Width of With

7/12/00, Noblesville, IN, Deer Creek Music Center

SET 1: My Friend, My Friend, The Curtain With, Tube > Heavy Things, Billy Breathes, Beauty of My Dreams > Free, Axilla, The Squirming Coil

SET 2: Birds of a Feather, Piper, Crosseyed and Painless > Prince Caspian > Meatstick

ENCORE: Wading in the Velvet Sea

Listen

The day after I confidently asserted that Chalk Dust Torture Reprise might be the ultimate Phish bustout, Phish did me one better. Tonight’s show marks the reemergence of The Curtain With, the longer form of the song that had been shelved for 1,184 shows – a gap so long that the number has increased in the last 25 years as more 80s shows were discovered. It was the third longest bustout ever at the time, and still hangs on in the top ten, only beat by Fuck Your Face among Phish originals.

Now that’s cheating with statistics a little bit, because the band never stopped playing The Curtain between 1988 and 2000. They just cut out the last two parts from the original composition, recycling the middle section – at double time – for Rift. So technically, Phish has been playing 2/3rds of The Curtain With for the last dozen years. Even the unplayed part, the calm, rippling jam in the third section, sounds quite a bit like Reba, which may explain why it was shelved a couple years before Rift made its debut.

But put all these familiar parts together and you get something unique and special. I’m a big fan of a solid “The Curtain >” drop, provided they find a worthy companion for the other side of that carrot. But there’s a lovely flow to how Trey first wrote it, with the chopped-and-screwed Rift sequence revealing unexpected melancholy, and the finale a zone for elegiac improvisation. The bonus features turn a fussy Zappa-esque oddity into a more well-rounded prog epic, one that can hang with similarly-structured songs like YEM, Coil, Hood, and Slave.

And even better, it’s some real nerd shit. Apparently, it was originally the fans’ idea to refer to this version as The Curtain “With,” though the band’s official releases have since taken up the cheesesteak-inspired practice. It’s one of my favorite Phish social media things when the confusingly named Micah Gordon posts a delayed “...With” on the Phish From The Road account, six or so minutes after the song starts. Like all great Phish lore, it’s a hilariously stupid concept to explain to a neophyte when everyone starts cheering for seemingly no reason in the middle of a song.

Here in Noblesville, it sounds like only a few fans recognize that history is happening at 6:15 when The Curtain slows down in an unusual way and the Rift theme emerges. At least in my trading circle, 80’s Phish tapes weren’t commonly seen, and the Colorado ‘88 release – which starts with Trey asking the tiny crowd “do you want with or without?” – was still six years away. That left the Ian’s Farm tape and an entry in the Pharmer’s Almanac as most people’s only reference point for what The Curtain With (or “width,” as some sources confusingly had it) sounded like.

The primordial track turns out to be a very good fit for a much larger-scale Phish, even after a 12-year hibernation. It’s a textbook specimen of the “busy up front/chill in the back” composition I wrote about last week, and it gives Phish a novel platform for the type of delicate jamming they’ve recently slayed in Reba and many Limb By Limbs. The closing jam is patient, gorgeous, clean-toned, and full of the space that so many summer 2000 improvisations have lacked. Even the majority of fans who had no idea what it was had to appreciate it.

Unfortunately, the rest of the show didn’t take that lesson to heart. It’s another breathless – in both the hurried and out-of-shape senses – second set, with cudgels of jams in BOAF and Piper. The summer’s only Crosseyed imports some excitement, but the band can’t match the delirious pace of the song’s last performance in Florida, winding down quickly into an aimless ambient jam that’s mostly a Trey/Mike duet. Meatstick forgets the new Japanese verse, and it feels like the first version without extended banter, though Trey takes time to shout out the “7,000” people who couldn’t get in to Deer Creek that night – then plays a Velvet Sea encore to keep them from storming the fence.

But it would’ve been hard to top that magic moment in the two-slot anyway. The Curtain will stick around in With form for the rest of the year – with the exception of an Albany version that apparently didn’t earn it – and for 2.0 as well, though it will play a particularly ignominious closing role at Coventry. For now, it’s a subtle full-circle nod to the early days of Phish as they roll towards an uncertain future.