Wolfman’s Progress

7/24/98, The Woodlands, TX, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion

SET 1: The Moma Dance > Runaway Jim, Bouncing Around the Room, Stash, My Soul, Taste, Golgi Apparatus, Loving Cup

SET 2: Wolfman's Brother > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Scent of a Mule > Ha Ha Ha -> Scent of a Mule, Slave to the Traffic Light > Chalk Dust Torture

ENCORE: Character Zero

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I’ve argued a couple times already that 1998 represents the start of a new musical era for Phish, but it’s not a clean break from the pivotal year that came before. If playing The Moma Dance 5 times in the first 7 shows wasn’t clue enough, Phish has yet to kick their nightly JB’s impression habit. Since returning to the states, every show has packed in plenty of cowfunk, from songs where you expect it such as Moma, Tube, or Ghost, to songs where you might not, like Reba, Gin, and Gumbo. 

But the funk does feel like less of a singular obsession in 1998. After 11/17/97, nearly every Fall 97 show found its way to several minutes of wah, clav, breakbeats, and Lead Mike, and since it usually happened in each night’s signature jam, the sound looms large in the collective Phish memory. The improvisational highlights of 1998 are a more diverse crew, with some throwbacks to mid-90s shredding and examples of a new more atmospheric sound mixed in.

And yet, the funk is never far from their minds. Tonight’s centerpiece, the biggest Wolfman’s since the previous year, is funkadelicized from start to finish – without the locked-groove metal jam of Worcester or the torrential rock peaks from Champaign. You can draw a straight line to this Wolfman’s from its breakthrough 16 months prior in Germany, the Reveille that launched this whole era. But on closer listen, that straight line travels through a prism, splintering into a rainbow of sounds that can all be called “funk” but offer a much broader palette for Phish to work with.

Listening back to the Slip Stitch and Pass Wolfman’s 85 shows later, it’s jarring how much thinner and more cluttered it sounds – there’s a Dave’s Energy Guide tease, for pete’s sake. Until Mike starts to elbow him out of the way in the 9th minute, Trey is still playing a lot of notes, and Page is multi-boarding on piano and synth, ignoring the clavinet. The cowfunk template really only reveals itself in the last 3 minutes, which doesn’t leave it much time to develop beyond its initial groove…it pretty much just slows down.

That stasis is a hallmark of 1997 funk jams; I spent many essays last year arguing that what comes after the funk jam is usually the most interesting part of many of that year’s highlights. Funk was a liminal space for Phish, a reliably fun and entertaining transition that could instantly bump almost any song out of its comfort zone and open up new territory to explore. As the year went on, they got better at stretching it out and keeping it fresh with tricks like the solo breakdowns and precision start-stops, but it still was a passageway to something else, not an endpoint in and of itself. 

[There are a couple nice photos from this show on Getty Images — Trey’s wearing the Deset Patnact shirt and some really dorky sunglasses. But I don’t wanna get sued, so just click here if you’d like to see them and possibly pay $500 to use them on your personal blog or editorial publication.]

Compare that to tonight’s Wolfman’s, which isn’t just twice as long but also content to keep its feet submerged in cowfunk that entire time – it even segues into 11 more minutes of 2001, just a spacier version of the form. But the relatively limited boundaries of the Hamburg Wolfman’s have been stretched beyond recognition, even though you could edit the first 6 minutes or so of The Woodlands into the Markthalle and most people wouldn’t notice the stitches.

It’s around the 11th minute where the experience starts to show. Trey begins leaving more and more space at the end of his riff, resting as much as he’s playing and gradually shedding notes, not quite a start-stop jam but an invitation for Mike to step in. From there on out, the two of them start a bob-and-weave that is the staple of the 1998 cowfunk varietal, something like the Prague Ghost but without Trey in strafe-fire mode. Page, by sticking with piano instead of the now expected move to the clavinet, seems to nudge the band into jazzier turf, and there’s a nifty almost-free section in the 14th minute.

It spills out into a big solo, the maximalist ending of last fall’s Assembly Hall take, but eventually settles on some chunky riffage, a la the Gorge Mike’s, but this time alternating between windmilling power chords and taut cowfunk like Phisih are playing both halves in a battle of the bands. Shit yeah, it’s cool. Then Trey triggers a bweeoooo, and it quickly dissolves the minimalist structure of funk into the interstellar ambient sound that the new year has brought us for the final 3 minutes, until Fish’s 2001 drum part kicks in. 

That’s a lot of distance traveled in just one jam, but it’s all music that can be hyphenated to “-funk,” showing off the flexibility of the genre. It’s what Phish figured out that a thousand jambands in their wake never did – funk offers so much more than just rotely mimicking “Super Bad,” it’s a whole new vocabulary that can be reassembled into a multitude of variations, everything from Headhunters to Maggot Brain to Entertainment!. Part of the joy of 1998 is hearing Phish learn that lesson in real time, playfully exploring and experimenting with funk’s frontiers just as they’d done with rock and roll’s. We’re a long way from Hamburg.