Too Big To Notice

12/31/99, Big Cypress, FL, Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation

Runaway Jim, Funky Bitch, Tube, I Didn't Know, Punch You in the Eye, Bouncing Around the Room, Poor Heart, Roggae, Split Open and Melt -> Catapult, Back on the Train, Horn, Guyute, After Midnight

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“Only at the largest concert in the world could we get away with playing a song like that.”

Trey’s not wrong – the Split Open and Melt > Catapult on New Year’s Eve evening is one of the festival’s finest and weirdest. The jam slowly transforms from Melt’s usual Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride into a menacing four-part clockwork, nicely foreshadowing the midnight gag just several hours away. It’s of a different flavor than the all-night set’s standouts, moving nimbly between different themes instead of chewing one or two ideas into submission. The final motorik groove it lands on is perfect for Mike’s plainsong chant about a malfunctioning machine, a welcome bit of deep Phish lore in a set that is otherwise – up until its final song and crowd reaction – a pretty light warm-up.

But for today’s essay*, I’m more interested in the first part of that quote – that Phish was playing the largest concert in the world on this historic and lucrative date. Musical artists and their management had circled December 31, 1999 with dollar signs in their eyes, anticipating that an already big night for live music would be multiplied by the end-of-century hysteria. Big-name acts like The Eagles, Barbara Streisand, Sting, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, and Jimmy Buffett booked large venues and charged eye-popping (at least at the time) ticket prices. And yet the Los Angeles Times reported that, with only a week remaining, many of these A-listers were struggling to fill seats, with some outright cancelling their year-end blowout.

Near the bottom of that story, in a paragraph that begins “The glut of holiday shows also promises some odd musical moments,” Phish finally gets mentioned for their “two-day camping concert” in South Florida. Apparently it wasn’t considered newsworthy that their chosen venue had no official capacity, and that the organizers were estimating 75,000 tickets sold – 3-4 times the size of the arenas booked by The Eagles and Billy Joel in major cities. Oh, and that tickets were only $150 each, camping inclusive…one-tenth of what it cost to see Buffett play “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and sip the worst margarita you’ve ever tasted**.

Despite a track record of four similar-size festivals since 1996, nobody seemed to take Phish’s millennium celebration seriously. In Jesse Jarnow’s After Midnight podcast – the definitive documentation of all the details that went into the fest’s planning and execution – he reports that promoters warned local officials to expect 80,000 people to descend upon the Everglades, and they basically didn’t believe them. “If it had been The Rolling Stones, we would have been more prepared,” said a deputy from Hendry County as the festival finally earned media coverage…for its traffic jam.

Even the band’s appearance on ABC News’ 24-hour special coverage of the holiday felt somewhat disrespectful. The cheesecaked performance of Heavy Things was tape-delayed to the wee, final hours of the broadcast, and a sleep-deprived Peter Jennings infamously introduced them as “The Phish” while managing to mention the Grateful Dead twice. With the carnage of Woodstock ‘99 still recent news, you’d think a few national news crews might be around to document Phish attempting a similar-scale event on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. But the ones that showed up were mostly interested in the traffic.

I think even Phish fans under-appreciate what a logistical achievement Big Cypress was. It’s easy to get distracted by the musical milestones or the inconvenience of the road in. But one of the great things about After Midnight is how much time it dedicates to the behind-the-scenes work: the selection of the festival site, the tribal negotiations, and the intense labor needed to build a temporary “city in a swamp” the size of Flint, Michigan.

Where previous festivals had taken place on air force bases and airports already filled out with infrastructure, the Big Cypress site was a cow field full of fire ants. And because the band didn’t settle on the location until the middle of summer tour – after attempts to mount a smaller festival in Hawaii dead-ended – they only had a few months to build all the roads and utilities, never mind the giant ice sculpture or the row of Victorian homes encrusted in vines.

And it all came together beautifully. Inside the gates, the fan experience was pretty much perfect; I don’t recall significant shortages of amenities or the walk to the concert area being crazy long or any of the other typical festival beefs. As a veteran of both Oswego and Big Cypress, the winter weather made a huge difference in livability – 70s in the day and 50s at night were pretty much ideal. And with plenty of stuff to do and gawk at between sets, Phish’s magic trick of making these enormous gatherings feel simultaneously massive and intimate was never more impressive.

Not that there was too much time to kill, since the band was just as generous with their time. After the mammoth three-setter of the 30th, I don’t think many fans would have begrudged them “only” playing the all-night set on the 31st. Or they could have taken a page out of Oswego and booked a side stage with other artists to keep the masses entertained in the sunlight while they rested up for The Long Gig. But they still gave us an evening bonus set, and a hefty 105-minute one at that.

Like I said up top, the music is not too memorable outside of the Melt; it’s mostly a bunch of short songs that wouldn’t work as well in the middle of the night. But it did produce one of the festival’s singular moments, with a forgivably on-the-nose cover debut that sent the crowd into religious rapture as they walked back to the campground for the longest setbreak ever. At that pregnant moment, the disrespect and obliviousness of the outside world didn’t matter – the largest concert of the world was just for us, anyway.

* - Sorry to anyone expecting coverage of the overnight set today, but I wanted to hold space for the afternoon set and some other festival thoughts. Due to reportedly missing actual midnight by a few minutes, the overnight set entirely took place on 1/1/00 anyway…so tune in tomorrow!

** - Even better, Phish outgrossed them all anyway, bringing in a cool $11.6 million, twice as much as the fuckin’ Eagles.