Thin Ice
11/14/96, Ames, IA, Hilton Coliseum
SET 1: AC/DC Bag > Uncle Pen, Wolfman's Brother > Cars Trucks Buses, Free, All Things Reconsidered, Bathtub Gin, Talk, Julius
SET 2: Llama, Sample in a Jar, Taste, Swept Away > Steep > Scent of a Mule, Life on Mars?, Demand > Run Like an Antelope > A Day in the Life
ENCORE: Stash, Hello My Baby
A natural side effect of playing bigger venues is that you no longer play the smaller towns. For the first half of the 90s, Phish was the perennial college band, playing any municipality with a quad and a dorm, no matter how remote. Now that they’re mostly in NBA and blue-ribbon Division I college arenas, the out-of-the-way campus towns get skipped.
So the 1996 stopover in the central Iowa town of Ames — a town of 66,000 whose population is roughly half Iowa State students — was a bit of a throwback. Played on a Thursday night between the more major metropolitan areas of Minneapolis and St. Louis, it had all the ingredients for a sleeper show. Unfortunately, the weather outweighed all these factors, as a nasty ice storm raged outside the Hilton Coliseum, keeping the room only 2/3rds full. It was a lesson in why you probably shouldn’t play shows in the deep midwest from roughly November to March (a lesson Phish would regularly ignore).
Still, inclement weather is associated with some of the most legendary Phish shows, last year’s Albany outing chief among them. But Phish plays this show with the same attitude as your author when he sees flurries outside the office and has to pick up the kids from daycare — working as quickly and leaving as early as professionally possible. The entire show clocks in just a couple clicks above two hours, and even that’s only because they guilted themselves into playing a rare Stash encore after blowing through both sets in fifty-some minutes.
They play none of the year’s featured jam vehicles: no YEM, no Mike’s, no Simple or Tweezer. The longest song is (deep sigh) Scent of a Mule, which gets barely past 12 minutes. Bustout rewards were scarce for the fans who risked life and limb sliding down the highway to the show; there’s the first Demand of the year and…Uncle Pen? It’s slim pickings for sure.
But it’s a central tenet of this newsletter that every Phish performance contains magic somewhere, and on this night there are a few glorious minutes in the first set Bathtub Gin. It’s well short of the 27-minute marathon from Lexington (again, ice storm), but they pull a trick that perks my ears up more than almost anything in that elongated performance.
After some of the standard playful Gin jamming, including the common flirtation with “Long Tall Glasses,” there’s a subtle shift around the six-minute mark where the aspect ratio goes from 4:3 to Cinemascope. Fish is playing with a little more space, Trey’s tone gets bigger with longer sustains, Mike and Page are building busy structural formations in between. It’s like you’re hearing a college band transform into an arena-rock band in real time, with a few time splinters of the 12/6/97 Tweezer or 7/10/99 Chalk Dust flying back from the future. Neither snow nor ice nor long drives through Iowa will stay Phish from finding new sounds, even if it’s just for a fleeting moment.
I had the same feeling about the Bathtub Gin and it prompted me to think it's probably my favorite phish song. I respect the short write up for the short show, too.