, or at least Trey and Fishman, were proud fans, teasing Pure Guava tracks “The Goin' Gets Tough From the Getgo” and “Push th’ Little Daisies” in the early 90s. The two bands were labelmates as well, and Trey credits Phish’s Elekra A&R rep Sue Drew for getting him into Ween in the first place. Adding a Ween cover to their repertoire felt like an obvious move, and you can hear them goofing around on Ween’s “The Stallion (Pt. 3)” in the soundcheck for the show four days before this one.

Yet that admiration was, reportedly, a one-way street in the 90s. Based on songs like “Reggaejunkiejew,” the brothers Ween didn’t seem too fond of jam culture, and their fanbase wasn’t exactly thrilled with the crossover audience inspired by Phish’s endorsement. Ween and Phish might share a knack for obtuse lyrics, genre dabbling, mythology (are The Boognish and Icculus two manifestations of the same spiritual entity? Turn in your essays by Friday.) and humor. But Ween’s version of that same ingredient list is much darker and more perverse. It says a lot that, for Phish fans, the big cheer line in Roses is “get in your car and cruise the land of the brave and free,” while Ween fans flip out for “resist all the urges that make you want to go out and kill.”

Mike looks thrilled about the new Ween cover.

Phish also kind of scooped Ween on their own song, oddly enough. The Chocolate and Cheese track was only three years old (unusually recent for a Phish cover), and Ween had barely played it themselves before Phish’s version debuted. Unusually for a Phish cover, it’s a pretty significant rearrangement, taking the computerized, compressed original and blowing it out into a big rock epic. Ween essentially swiped that arrangement right back, using the reinvened song as the climax for many of their own shows. When Ween “opened” for Phish at the Lockn’ Festival in 2016, they played it in their own set before Phish could, with Dean declaring after “i wanted to blow their fuckin’ asses off the stage and rupture their fans’ ear drums and harsh their ‘vibe’.”

That aggression is seemingly shared by Phish on this night in Rochester, perhaps triggered by reminiscing about the hostile audience at their first show for the film crew. The terse 69-minute first set is dominated by a needle-in-the-red Disease and torrid Maze, and even the buoyant Limb By Limb gets a bit gnarly in its jam. In the second half, the Roses debut comes out of a gigantic Drowned and fades into a Big Black Sabbath Creatures From Mars, followed by a Ghost that gradually accelerates out of a deep zone of cowfunk cool until a Diseaseprise/JBG combo is the only viable destination. 

You might think a brand new cover would be a timid wallflower in this brash company, but Roses quickly asserts itself – particularly the building chords in the middle and end, which immediately becomes one of the most thrilling segments to experience firsthand at a Phish concert (and it went straight into the movie). And it settled in quickly after this show, falling next in the tony real estate inside a New Year’s Eve Mike’s Groove, and the version after that merely becoming one of the most important Phish jams of all time, as critical to their journey in ‘98 as the Hamburg Wolfman’s was for ‘97.

That quick ascension of Roses to jam superstar, and the similarly fast assimilation of Boogie On and Sally into crowd favorites, shows that Phish’s hot hand in late 1997 didn’t just apply to their performances, but also their taste. The self-awareness to crate-dig the exact songs that suited their new style, be they new covers from 90s peers or 70s deep cuts they hadn’t touched since their bar-band days is special and relatively rare – I love the jukebox trend of 1998, but many of those one-off covers are more often novelty tributes than instant classics. Like all things 1997, thte covers they chose just clicked, and the momentum was so strong it even swept up two shady weirdos from Pennsylvania.