The Sound of Settling

6/23/00, Atlanta, GA, Lakewood Amphitheatre

SET 1: Ya Mar, My Soul, Bathtub Gin, Heavy Things, Back on the Train > David Bowie, Cars Trucks Buses, Farmhouse

SET 2: Rock and Roll > Jesus Just Left Chicago > Down with Disease > Twist, Contact > Makisupa Policeman > Character Zero

ENCORE: Brian and Robert, Possum

Listen

With Phish having to play host to a gaggle of Nashville royalty on opening night of summer tour, the good people of Atlanta were treated to an early-tour tradition: the settling-in show. It’s a familiar challenge for the Georgians, as for two years in a row their two-night stand has fallen in the first weekend of the tour, when the band is still shedding offseason weight. You’d think that rustiness would be alleviated somewhat in 2000, since these are technically the 12th and 13th full shows of the calendar year. But as discussed yesterday, the significant shift in conditions between Japan and the U.S. has reset Phish back to square one – or maybe, to be charitable, square one-and-a-half.

The first set has all the hallmarks of a tune-up session, aside from omitting the Stash that always turns up in such shows. I’ll never hate on a Ya Mar opener, but for a summer shed show, it’s definitely the “first thought, best thought” option. They take it to some interesting places but crash-land in My Soul, and I will once again tap the sign that 12-bar-blues is the lever Phish pulls when in need of realignment. I’ll get back to the Gin, but the rest of the set is similarly tentative, with some lengthy breaks between songs reinforcing that the band isn’t quite fully operational yet*.

Not so the second set, which just misses being fully continuous. And here the settling-in takes a different form, as the band sorts out its improvisational focus for the summer. On the bookends, you have the maximalism of Rock and Roll and Zero, itself a sign of getting their sealegs; when it doubt, play it fucking loud. The former song in particular sounds like Trey, rather noisily, trying to light a fire under the band, but pushing so hard he ends up drowning them out until the final couple minutes, when they build a stomping (and distinctly Phish-brained) bridge between VU and ZZ.

But you can’t play a whole set cranked to 11 – at least not at this stage in their career – and they calm down in the middle for a pretty fascinating Disease jam. Though the song is already old enough to attend first grade by 2000, it feels tied to the year’s zeitgeist, heavy sometimes to the point of overwhelming, but often displaying surprising detail below the high-decibel surface. Here, they exit the guitar solo quickly – there’s been plenty of that in this set already – and though it meanders for a while, it finally feels like four musicians in conversation instead of a bandleader whipping on his horses. And given time to find itself, it eventually arrives in fresh territory, with Page unfurling synth drones and Trey using the weird, darting effect he’s been enamored with of late.

I feel personally trolled by the Comic Book Guy t-shirt.

Eventually, it reaches that elusive Fukuoka space, still hanging on in spite of the less conducive environment. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it oozes into Twist, that set’s signature song, but like a strip mall sushi joint, they can only bring so much Japanese influence to the Deep South, and it can’t maneuver back to the depths reached in Disease.

Still, it’s a very strong segment, which makes it odd that this show is represented in the Live Bait canon (Volume 8, if you’re looking) by the first set Gin. A Shapiro selection made a dozen years later doesn’t say anything about the headspace of the band in June 2000, and it’s a very good jam lent extra nuance on the SBD. But in the context of this show it feels like a jam looking back instead of forward. Gin was also one of the feature songs of last year, and tonight’s follows the same contours as I described last year – squeezing the maximum creativity out of Type I, first set energy, building with a relentless focus. Even when it’s undeniably ripping, it sounds like Trey soloing with himself – sometimes literally, thanks to his loop pedals – while the rest of the band is a backdrop, less engaged than they were in Japan’s more abstract sections.

It illustrates the stakes of a settling-in show, the dueling – but not incompatible – impulses of picking up where you left off and departing for some place new. The itinerary deja vu might be working against them; it’s kinda weird that the early summer tour routes of 1999 and 2000 repeat themselves if you take away the earlier year’s Kansas City opener. I’ll also repeat myself from a month ago and say that it’s troubling that Phish came to 2000 with no new material – it’s easier to avoid falling back on old tricks when you’re trying to find the right place for new arrivals. This early in the tour, Phish still has the Japan sound to substitute as fresh blood, but without a signature song to access it – even if they try tonight with Twist – that’s a precarious solution. As this show foreshadows, It’s one thing to settle in, it’s a lot more worrisome to settle.

* - There have been a lot of pauses in these first two U.S. summer shows, and that’s something that sticks out about this year in my memory. I wonder if I need to start a pause tracker?