Training Tradeoffs
12/8/99, Portland, ME, Cumberland County Civic Center
SET 1: Limb By Limb, Back on the Train, Down with Disease > Fast Enough for You, Ya Mar, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Run Like an Antelope
SET 2: Sand, Dirt > Piper -> Dog Faced Boy, The Lizards, You Enjoy Myself -> Tweezer Reprise
ENCORE: Golgi Apparatus > Tweezer Reprise
Near the end of this show, Phish pulls off a nifty trick I would’ve sworn had happened before: taking the vocal jam of YEM into a spontaneous a capella rendition of Tweezer Reprise. Over an entire decade of co-existence between Phish’s two most iconic songs, YEM and Tweezer’s little brother had previously cozied up only three times at the end of a second set. But despite the arrows linking two of those versions, they’re traditional soft segues, with the vocal jam fading out as Trey starts up the Tweezer riff in D.
Not so in Portland, where someone starts singing Mike’s Tweeprise bassline at 19:45 and the other three quickly lock in to approximating instrumental parts Bobby McFerrin-style. Eventually they work their way up to the vocals, pause for an encore break, play Golgi, and then go right back into Tweeprise proper. So two Tweeprises in three songs on a night where they didn’t even play Tweezer – though, pardon the spoiler, it was pretty easy to guess what they’d open the next show with.
That’s the kind of mischief and setlist creativity that’s essential to the full Phish experience. Yet it’s an element that’s relatively lacking in this concentrated December run, for all its high esteem in the Phish history books. Over the first six shows of the tour, it’s the first real moment of good ol’ Phish goofery since…another YEM vocal jam segue, the Little Drummer Boy on opening night.
Now, these shows remain sillier than at least 99% of rock bands touring the country in 1999 or any other year. Tonight, there’s still 15 minutes set aside for a zydeco cover with a nonsensical chorus and 11 more for an emotional epic about lizard people, never mind You Enjoy Myself’s whole deal even before the unusual segue. But on the relative scale of Phish shows, it’s pretty sober stuff; FEFY and Dog Faced Boy, the show’s mild bustouts, don’t really fulfill the wackiness quota.
If you’re feeling deja vu, I am too – I griped about this shift just a few months ago. At the time I put the blame on the dominance of the TAB material and its associated sonic influences; but now I think it might be the trade-off for the Cypress-sized jamming style I described yesterday. The patient layering of texture over a mostly static base is not conducive to seguefests and unrehearsed cover songs, and stretching out the jam vehicles takes up a lot of the space where a deep, silly bustout might fit. Instead, the band often reaches for a slower song between the monolithic jam pillars – Dirt is probably a more appropriate palate cleanser between this show’s nearly 20-minute versions of Sand and Piper than Buffalo Bill or Dog Log.
Neither of those second set features do it for me like the previous night’s Halley’s. The Sand is noisier and less nuanced than its Cincy predecessor, the Piper is split between rager and chin-stroker with neither segment transcending the stock form of each. Disease and Ya Mar in the first set are stretched out but meandering, showing that the extension exercises still need some practice – the focus is there, if not the execution.
And sometimes focus comes at the cost of flexibility. In the face of that frustration, past iterations of Phish might’ve switched modes from heavy jammers to charming goofballs earlier in the evening. But Phish has a record of tightening up and playing it straight around big shows – it’s part of what I found unsatisfying about the music at Clifford Ball, and I wrote years ago about how shows after Halloweens were looser and more engaging than the nervous shows before. If you consider December ‘99 to be a month-long rehearsal for Big Cypress, you can hear that high-pressure tension at play. At least until the end, when the essential Phish weirdness sneaks in through the cracks of training camp determination.
I adore this first set.. A raging Limb that’s strong enough as a standard version to follow 12/3’s brilliance, a jammy Ya Mar that has Trey in a long rhythm duet with Fish, a bone-rattling Antelope, and a DWD that functions as a brilliant developmental jam towards the Big Cypress sound.. Sure it’s type I, but the build of Trey’s single note percussive loops and incredibly simple playing is so on point. Leaves a ton of room for Mike and Page, who’s doing the same kind of ambient-jazz chordal playing as the 12/3 Limb and 12/7 Halley’s. His piano work is so strong at Cypress, and as a longtime fan of this tour I’m somehow just noticing how strong it’s been in the lead up too, probably because his synth work gets so much attention in this era. He just plays at an angle across the other guys in this really smart and progressive way that I just find absolutely mesmerizing.
The second set has a weird flow cuz of the placement of the ballads, and the Sand isn’t possibly the “weakest” of the month (lol it still RIPS), but my god, the Piper. A raging take off that just blasts into an orbit. An absolute SpaceJam clinic. It develops really fascinatingly too, “peaking” after 16:00 with Mike developing a theme in a 5 beat phrase while the band plays in 4, almost taking a cue from some of Page’s piano approach from earlier this tour. Page swells in bigger underneath and Trey starts into these brilliant Fripp/Eno - No Pussyfooting cascades of sound. One of the defining psychedelic moments of the tour, along with the 12/11 Ghost and 12/16 Tweezer. What a band.