Threatening Skies
7/14/00, Columbus, OH, Polaris Amphitheater
SET 1: Sample in a Jar
SET 2: Punch You in the Eye > Timber (Jerry the Mule), Gotta Jibboo > Boogie On Reggae Woman, Stash, Bouncing Around the Room, Foam, Dog Faced Boy, Farmhouse, Taste, Golgi Apparatus
SET 3: Mike's Song > Frankie Says > David Bowie, Waste, Sand > The Lizards, Weekapaug Groove
ENCORE: The Inlaw Josie Wales, Driver, Guyute
Weather has a way of symbolically intruding upon Phish shows. The most famous example is Coventry, where the intense storms and resulting mud pits set the tone for the musical disaster that transpired. But there’s also plenty of summer nights where the band fed off extreme weather – or vice versa – to produce electric moments. Or snowy runs like December ‘95 where harrowing drives between shows set the stage for white-knuckle rides under the roof. One could even argue that the weather-related cancellation of Curveball and the forced shortening of Mondegreen are nature telling Phish that they’re past the age where they should be throwing big outdoor festivals – time will tell.
And 25 years ago today, there was the Columbus Death Cloud. As fans drove in or hung out on lot, they could see a terrifying black shelf cloud rolling in towards the Polaris Amphitheater. And yet, in a move that 1000% would never happen today, the show went on as scheduled…for about five minutes, at least. From the safety of the roofed stage, Trey doesn’t seem to take the liability potential of the situation very seriously, telling the crowd they’re just going to wait a few minutes for it to pass and to “enjoy the storm.” You couldn’t dream up a better metaphor for this fraught era on the Phish scene – partying obliviously while dark clouds creep up.
Irresistible symbolism aside, the more immediate impact of tonight’s severe weather is disrupting the structure of a typical Phish show. Forget the short sets of Holmdel, tonight’s first set is only a single song*, and it’s Sample of all things, possibly the funniest “oops, never mind” opener they could have chosen. After a 25-minute break, they come back out and play a mulligan opener with a storm reference…though not the Harpua I assume everyone was calling while they huddled for safety. And then they just proceed on as if nothing had happened, playing an even longer-than-usual show, presumably breaking curfew after such a significant interruption.
But it’s not a normal show. Maybe it’s starting a half-hour closer to sunset, or maybe it’s the bonus time for the band to do whatever they were doing backstage in 2000, but this first set is definitely infused with some second-set zest. The summer’s only Timber casts a dark spell, while Jibboo gets a first-set call-up for the first time all season, starting the disco ball turning early in partnership with Boogie On. Even if the setlist reverts to more typical opening-frame selections after that, the playing in Stash and Taste is still deep enough to qualify it as an elusive one-and-halfth set.
The second/third set doesn’t quite recreate that special festival/holiday late-night feeling either, but it’s a nicely-paced, unpredictable sequence. As always, the set-long Mike’s Groove is a flow cheat code, but they stuff it with interesting material, starting with a genuine second jam in Mike’s – the last until Drew Hitz resurrected it in 2015. Frankie Says, with a little extra atmosphere, would have been a totally acceptable bridge to Weekapaug, but they swerve to Bowie instead, breaking it out of set closer duty. Heck, I even like where and how they play Waste here; combined with my recent Bug and Caspian appreciation, I’m really going soft in my old age.
They start the home stretch with a Sand where Fish and Mike briefly create a stop-start groove, maybe the first genuinely new thing they’ve done with the song in months. Then they sound like they’re going to go into a very slow, zoney Hydrogen before giving the Columbus fans a sloppy but sweet Lizards instead. That crowd – probably just drying out by this point – sounds much thinner by the encore, kicking off an old-school battle between the yellers and the shushers during Josie Wales. It’s a lovely calm after the storm.
So on the timescale of one show, the weather symbolism finds a happy ending. And weather events don’t always have negative connotations with Phish, often introducing just enough chaos to break the band out of autopilot mode and into a more creative state. But those of us in the big-picture business can’t help but fixate on an incident called the “death cloud” hitting at this precise moment in Phish history, at the dawn of their darkest decade. The storm may have quickly passed on this evening in Columbus, but the conditions that produced it remain.
* - I swear phish.net used to list it this way, but they changed it at some point to a more typical, but far less accurate, two-set format. I have corrected the record here!