Washed Out

7/3/99, Atlanta, GA, Lakewood Amphitheatre

SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, Gumbo, Sparkle > Cavern, Taste, When the Circus Comes, Tube > Funky Bitch, NICU, Waste, Meatstick

SET 2: Twist > Piper, The Moma Dance, Mountains in the Mist, Run Like an Antelope > Contact > The Little Drummer Boy

ENCORE: The Little Drummer Boy, Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?

ENCORE 2: Harry Hood

Listen

It’s time to discuss one of the unfortunate aspects of this tour: Summer 1999 might be the worst-sounding stretch in Phish’s 90’s. I don’t mean the band’s performances – though they’re still very much in warm-up mode for this show. I’m talking about the audio quality, which for mysterious reasons takes a noticeable step back on this particular tour. And it happens at the worst possible time.

The obvious handicap for 1999 is that, for whatever reason, the year has been relatively neglected by official Live Phish releases. At press time, we only have 8 full SBD shows from the year, a 12.5% coverage rate. That’s the lowest percentage since 1994, a year that had nearly twice as many total shows, equating to 15 shows in the app. Even 1996 – nobody’s favorite Phish year – beats it on both total shows released and coverage. You have to go all the way back to 1992 for a year with poorer official representation, and that’s a year packed with unofficially circulating SBDs.

That leaves us dependent on AUDs as our window into 1999, and unfortunately, they come up lacking for this summer*. I’m not sure why – Phish is mostly playing the same circuit of venues as the previous two years, and you’d think the taper section would have adjusted to those big amphitheaters by this point. Maybe the house sound changed when the band reshuffled, but I don’t remember hearing any significant difference at the segment of shows I attended. Did elevated ticket demand and taper ticket chicanery squeeze out the best rigs? Was this summer’s notorious heat a factor? Did the shift from tapes to CD-Rs as the preferred method of distribution leave us with shoddier sources for today’s streaming sites? Who knows!**

Regardless of the reasons, my ears wince when I queue up most shows from this summer. Mixes tend to be muddy and flat, with wimpy bass and shrill high end. Trey is typically very loud, Fish is all cymbals and snare, and everything kind of blurs together in that boomy shed acoustics way. It’s painful to listen to at proper loud volume, and the thick slab of sound is simultaneously exhausting and slippery – I find myself distracted more often when there are fewer details in focus within the overcranked murk.

It’s truly a shame, because the drop in quality manages to obscure the best and bring out the worst in Phish’s 1999 sound. In fairness to the tapers, the sonic palette was reaching unforeseen levels of density at this point, shifting from the relatively clean tones of just a couple years prior to a more complex focus on texture. Trey is at the peak of his Kevin Shields phase, layering multiple loops into each jam, Page has added new synthesizer toys to his menagerie, Mike’s bass tone and approach is more assertive than ever, Fish’s drumset is Peart level. Combine that instrumental diversity with the volume needed to reach the fans on the lawn, and those VU meters are going to spend a lot of time in the red.

On the AUDs, a lot of the sonic subtlety gets washed out. In this show, you can just about hear interesting things going on in the periphery of jams like Gumbo and Tube that feel like straightforward funk grooves at the surface. The proper debut of Meatstick (after its sneak preview way back in June ‘97) puts the spotlight on the polyphonic sounds of Page’s CS-60 synthesizer, but it’s barely audible in its other appearances – at the end of Antelope, for instance. The night’s best segment, a nifty old-school Twist > Piper, manages to surmount the faulty fidelity, but the “Oye Como Va” flirtations and slow build dynamics would sound even better on a board.

In lieu of all these finer details, summer 99 AUDs are dominated by Trey, who is still shaking off his elevated frontman role from the spring solo tour. Three shows in, we haven’t really had a deep type II jam, and that’s in part because Trey is throttling the heck out of every chance he gets to solo. But even this observation is distorted by the audio quality; individual SBD tracks like the 7/1 Disease (released on Live Bait 17) usually reveal that he was doing a lot more than just unleashing a torrent of notes. Whenever he pauses for breath, there’s a fascinating landscape of loops and drone afterimages he’s laid down like bread crumbs along the way, shoegaze details that don’t reach the taper section. 

Honestly, I’m not sure how many of those details even reached the people standing around the rest of the venue; the SBD releases of shows I attended this year, such as 7/23 or 12/2, tend to be a revelation beyond what I experienced at the time. Maybe it was a mistake for Phish to push the sound this far into texture within the subpar acoustics of summer sheds; consider that a year later, when they’re playing club shows to silent audiences in Japan, it will sound amazing on AUD or SBD. But until the day when the vaults are fully online, the digital record of 1999 is always going to feel compromised by the loss of crucial information somewhere between the PA speaker and the mic stand.

* - Obligatory eternal gratitude to the tapers, without whom this entire project wouldn’t be possible. 

** - This tour is also seriously lacking for photographs on the internet, which is your signal to send me some, if you’re holding.