There Are Two Wolves

11/24/98, New Haven, CT, New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum

SET 1: Down with Disease, The Moma Dance > Ginseng Sullivan, Stash, Brian and Robert, Limb By Limb, Sample in a Jar, Tela, Chalk Dust Torture

SET 2: Ghost > Halley's Comet > Tweezer -> Possum, Wading in the Velvet Sea > Character Zero

ENCORE: Suzy Greenberg > Tweezer Reprise

Listen on phish.in

We need to talk about Trey. In a year when the band’s trajectory is pointed towards minimalism, there’s the beginnings of a backlash from their guitarist and leader. Trey, of course, is one of the main drivers of the shift towards texture and space, with his increasing embrace of effects, loops and rhythm guitar. But like any great artist, he contains multitudes, and in late 1998 we can start to see the minimalist angel and the maximalist devil perched and squabbling on Big Red’s shoulders. 

In this show, the devil wins. From the Disease opener to the Zero at the end of set two, Trey expresses that he came to New Haven to rip guitar solos and chew bubblegum, and supply chain issues have created a gum famine in Connecticut. Perhaps it was the lingering afterglow of the New Haven Tweezer three years earlier, one of Phish’s most metal moments. But where that jam fits as the blow-off top to a tour of rock star heroics, tonight’s geyser of notes feels out of sync with where the band has evolved to over those intervening years.

I brushed over how much I disliked the previous Disease in Cleveland, but this one inspires the same frustrations. The once-overplayed single matured into a reliable and interesting jam vehicle from 1995 through 1997, and started this year strong with a spooky version in Denmark. But it has regressed back to a high-speed fireworks show, only now at twice the length of its early versions – this time featuring 14 minutes of furious scribbling.

It might not be to my taste, but I’m sympathetic to that approach as a way to quickly ignite a show in the dead zone of the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving. However, Trey seemingly gets his gear shift stuck in that mode, loudly asserting control over jams in Limb, Chalk Dust, Ghost, Tweezer, Possum and Zero. Only Stash promises a different direction, collapsing inward halfway through and yielding control to an ominous Mike pulse and sparse dissonance before working its way back to the finish line in a zig-zag.

Everywhere else feels like Trey stomping through any attempts to pick up the 1998 thread of ambient entropy. Limb has its typical jazzy prance and a nifty seasonal “Carol of the Bells” tease, but Trey wraps it up with flashy spirals instead of sparring with Page as he’s done on other versions this fall. Ghost and Tweezer both spare little patience for cowfunk foreplay, skipping straight to the hard-rock payoff and extending it well past its welcome. Possum sucks! I have no idea what Trey is trying to do at the end of the jam, but it sounds bad!

Look, I fully realize that Phish will always be Trey’s band in truth, and that some Phish fans are all about the nights where he seizes center stage. But this style wears me out fast, and seems to elbow out the rest of the band to the margins at a time when they have a lot to contribute. Fortunately, most other Fall 98 shows contain this impulse to a song or two, and balance it out with quieter moments and more equitable improvisation. Just not tonight.

And, I’m sorry to say, it will become less of an anomaly as this project moves forward. That tug of war between passivity and aggressiveness will only get stronger in 1999, compounded by structural changes like Trey’s solo tour, his relocation to stage left, and the addition of his mini-keyboard. It’s an internal conflict that I’m pretty sure muddied the waters with the rest of the band, a path that leads to the hiatus and eventual breakup. A four-legged table can only put the weight to one side for so long before it becomes permanently wobbly.