SET 1: Bathtub Gin > Foam, Samson Variation > Dirt > Vultures, My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own, Twist -> Jesus Just Left Chicago, Limb By Limb, Character Zero
SET 2: Julius > Simple > Fluffhead, Lifeboy > Taste, Hello My Baby, Frankenstein
ENCORE: Bouncing Around the Room, Slave to the Traffic Light
Tweezer opened the floodgates. On night two at The Gorge, no less than six songs that hadn’t appeared for more than 20 shows return to the stage. And if it doesn’t look much like a bustout show, that speaks to just how weird the songlist was in 1997. Foam, My Mind’s Got A Mind of Its Own, Jesus Just Left Chicago, Fluffhead, Lifeboy – these aren’t songs you hear every four shows, but they’re not the deepest of cuts either, particularly in the 90s.
With all these comebacks, it’s worth considering again why all these songs were exiled in the first place. There’s certainly not much in common between this quintet of songs, plus Samson Variation, the sixth with a significant show gap. None of them will really go back to truly heavy rotation, the closest being Fluffhead, which will hold steady every 10 shows or so until its infamous reshelving in 2.0. In most cases, their brief reappearance at The Gorge reinforces that they no longer fit in, like revisiting your college campus several years after graduation. They’re moving on to the bustout attic, only to be dusted off and displayed on special occasions.
For songs such as MMGAMOIO and JJLC, they’ve simply been displaced by younger competitors. Instead of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s clever country ditty, Phish now has their own Water in the Sky and, to a bluegrassier extent, the cover of Del McCoury’s Beauty of My Dreams to scratch that twangy itch. Jesus Just Left Chicago also gets bumped by an original and a cover – Dogs Stole Things and My Soul, in this case. Neither blues-rock exercise quite nails the swampy slowdown of ZZ Top’s original, but it also doesn’t suit Phish’s style to play more than one blues piece a night, so something’s gotta go.
Similarly, Lifeboy was one of Phish’s first ballads when it debuted in 1993, only beat out by Fast Enough For You by a couple of months. Now the band has plenty of slow jams to provide a soft landing late in the second set – currently, there’s Waste, Billy Breathes, Dirt, Velvet Sea, and When The Circus Comes, and the list will only grow longer with time. Here, the new competition is a definite upgrade, the saccharine Lifeboy elbowed out by more touching and lightly psychedelic cooldowns.
Foam and Fluffhead are a more complicated tale. Both were absolute staples of the band’s first decade; they played Foam at over half their shows in 90 and 91 and every third night 92-94, while Fluffhead could be heard almost every show in the late 80s and 20 times a year the first half of the 90s. The cynical take is that these two songs were more difficult than what the band wanted to play in 1997, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I caught Trey on Phish Radio recently saying he used to practice Foam for hours, and maybe that was fine in their younger days, but it seems like unhealthy behavior by this point in their career. Work-life balance is important, and they’d rather spend their practice hours elsewhere in 1997.
Plus, it’s not like Phish are phoning it in on the prog-rock, they’ve just spread it out a bit more evenly. The twists and turns of Vultures and the rhythmic complexity of Limb By Limb and Taste sound as hard to play as anything from Fluff’s Travels. No coincidence that all of these newer songs, on this night, kick butt, finding new spaces in and around their choreography where Fluffhead sounds like a recital. Whereas Younger Trey wanted to cram every compositional idea he had into a single very long song, the Trampled By Lambs material is stingier: each song gets seeded with one good concept, and let’s see how they bloom over time.
Even as someone listening to every dang minute of this year, I’d rather hear the newer stuff rapidly mature every other night than get a deeper songlist for novelty’s sake. If there’s an acceptable replacement for the semi-retired songs, let them sit on the shelves a little longer; nobody but the most reactionary of fans will miss them too badly. If a song such as Tweezer comes back and shows the ability to change with the times, all the better – there’s not really a good substitute for ol’ Uncle Ebenezer anyhow, unless you count Simple, where the current jam is too genteel for the ‘97 funk snarl. Otherwise, the revivals are just Michael Jordan in a Wizards jersey, old friends that don’t know when it’s time to say farewell.