Time Zone

11/26/97, Hartford, CT, Hartford Civic Center

SET 1: Tweezer > Sparkle > Gumbo > My Soul, McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters, Dirt, Split Open and Melt, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Taste

SET 2: Character Zero -> Also Sprach Zarathustra -> Cities -> Ya Mar > Punch You in the Eye > Prince Caspian, Poor Heart > Tweezer Reprise

ENCORE: Cavern

Listen on phish.in

It’s easy and tempting to shorthand Fall 97 by its monster jams, of which there are plenty. Nearly every night from here on out has a 20-minute-plus centerpiece to chew on, often showing up in unusual places. Tonight’s eye-popper is the Zero, still the song’s distance record-holder by a long gap. It’s honestly not the strongest jam on headphones, spending its final six minutes in a lumbering power-chord headbang. It’s more important as a symbol of Fall 97’s adventurous spirit – no song is safe from a structure-breaking extended improvisation that thumbs its nose at all the old and obvious exit points. 

That said, just experiencing this tour via its gaudiest runtimes misses a lot of its treasure. There’s a second tier of value that’s harder to spot with a glance at the setlist, performances that sit in the “Phish connoisseur’s” length of 10-14 minutes. In certain years of the 3.0 era, appreciating this zone became something of a community meme, either in celebration of the band’s newfound efficiency at moving through several different keys and themes in a shorter amount of time or as a coping mechanism for the lack of marathon jams. But there is a certain special quality to songs in this time range that maps back to previous eras, taking off in a big way in the hallowed year of 1997.

10-14 minutes might seem like a hilariously specific period of time to talk about, but it’s not entirely arbitrary. Many songs in Phish’s catalog feel designed to last about 6-9 minutes, and a browse through the track lengths of any show in the early 90s will show that dominance. That’s a little bit Trey’s compositional style – when he’s not writing a long epic, he sticks to head-jam-head or verse-chorus-jam-chorus structures that naturally fall into this range – and a little bit Trey’s stage instincts to wrap up in time to keep most songs under ten minutes lest they lose the casuals. 

When things began to loosen up in 93/94, it didn’t really change this dynamic. If anything, 1993 tracks got shorter, as seguefests and reprises became the favored trick, while in 1994, the really long jams were typically walled off from the rest of the show. Overall track lengths in 1995 and 1996 inflated a bit, mostly due to the band playing bigger and (slightly) slower to match the scale of the venues and crowds. But it’s 1997, in Europe specifically, where even the “stock” songs start to regularly breach that 10-minute barrier, for reasons of creativity instead of tempo or design.

Trey talked about this shift a bit in his recent Undermine episode, describing how the band’s early 90s priority was nailing their incredibly hard compositions at high speed. By contrast, the general loosening-up that permeated ‘97 and the years following led to the band spending time nurturing unexpected surprises instead of correcting their stride and sprinting on. They’re not all Hartford Zero-level explosions, and that approach leads to some slop – the band forgets how to play Cavern, of all things, in tonight’s encore. But all it takes is one interesting idea, briefly explored, to push a stock-length song into the more fertile 10-14 range. 

In Winston-Salem, that occurred in excellent but easy-to-overlook versions of Theme and Twist. In the former case, pretty much every Theme of Fall 97 is a must-hear, but this one stands out as subtly unorthodox, with some DEG-like discordance pushing against the usual soaring glory, Page switching between piano and synth, and Fish adding extra syncopation. Twist is still searching for its standard template, so it’s hard to say that this one cracks it, but the jam quickly warps the chord progression into a funk jam that retains the song’s sinister intent, even landing briefly in a rare Mike/Page duet.

Three nights later, on Thanksgiving Eve in Hartford, there’s a full sextet of songs in The Zone, each of which adds what the kids today call “extra mustard.” Gumbo, still thumbing its nose at the old ragtime ending, mines a similar paranoid-funk vein to that Twist, moving your ass while making you look fretfully over your shoulder like that Jay-Z gif. McGrupp doesn’t have to stretch too hard to get over 10 minutes, but this one lingers in Page’s impressionist solo just long enough. Split and Taste continue their winning streaks, two intricate songs that don’t really fit the vibe of Fall 97 but absolutely do not give a fuck.

2001, the song that they seemingly meant to open the second set with before Trey got cheeky, just barely sneaks in under the upper time limit, and only then because they forget to play the second peak and segue (clunkily but charmingly) into Cities. It’s magnificent; that’s all. Then there’s Caspian, the song that I genuinely can’t believe I’m enjoying as much as I have been this run through ‘97 Here, it has a lovely, patient opening on the heels of a speed-freak PYITE and a tidal wave of a solo that pushes through extra laps.

In every one of these performances, I would have happily taken several more minutes in whatever space they found themselves in (and they’re very different spaces!). But not every jam needs to be long enough to mow the lawn, and sprinkling a bunch of these medium-size expansions around a show makes for a richer relisten. It’s perverse, but I appreciated this show’s “songy” second frame of 8 songs, as a break from the monolithic sets of the past week – the ludicrous Cities > Ya Mar segue and the Rocky Top/Poor Heart fakeout are just good ol’ wacky Phish. Innovating all the way down from the 20-minute headline jams to the two-minute bluegrass chaser, that’s the Fall 97 difference, and the middle class is not to be neglected.