Trial Run

12/7/99, Portland, ME, Cumberland County Civic Center

SET 1: Farmhouse, First Tube, NICU > Funky Bitch > Punch You in the Eye, Nellie Kane, Halley's Comet > The Squirming Coil

SET 2: Wolfman's Brother, Jennifer Dances, Heavy Things, Bug, Bathtub Gin > Simple, Free, Suzy Greenberg

ENCORE: Walk Away > Rocky Top

Listen

I’ve never run a marathon and never will; running is not the sport for me, man. But I know people who have, and I’m always interested in hearing how they prepare for their 26.2 mile goal. For many months in advance, they gradually increase their endurance, alternating frequent, shorter runs with one longer distance per week. In some plans, they’re almost doing a marathon-length practice run before tapering off for the big day. Your body needs to know what it’s in for if you’re going to execute.

Phish headed into December knowing that they would be playing a set roughly five times its usual length at the end of the month. And while the normal venues of the Northeast weren’t going to accommodate them extending their continuous music-playing capacity up to 3, 4, 5, and 6 hours in the run-up to New Year’s Eve, there were some things they could work on. While fans argued over whether they’d fill a midnight-to-sunrise set with pure improvisation or just five times the songs, Phish had likely already settled on the middle path they’d use: allowing each song the curfew-free luxury to jam exactly as long as it needed to.

But jamming in what style, precisely? The twisted Phish fan mind likely imagined the band playing 7 or 8 Mud Island Tweezers in a row, but that kind of idea-stuffed density sounds exhausting for musician and listener alike. The funk jams of 97 can’t really sustain an all-nighter, though it’s funny to imagine them doing a couple hundred breakdown solos. More recent space ambient trends risk putting even a jacked-up NYE crowd to sleep in the wee hours of the night. Instead, it was necessary to pull ingredients from of all those 90s trends and recombine them into an improv approach that was well-paced, sustainable, and kept the energy up over the long run.

I think some of the more relaxed jams I pointed out over the tour’s first weekend reflected some early tests of that jamming style. But tonight at the CCCC gives us the most prominent example yet of what 85,000 of us would hear in the Everglades. And it catches you off guard at the end of the first set, popping out of Halley’s Comet – a song that backed off in 1999 from its 97-98 heights.

But this Halley’s does have a “stay on F” promise right from the drop into the jam, with Trey laying down a bweeoooo and settling into some unhurried rhythm guitar. And that’s…pretty much where they’ll sit for the next 20 minutes, as this will not be a jam that takes abrupt turns or self-organizes into symphonic movements. It’s an exercise in methodical layering, an accumulating collection of subtle changes that never divert the comet from its path, just build and ebb its luminescence.

It’s a cousin to the impressive patience of the month’s Sands, but with much more freedom for Fish and Mike to invent around the unchanging core. It also, against trend for the era, doesn’t rely heavily on effects from either Page or Trey’s side – Page spends most of the jam on piano, Trey is mostly content to propel the jam with funk and power chords. It has all the ingredients of a trance jam, but played with an arena rock palate, a trick that only late 90’s Phish could pull off.

When it finally starts to change course in the back half with a darker section followed by a slight key change to hose territory, the preceding repetition makes it sound massive. It still mostly sounds like it could come right out of the lyrics of Halley’s Comet though, until the perpetual groove finally disintegrates for the final few minutes into a gorgeous looped-out coda.

The band is still getting its sea legs with this approach though – I think the Wolfman’s that opens set 2 is going for something similar, but it’s kinda soggy, and its euthanasia results in the nightmare sequence of Jennifer Dances/Heavy Things/Bug. Much better is the Gin, which goes the opposite direction from its thick-bodied predecessor in Michigan to explore quiet, Siket-y spaces where Page gets to be the synth wizard for once.

But while the subtlety plays well in a small arena in Portland, it might not work in a swampy field in Florida. That’s why the Halley’s feels like the true trial run for Big Cypress; it’s broad and dynamic enough for a festival crowd but still nuanced, doling out fresh ideas just frequently enough to hold the interest of anyone sober enough to be listening closely. The band has identified the muscles it needs to build up for the unprecedented distance on the horizon, now it’s just about putting in the work.