To The Throat

9/14/99, Boise, ID, Boise State University Pavilion

Some fancy video editing on this one.

SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, The Sloth, The Curtain > Waste, Loving Cup > What's the Use?, Wading in the Velvet Sea > Farmhouse, Nellie Kane, Taste, Rocky Top

SET 2: Peaches en Regalia > AC/DC Bag > Gumbo, Down with Disease > Frankenstein

ENCORE: Simple, Hello My Baby

Listen

Boise had all the makings of a Salt Lake City Reprise. A sparsely-sold Tuesday night show between higher-profile stands at The Gorge and Shoreline, an out-of-the-way location (it’s 430 miles from Portland to Boise, another 670 down to Mountain View), in a town that Phish seldom visited – something special just had to be in the works. At least one phish.net comment says rumors were circulating that they were practicing “an album,” a prank that would have been especially juicy in a year with no Halloween show.

Instead, Phish treated their Idaho faithful to a different kind of musical costume: a good old-fashioned Phish show. It’s an impression that goes deeper than a setlist lacking any of the new songs and reviving older favorites The Curtain and Peaches, down to the emotional narrative and structure of the show. Even though a Phish show is (almost) always two sets and an encore, the way the music flows within those parameters can change dramatically, and yet subtly evolve over the course of tours and years. And sometimes it takes a show like this one to suddenly realize just how much the standards of a typical Phish show have changed.

A scattershot set one is the first variable of that equation. United only by sharing the key of E – a joke about Bois-E, perhaps? – (debunked! See commments.) It’s a shuffle of 11 songs that spans Phish history from the 1987 class of Sloth and Curtain up through summer debutante What’s The Use?. That they are played in hilariously random, even insulting* order is part of the aesthetic; it’s a callback to the days of Phish opening for themselves, using set one to demonstrate all the different things they could do before settling into a more focused strategy after the break.

Peaches is a key throwback variable all on its own; the cover that, more than any other, feels like the Rosetta stone to Phish’s whole deal. Appearing for the first time in 2.5 years, it’s still (mostly) razor sharp at a time when the band wasn’t always well-honed. And in classic Phish fashion, the calisthenics of navigating its twist and turns sync the band up for another classic segment: the centerpiece jam. 

That this highlight would come in AC/DC Bag isn’t a huge surprise; we’re only four performances removed from the big one at UIC. And like that standout, the Boise Bag provides a guided tour through 90s jamming styles – slipping its chord progression into an ominous minor key like the darker jams of late ‘94, recovering for a brief respite of arm-waving holy rapture, slinking into a taut funk-rock strut complete with stop-start maneuvers, landing in a murky ambient soup. It’s more multi-segmented than the majority of 1999 jams, with minimal friction separating the themes, but it’s still coated in a gossamer of millennial-Phish sonics: more loops, weirder keyboards, vacuum played for drama instead of laughs.

And lest earlier phases of Phish feel left out, the following Gumbo interpolates Queen for an extended classic rock tease a la ‘93, while a barrel-chested Disease and the reliable space-rock crunch of Frankenstein check off the arena-rock era. It’s Phish’s whole decade in an hour, a slightly out-of-order survey of all the improvisational tricks they’ve accumulated over nearly a thousand shows, wrapped up in a five-song set – that reliable signifier of landmark status.

So Boise’s eventual choice as a LivePhish release is no surprise; it’s only an upset that it took so long. It’s the kind of show you don’t find often in 1999, one that just feels like vintage Phish without any need to adjust expectations for the epoch. Its closest cousin is Columbus, another official SBD, another eclectic first set followed by a five-song second set, another one that succinctly summarizes years of Phish history and creates something that feels just modern enough. That the two shows are outliers in this format may explain why 1999 is so poorly represented in the official record, and speaks to the frustrations of a year when Phish struggled to fit all their new ideas into the “classic” show mold.

* Curtain > Waste? Sicko stuff.