We’re An American Band
We’re An American Band
3/2/97, Copenhagen, DEN, Pumpehuset
SET 1: Johnny B. Goode, Uncle Pen, Sample in a Jar, Guyute > My Soul > Runaway Jim -> Gypsy Queen -> Runaway Jim, Run Like an Antelope -> Catapult > Life on Mars? > Chalk Dust Torture, Hello My Baby
SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Maze, Swept Away > Steep > Punch You in the Eye > Waste, Character Zero > Slave to the Traffic Light > Tweezer Reprise
ENCORE: You Enjoy Myself
When Americans go abroad, it does weird things to their national pride. Some travelers attempt to downplay their citizenship, to the extreme of sewing Canadian flags on their backpacks. Others go the other direction, acting extra American after a couple weeks of immersion in foreign cultures. Traveling Europe in the late 90s wasn’t as fraught as touristing during the Bush administration, but as Bittersweet Motel illustrates, Phish weren’t immune to acting boorish overseas.
A lot of that ugly American behavior was recorded in 1998, but here at the end of the first European tour of 1997, Phish plays a set that is practically bleeding stars and stripes. In the first seven songs of the show alone, they bring in Chuck Berry, Bill Monroe, Clifton Chenier, Carlos Santana, and James Brown (through an extended “Super Bad” tease in Antelope), a multicultural parade of great American musicians and Made-in-the-USA genres. It’s a wonder they don’t close the set with an acapella Star-Spangled Banner instead of Hello My Baby – itself a product of the quintessentially American Tin Pan Alley.
It’s a weird flash of patriotism from a band of Generation Xers about to “destroy America.” Then again, it might just all be homesickness. Phish are having fun in Copenhagen, but they also clearly have one foot on the plane. Everything is played blisteringly fast, quashing any hope of building on the previous night’s eureka moment about slowing it down. It’s summed up by Antelope, which once again fails to reach its ending before diverting into another song, and the shortest YEM vocal jam I’ve heard in some time, basically just 90 seconds of chanting the word “skeleton.”
But the oldies programming fits with a tour where the band has been spending more time among the Americana roots than usual; not just the blues, but also a renewed burst of bluegrass (the new Beauty of My Dreams, revivals of Daniel Saw The Stone and Paul & Silas), early rock and roll (JBG and Love Me), and even some jazz. Like a certain other band that toured Europe 25 years prior, Phish is leaning into American cultural history just as they’re trying to establish a beachhead overseas.
But where the Dead were reengaging with and building upon the music of their youth, there’s another layer of generational remove for Phish. They’re 70s kids. In that Slip Stitch and Pass interview I pulled from yesterday, Trey admitted as much, saying:
“You can hear it obviously in the album because we're always throwing in those little quotes: the Doors, the Stones, Pink Floyd, ZZ Top, Talking Heads. You know what I mean? It's really second generation or something. I guess my realization is the first thing you have to do is know thyself and admit who you are. It's like, ‘Be yourself, because nobody else can.’ And it's like the suburban New Jersey mall life is so void of any kind of meaning or anything…that's exactly who all four of us are. We all grew up on a block with 25 kids playing army and stuff and waiting for the Good Humor man. Going to the mall and hanging out at the pizza place.”
As a result, Phish are much more interesting when they’re looking to the future — or at least the proggy 70s/80s vision of what the future might look like. The most effective cover performance of this night is the second-set-opening 2001, Eumir Deodato’s 1973 reimagining of Richard Strauss’ 1896 composition, best known for soundtracking Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 vision of the space age. It leads into a Maze that channels the avant-garde skronk of 1980s experimental rock; I’m duty bound to mention that Trey also name-drops the similarly-aged Sonic Youth in that SS&P interview as a role model of the realization he describes above:
“I feel more that transcendence can't happen without acceptance. First thing you have to do is accept. So you know who's a good example of this to me is Sonic Youth. Know what I mean? I mean, I really like them for that very reason. They seem to have accepted fully who they are, and from that base they've been able to really do some great, groundbreaking sort of stuff. I'm sure they look and dress exactly the same as they did in ninth grade.”
It’s easy today to forget how musically conservative the jamband scene was in the 90s, still dominated by Dead soundalikes and acts chasing the vaguely granola singer-songwriter image that struck gold for DMB and a multitude of HORDE/Lilith acts. Other jambands weren’t covering Talking Heads or quoting Radiohead or name-dropping My Bloody Valentine and Pavement. They might be dad-rock to the core now, but Phish were pulling the scene’s timeframe forward in the 1990’s.
So at the end of a tour that’s all about laying the foundation for the rest of an amazing year, here’s a show about celebrating, then rejecting, the past. People often characterize Phish’s transformation in 1997 as a throwback, an embrace of 70s-style funk, but they also embraced the futuristic promise of the genre, as well as how artists such as Brian Eno, David Byrne, and Robert Palmer blended it with other genres in subsequent decades. In Copenhagen, they might play Chuck Berry and zydeco blues, but they can’t wait to get back to the States and Bearsville Studio, where they’ll record a bunch of improvised music that sound worlds away from Johnny B. Goode and My Soul. Because there’s nothing more American than reinventing yourself.