The Wind Down

7/15/00, Columbus, OH, Polaris Amphitheater

SET 1: AC/DC Bag, First Tube, Limb By Limb, NICU, Dirt, Roses Are Free, Wolfman's Brother > My Soul, Julius

SET 2: Down with Disease -> While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Makisupa Policeman, Piper > The Mango Song, Bug, You Enjoy Myself

ENCORE: Loving Cup

Listen

At the risk of opening myself up to identify theft, this show took place on my 21st birthday. A year earlier, I was about to set off on my longest Phish run ever, tackling 8 shows in 10 days between Oswego and Deer Creek. Seven months earlier, I had driven two full days and sat in 10 hours of traffic to see Phish ring in the millennium in a swamp. And yet, despite spending the summer of 2000 split between Chicago and Ann Arbor – neither of them a prohibitive drive to Columbus, relatively speaking – I did not take this opportunity to spend a landmark birthday seeing what was, theoretically, still my favorite band.

It’s not like I had anything better to do; it was a Saturday, and I recall having my first legal drink in a sad TGI Friday’s. And I can’t pinpoint any specific reason why my Phish interest dropped off so steeply. I only attended one show all summer – fittingly, the underwhelming night at Alpine – skipped Deer Creek for the first time since ‘96, and wasn’t tempted to road trip anywhere more exotic. I remember following setlists but not feeling much FOMO, aside from envy about the Moby Dick fest on 7/11. After a few years of my life where there was almost nothing more important than logging as many shows as I could reasonably get to, following the band suddenly fell way down the priority list.

I’d make a small recovery in the fall – I’ve still got four more shows in my 1.0 ledger. But in retrospect it seems obvious that the passion was already gone by summer. From an external perspective, it looked like Phish had never been more popular. But internally, I was watching friend after friend fall off the bus, either due to reduced interest in the band, changing musical tastes, adult responsibilities, or in some sad cases, substance and legal issues. There was a growing general sense that the most fun thing just wasn’t that fun any more.

Fan-band breakups are a real thing, at least in my music-listening life; a very public separation from one of my later favorites led to the main source of my internet infamy. And every time it’s happened, I’ve pondered the customary question: was it them, or was it me? My tastes were certainly evolving; I was already split between the indie and jam worlds, but the former was gradually eclipsing the latter. When the hiatus hit, I was ready to see other people/bands, and as established previously, Phish and I drifted apart until the 2009 reunion.

Obviously, we’ve patched things up – I’ll be seeing shows 83 and 84 shortly after this essay hits your inbox. So revisiting Summer 2000 provided an opportunity to reassess this era with less jaded ears. I knew that the year wasn’t held in super high regard by the fanbase, but there was also the chance I had just overindulged at the time, spoiling my appetite for what they were doing in the post-Cypress runout.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I haven’t done a U-turn on this year. I hope I haven’t been too much of a sourpuss; I’ve definitely found some very good shows that I’ll revisit whenever this project and keeping up with new Phish gives me a break. There may not be very many excellent “complete” shows, but like practically any Phish tour in history, there are enough highlights sprinkled around to make a several-hour playlist. But overall, a tour-length revisitation brought back the same feeling of malaise that hovered like a fog on the scene at the time…or at least in front of eyes.

Tonight, like a lot of tour closers, is a bit like a greatest-hits roundup of the preceding shows. Unfortunately, that just means it hits many of the nerves that irritated me the last few weeks. The first set is dull, yet harmless, registering one more pretty LxL for the road at least. It’s the second set that captures what a water-treading tour this has been, with the most interesting advances sanded down to a heavy, lumbering core.

The set-opening Disease is one of its longest, but it takes 14 minutes to do more than the musical equivalent of YELLING IN ALL CAPS. The urgent funk section that follows starts out fun, but fails to develop any interesting offshoots; the sonic experimentation of Japan has fully withered away. The lauded segue into WMGGW lurches in, without the inspired triumph of the tour’s earlier Drowned > Rock and Roll connection; the performance of my favorite Beatles song is slow and laborious.

It’s annoying and apt that Trey saying “heady nuggets” in Makisupa earns maybe the biggest crowd pop of the night; the party has become the point. There’s another Piper that wears me out, another Mango with some mild extension, and then one of the most awkward moments of the summer. Phish.net drolly describes it as “The jam out of Mango included a Have Mercy tease,” but it’s much more than that – Mike abruptly starts playing the bassline, the rest of the band falls in line, but after 40 or so seconds Trey gives up chording, and shortly thereafter it just stops. A very long band conversation follows, until they finally settle on one from the new album they’ve played a bunch this summer.

That’s a microcosm of how out of sync this band has felt all summer, and how opportunities to go in unexpected directions have been quickly snuffed in favor of more predictable moves. The dense improvisational default mode has failed to evolve, and even the post-firestorm codas have gotten shorter and less interesting. It’s possible too that listening to the 8 shows of Japan as the lead-in to these 18 North American dates does them no favors. The Japan sound survived longer than I expected it to in the face of boomy shed acoustics and distractible crowds, but it’s barely noticeable by the final week – for all its quirk, the Moby Dick show is a much different flavor of extreme Phishiness than Drum Logos.

It’s a tour that confirms my central thesis for this entire project: that the essential engine of Phish is constant evolution. When the band stops introducing novel elements, they flounder. The Japan improv innovations didn’t stick – and arguably weren’t that much of a break from the arena ambient of 1999 anyhow – and as I’ve moaned a bunch this summer, there were no new songs or covers to get them out of their comfort zone. There’s not even a new piece of gear to spark creativity, with Trey’s synthesizer now an established, stagnant presence. The answer for following up Big Cypress that the band landed on appears to be “keep doing what we were doing,” which is absolute Phish kryptonite.

Was I observant enough to pick up on that stasis at the time? Probably not – certainly not enough to articulate it. But I think I subconsciously felt it, and maybe a lot of other fans did too. It subliminally offered permission to take it easy and go light on my summer tour schedule, the first time in my half a decade of Phish fandom where it felt like I wouldn’t miss anything important if I stayed home.

Phish will always have its ups and downs, but the worst thing you can say about them is that they are uninspired. I’m not optimistic that anything will improve in the seven weeks until Fall 2000, but it is curious that you can’t make the same allegations against 2.0, when there were new songs and new sonics aplenty. And they certainly learned this lesson by the time of the modern era, when a steady flow of fresh material, gear, and creative challenges like the post-cover Halloween shows or the Sphere run have kept them in healthy perpetual change. With a quarter century’s perspective, the absence of that fuel in 2000 is palpable in a zombie band, mostly going through the motions as they look forward to a hard-earned break.