The Only Rule

11/21/97, Hampton, VA, Hampton Coliseum

SET 1: Emotional Rescue > Split Open and Melt, Beauty of My Dreams, Dogs Stole Things, Punch You in the Eye -> Lawn Boy > Chalk Dust Torture, Prince Caspian

SET 2: Ghost > AC/DC Bag -> Slave to the Traffic Light, Loving Cup

ENCORE: Guyute

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It’s one of the most hoary of sportscaster cliches, that a player is “just having fun out there.” It’s meant to describe when an elite athlete, surrounded by peers at the highest level of competition, makes a professional match look like an after-school pick-up game. Yet despite its cliche status, the platitude implies a lot about the so-labeled subject: cockiness, joy, a seemingly effortless mastery, and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes.

If Phish had live commentary in Fall 1997, you know Bill Walton would be hitting the “just having fun out there” button every single night. You can see it in the surprising amount of camcorder footage that was captured in this pre-smartphone era, usually depicting Trey hopping around like a squirrel ran up his pant leg. You can read about it in The Phish Book, where they talk about the new “no-analyzing rule” put in place after Salt Lake City, or hear it from Trey’s mouth last week on Undermine when he described it as a “result of not wanting to argue.” And you can most definitely hear it when the band reached this mid-Atlantic weekend enshrined forever as the Hampton/Winston-Salem ‘97 boxset in 2011.

There might not ever be a better Phish archival release, collecting three shows from the giddy first peak of their most popular tour, two-thirds of which was in Phish’s most iconic arena until MSG bigfooted it (as New Yorkers tend to do). These aren’t just three excellent shows but six nearly flawless sets, each one featuring at least one landmark jam and almost every disc divisable into a satisfying album-like listening experience of its own. The numbers back this hyperbole up – phish.net users rate all three of these dates in the top 50 shows of all time, with 11/21 (#10) and 11/22 (#3) in the top ten. Only an official Big Cypress release would sport a better batting average.

I’m a proud American and I honor the will of the people, but if I’m going to quibble with one of those rankings, it’s for this show. Stipulated: it is a Great Show, but we’re now into the stretch of Fall 97 where they pretty much all are, and there are at least a couple still to come – longtime readers will know which ones – that I’d put above it*. It’s extreme hair-splitting, but what else is this newsletter for?

Certainly it starts red hot, with the very embodiment of “just having fun out there.” The debut of Emotional Rescue, a lecherous hit from the Stone’s disco-damaged turn-of-the-eighties manages to instantly encapsulate the still-nascent vibes swirling around Fall 97: goofy, in the form of Mike’s rooster-like recreation of Mick Jagger’s falsetto; sleazy, with its four-on-the-floor beat and bass pops; tradition-flaunting, irritating old-school Phish-prog loyalists as much as it annoyed Stones purists in 1980; and, most of all, irresistibly danceable. It’s inevitable that it immediately turns into an extended resurfacing of the cowfunk jam that is, by now, perpetually running beneath this tour**, available for Phish to dip into at any moment.

Juxtaposing it with Split Open and Melt is genius. For one, it wins back my strawman Fall 97 Phish “they keep playing the same songs/jam” critic, showing that they were still perfectly capable of navigating weird time signatures and polyphonic tangles. For two, it perfectly caps a slow and subtle mood swing, punctuating the gradient shift of the initially boisterous Emotional Rescue jam into darker and darker territory. They try to segue back to Disco-Stones at the end of the Melt jam but can’t pull it off…it’s gotten too deep into the quicksand. If you need a pairing that depicts both the party euphoria and the after-party paranoia of Fall 97, look no further.

If Phish takes their foot off the gas after that opening half-hour, it’s understandable. But returning to the genre shuffle still has its eureka moments, including the high degree of difficulty move connecting PYITE to Lawn Boy and a Caspian that ends with two minutes of loops, left to run even after the band leave the stage and the house lights come up for setbreak. The borders between sets continue to blur; but for mere technical demands, they could’ve left it running the whole break and picked right back up with a segue into Ghost.

That Ghost kicks off the second late set in a row to only feature four songs, and gun to head, my Midwestern bias and I pick the previous outing in Champaign. Tonight’s lap gets points for ambition and unpredictability – after basically discovering the sound of the tour the last time Ghost got played, this one only spends a few minutes of jamming in cowfunk pastures before ascending into spacier altitudes. The band also avoids the easy-path segue into Cities (or is it Psycho Killer?) at the end of the Ghost jam, instead calling for AC/DC Bag and taking it out for easily its longest stroll to date, more than double the previous longest version. 

Both are a return to the Siket-y sound of the tour’s first two shows, and I like it, but it also sounds like a slightly under-ripe version of what they’ll perfect early in 1998 (like, literally three sets into the year). Champaign’s second set also carves out a more consistent momentum arc throughout, while Hampton 1 veers a couple times between sparse ambience and dense rock theatrics, steering into a few cul de sacs in the Bag’s epic journey. But again, this is the opposite of beggars can’t be choosers – arguments only against this show’s status as one of the top 0.5% of shows Phish has ever played. Scientifically, it shouldn’t be any higher than the top 1%, I mean, come on.

The important thing is they’re having fun. “We simply relaxed and avoided going to those places that made us doubt ourselves,” Page says in The Phish Book. Throw out the encore and they start and finish this show with a Stones cover, and that’s the good Phishy stuff. Add back the encore and you get Trey teasing Yes before performing the long and complicated homicidal pig epic as an encore for the first time, a sure sign that just because they’re playing tungsten-dense short sets, that doesn’t mean they want to leave early. They’ll start the next show 20 hours later as though they never left the stage, and the fun never stopped.

* - Never mind NYE 95, which is bafflingly outside of the top ten.

** - not to mention perpetually running in my head in 2022; it’s the damnedest thing to have “generic 97 funk jam” as an earworm for weeks.