The Snob's Choice

6/14/00, Fukuoka, JPN, Drum Logos

SET 1: Carini, The Curtain > Cities, Gumbo -> Llama, Fee, Heavy Things, Split Open and Melt

SET 2: Back on the Train, Twist > Jam -> Walk Away -> Also Sprach Zarathustra

ENCORE: Sleep, The Squirming Coil

Listen

Like all Phish fans, I have a lot of arrows in my quiver when I hear those glorious words: “I’m curious about Phish, got any recommendations?” For those who only have time to sample one jam, I point them towards the Camden Chalkdust. If they want something more involved, I still suggest A Live One – hey, it has reliably onboarded many a fan these last 30 years. If they want an actual show, you usually can’t go wrong with the icebreaker of NYE 95, which captures the band at a broadly accessible and representative peak. If they want a deep dive, I point them to the Island Tour, or dust off the ol’ primer…which really needs an update.

But for a certain type of music snob – the ones I’m typically surrounded by, to be honest – this is the show I recommend. If somebody raised on indie rock, experimental jazz, or minimalist electronic thinks they’re “too cool” for Phish but is at least willing to be convinced otherwise, I can’t think of a better argument. This is Phish at their most post-rock, a genuine RIYL for folks into Sonic Youth’s SYR records, the extended Tortoise family tree, or The Necks. It’s the only official Phish release that would fit into a WFMU playlist, Frow Show aside, or that could have conceivably earned a BNM on Pitchfork (assuming blind taste test conditions).

The only problem is that if that recommendation ever works – and it hasn’t so far – it’ll be pretty misleading. Because this night in the venue intriguingly called Drum Logos really doesn’t sound like any other performance Phish has ever played. Sure, there are distant cousins, most notably in the late-night secret festival sets played before and since, but there’s no other show that so successfully infuses that singular energy into the traditional two-set framework. And while 6/14/00 represents the culmination of sonic experiments Phish had been cultivating for at least three years, it marks the extreme projection of that trajectory, just poking into the razor-thin slice on the Venn diagram between jamband and the avant garde.

That continuity is confirmed by how this show picks up fairly close to where the last one left off. Opening with Carini would suggest a heavier approach on this night, but it’s really just a safe space for them to burn off any excess energy right at the top. Same goes for The Curtain and prog theatrics – they navigate the song’s scripted labyrinth ably, then put that breed of composed epic on the shelf until the very last song of the show.

Curtain is often used as a springboard to a big payoff, but here instead it drops into a very deliberate Cities, where this unusual night’s thesis starts to form. It sets the table for what must be the most languid Gumbo on record, and as it peacefully decomposes, it lets in more and more heavy air between the notes, assisted by a church-silent crowd. In just a couple songs, Phish recapitulates the entire 97-99 progression from tightly-wound funk to entropy jams to ambient texture. But crucially, in Fukuoka, they can continue exploring this path without the need for maintaining volume to keep an arena-sized crowd engaged, which makes a world of difference.

For now, the band puts a pin in it, ramping back up for Llama, a glitchy Fee, and the contractually-obligated single. Melt seems a perfect choice to dive back into those placid waters, since it's a song that reliably pushes Phish to the edge of free improvisation. But its cantankerous jam section isn’t the right fit, instead creating a compelling diversion on the way to the next set’s full breakthrough. Or maybe the band just needed to “intermit” to get back in the right frame of mind.

When they open with Back on the Train, it feels like Farmhouse business as usual. But without ever escaping from its usual path, BOTT notches its longest version yet, falling into a choogly trance that gets the band’s neural rhythms in sync and opens up a portal to what follows – one of the most remarkable hours Phish will ever play.

On the official release, the time is almost equally divided between tracks designated “Fukuoka Jam” and actual songs, the music traveling so far from recognizable source material it forced special nomenclature*. But they’re still within the parameters of Twist when it breaks through, stretching the Gumbo disintegration even further until they recapture the wee-hours haze of Big Cypress in a tiny Japanese club. Mike is the jam’s spirit guide, iterating endlessly through dubby three-note phrases around the standard Twist theme. Trey and Page’s hushed conversation eventually drifts into feedbacky washes and ECM watercolors, with occasional considerations of louder, more typical pathfinding quickly flicked away. After 12 minutes of loyally keeping the jam tethered to the original song, Fish finally throws in the towel, and the band just…floats.

They briefly return to shore to formally close out, but head right back out to deep waters, ignoring Mike’s suggestion of Ghost and steering into darker, loopier currents. It’s the kind of effects toybox jam Trey has been forcing for nearly a year now, but it’s so much more effective in this intimate context – Page matching him on synth, while Mike and Fish establish a groove spine that lends momentum without distracting, yet never settling into a TAB automaton. After 16 minutes within this rich, textured zone, refusing countless opportunities to off-ramp, they finally give in to…Walk Away, a very funny burnout-rocker landing within this abstract section and a reminder that, for all the pretentious beard-stroking aesthetics of this show, it’s still Phish.

It’s another island before the second “Fukuoka Jam,” which is shorter but possibly even more alien than the first. It starts with Trey solo, chording over a rhythmic synth bass loop like a 21st-century update on the DDL jams of the mid-90s, or even the four-track experiments of The White Tape. The rest of the band eases its way into the spontaneous composition and it goes full Eno, until the drop into 2001 that felt inevitable the entire set.

That it’s merely a “pretty good” 2001 is understandable; they’ve extracted what’s normally the meat of the Strauss-cum-Deodato cover and spread it out over the entire preceding hour. In fact, were it not for that pesky Walk Away, you could argue for this being a 2001 with a record-breaking 23-minute intro instead of a nearly set-long Twist. Either way, it’s almost disappointing coming back to the familiar turf of Phish-style funk between the two peaks, after a half-hour of unprecedented excursions (interrupted by four minutes of James Gang).

And that’s where this set almost throws me into an existential crisis about my Phish fandom. They are undeniably my favorite band – this newsletter would be a really perverse project if they weren’t – but they aren’t my ideal band, which is a picky but important distinction. On 6/14/00, they get just about as close to that personal taste utopia as any musical artist has ever gotten, but it’s only a fleeting glimpse, the result of factors that would be nearly impossible to recreate. It’s the Phish I love to recommend to my indie-leaning friends, a Phish that I would likely be even more obsessed with, if that’s even possible. But if I’m being honest, it’s not the true Phish.

Still, I’m fairly reassured that the band shares my opinion that 6/14/00 was a triumph. It was a very weird outlier to choose for the first round of LivePhish CD volumes, released just over a year after it happened. To this day, when Phish plots a fully-improvised secret set at Superball or Magnaball or Mondegreen, the moment from the past it most resembles is the back half of this show. It gives me some consolation that Phish themselves are entranced with this strange version of themselves they briefly inhabited, and that they, too, would probably recommend it to their hipster friends.

* - The CD release predates the early LivePhish practice of using “[city name] Jam” to save on cover song royalties, so the decision to use it here is purely in the “what the hell do we even call this music!?” sense.