Worcester Weirdos
11/28/97, Worcester, MA, Worcester Centrum
SET 1: The Curtain > You Enjoy Myself -> I Didn't Know, Maze, Farmhouse, Black-Eyed Katy, Theme From the Bottom > Rocky Top
SET 2: Timber (Jerry the Mule) > Limb By Limb, Slave to the Traffic Light > Ghost > Johnny B. Goode
ENCORE: My Soul
The ‘97 Worcester run has always struck me as a bit odd. It had all the ingredients to be the tour’s centerpiece: A long holiday weekend in the heart of New England, the band’s first three-night arena run in a venue treasured by fans since the landmark show of NYE 1993, and a position smack dab in the middle of the fall itinerary. It should’ve been a triumphant celebration of the blossoming Fall 97 sound, but instead it’s…out of sync with the rest of the tour’s narrative, a weird detour between the consensus peak of the previous weekend and my subjective favorite on the next.
Folks, perhaps I don’t need to keep saying this, but it’s still Tremendously Great Music. The floor for Fall 97 is absurdly high – I don’t think there’s a single show from last Fall that I would take over the weakest show on this one (we’ll revisit that claim in Cleveland or State College). Each show from the Worcester trio contains memorable performances, including no less than the longest Phish jam in recorded history. But that particular datapoint speaks volumes; when I say this run feels like a weird outlier, it’s not even really a comment on their quality, but rather their flavor.
Sure, they’re popping out a 20-minute jam every night now, but playing a nearly hour-long jam with more themes and chapters than a Russian novel? That’s some 94-95 stuff, boys. The extremely-constricted song rotation suddenly dilates, with several songs we haven’t heard since the spring and summer trips to Europe re-arriving (many with a thick coat of rust). There’s just more setlist slots in general; despite the 58-minute Jim, the 11/29 show features twenty different songs! What is this, a Guided By Voices concert?!
Those details may all be spectres from the band’s past, but the Worcester weekend also feels suggestive of the future. In this run, I hear a lot of the heaviness of 1999 and 2000, when there’s a pervasive feeling that the magnitude of the Phish sound and experience had gotten too large to control. Some of those issues are definitely seeded within the euphoria of late 1997, and maybe these shows in particular, with their mix of excitement and, at times, excess.
Tonight’s show is the most connected to what happened in the two weeks leading up to it, as the second-song YEM dives straight into the most Denver-style jam of the entire weekend. For 15 minutes of improv (the vocal jam is tossed out in favor of a direct drop into I Didn’t Know), it’s gilded with loops and synths, flirts heavily with Crosseyed and Painless* for several minutes, builds to a euphoric peak, and then slinks back down to a stop-start jam. For anyone in the crowd who hadn’t seen a show or quickly gotten hold of a tape yet, it’s an instant primer to what Phish has been up to – it used to go like that, and now it goes like this.
However, if the second set is a callback to earlier in the tour, it’s more the Siket-ish landscapes of the first three shows, before that Denver eureka. The first half puts the focus on two songs that have quietly excelled this month – and that I’ve unfairly neglected – in Timber and Slave, sandwiched around the first Limb By Limb since its coming-of-age at The Great Went. It’s a jazzier (for stretches of Timber, of the skronk variety), more mellow 40-minute sequence in comparison to the aggro ragers of Zero and Gin earlier in the week, a Tryptophanned post-Thanksgiving digestive, too full to funk.
Or were they just saving it up for Ghost? Even here, the cowfunk bucks the tour’s trend of getting progressively slower and loopier, instead sounding like they all slugged a double espresso before counting it off. It’s absolutely manic for ten minutes, August 93 Phish covering their November 97 counterpart, before the night’s second round of stop-start breakdowns at least dims the volume, if not the number of notes. Suturing it together with Johnny B. Goode creates a Frankenstein from Denver’s strutting first-set and full-sprint second, a strange direction to take the jam they’ve been studying every night on the bus.
Even if all the signifiers of Fall 97 are present – including, sigh, a My Soul encore – it still feels slightly irregular, a sensation that will only be heightened on nights 2 and 3. But maybe the question is more about what *Fall 97* means in the first place. The Reader’s Digest version is “funk jams,” and that’s not wrong – the band admits to chasing the high of 11/17/97 the rest of the way. But a full-tour listen finds them working on so much more than just Meters mimicry, searching for new methods that run deeper than genre.
Cowfunk might be the tour’s star attraction because it’s both relatively new-to-Phish and so charismatic, but keeping the noise jam of Timber cohesive or riding the crest of Limb By Limb or adding new loop effects to the composed section of Slave contribute more subtly to the tour’s sterling reputation. It’s yet another case of the band’s addictive appeal stemming from their inability to stay still – Fall 97 isn’t just the culmination of threads that have been building since the Albany YEM (which sounds like cartoon music compared to tonight’s version), it’s already a laboratory for the next step. On that pursuit, Worcester might get a little bit over its skis, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong – its anomaly is only temporary.
* - Wild that a song they didn’t actually play all Fall – and wouldn’t play again for another two years – exerts such a heavy influence on the entire tour!
Fantastic writing.