You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)

9/24/99, Austin, TX, South Park Meadows

SET 1: First Tube > Punch You in the Eye, Farmhouse, Water in the Sky, The Moma Dance, Down with Disease, Roggae, Back on the Train, Guyute, Loving Cup

SET 2: Peaches en Regalia > Possum, Wolfman's Brother -> The Lizards, Sand -> Misty Mountain Hop

ENCORE: Boogie On Reggae Woman > Chalk Dust Torture

Listen

A few days ago I finally received a long-awaited preorder in my mailbox: Bob Dylan’s The 1974 Live Recordings box set*. The release includes 27 compact discs of soundboard recordings from Dylan’s famous reunion tour with The Band, a level of completism that even I, the guy with the exhaustive sequential listening project newsletter, hesitated over. But it was reasonably priced and announced when I was flush with birthday gift cards, so I pulled the trigger. 

I did so despite knowing about one potential flaw of the set: largely invariant setlists. Thanks to reading along with Ray Padgett’s date-by-date tour coverage earlier this year, I was well aware of this fact and yet mostly unbothered. I’m quick to complain about Phish getting stuck in repetitive setlist choices – and I’m going to do it again in a few paragraphs – but Dylan is different. I’m not particularly looking forward to hearing 20-some versions of “Rainy Day Women,” but hearing how Dylan subtly, slowly iterates on a mostly-consistent set is just as exciting to me as tracking the more obvious variability of a Phish or Dead tour. 

This pleasure was something I only recently discovered. In the last few years, I’ve found Dylan to be the perfect counterbalance to listening to an unhealthy amount of Phish; he manages to hit my musical pleasure center but from an angle different enough to not feel redundant. I had been listening to the high points of Dylan for decades, but didn’t go fully down the wormhole until Ray’s newsletter and the Jokermen gave me the fateful shove. Suddenly, I had opinions on which version of “When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky” is superior and whether the remixed Time Out of Mind improved upon or detracted from Daniel Lanois’ original production.

For the most part, Dylan isn’t jammy per se; there aren’t any 25-minute Type II Watchtowers to be found in the Never-Ending Tour. But his live approach is still ever-changing, it’s just less focused on improvisation than revision. Sometimes this is visible from night-to-night; last fall, I saw two shows in four days on his Rough & Rowdy Ways tour, and despite sharing 15 songs, there were often noticeable differences in the performances and arrangements. And sometimes it takes place over geological time – this summer, he’s been trying out new verses in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” a song he has been playing for nearly 60 years. 

Dialing in on these sometimes-small, sometimes-massive differences can be immensely satisfying, even when the setlist remains as static as it has for the last four years**. I knew exactly what was coming when I saw him in Tinley Park this month – well, except for that breathtaking “It Ain’t Me, Babe” bustout – but it was still a thrill to see it unfold, his band perpetually on its tiptoes in case Bob threw in a sudden phrasing change or tempo shift. It’s inspiring to see a man whose work is never done, who will consider his music unfinished until the moment he dies, very likely on a stage somewhere.

Which finally brings me back around to Phish in Fall 1999, one of those inflection points where the band should be in an electrifying state of flux. Instead, we are starting to get setlist repetitions that, while not quite 2020s Dylanesque, are certainly on the extreme end for Phish. In the first dozen shows of this tour, we have now tallied six First Tubes, closely followed by five appearances for Farmhouse, Guyute, Chalk Dust Torture, and Sand. The latter two even get the rare back-to-back calls, though with 620 miles separating Las Cruces and Austin, I’ll allow it. 

It’s not that unusual for Phish to get stuck in a setlist rut during times of transition; Fall 1997 was another time when several songs got pushed in heavy rotation. But the material Phish is repeating this tour isn’t all new songs – Guyute has been around for five years, Chalkdust for eight – and consists mostly of arrangements that are pretty well settled. They’ve got Farmhouse down pat, Guyute and First Tube are fully-scripted, Chalkdust hasn’t recaptured its Camden glory. Only Sand shows signs of continual tinkering, with various tempos tried out to see which fits its second owner best. 

This is, admittedly, a Me Problem, an artifact of listening to the entire tour. Dropping in on just this show in 1999 would give you an excellent primer on The State of Phish, and you’d likely be hearing many of these songs more favorably with fresh ears. “Sand is the shit, dude,” a guy announces emphatically on the tape between set two and the encore, and I can’t disagree – this 11-minute version seems almost cruelly abridged by an admittedly nifty drop into Misty Mountain Hop. The night’s centerpiece, a sprawling Wolfman’s, uses a lot of the tour’s familiar jamming tricks in its loopy wall-of-sound, ambient coda, and squeaky-toy keyboards. But if you hadn’t seen them in the 14 months since they last visited Austin, that would sound like a pretty big leap forward.

It’s misguided to apply the same set of standards to two very different artists, but it’s shows like these that emphasize how the rules for appreciating Dylan and Phish are very different. That’s why they complement each other so well when I’m deep into a Phish tour – by contrast, it feels psychotic to try to listen to the Dead as a break from Phish shows. And dang it, it’s just cool that two artists who have spent their lifetimes slowly sculpting their musical legacy through thousands upon thousands of shows can find new avenues in such different ways. Both Phish and Dylan are wells that I’ll never reach the bottom of, no matter how closely I listen, and I love that they’re parallel but separate.

* - I prewrote this lede and jinxed myself; my delivery was delayed until early October, argh. But everything I wrote still holds true.

** - The online Dylan community flipped its shit when he started this summer’s Outlaw Music Festival with a fully-revamped setlist, then almost completely overhauled it again for the second night. He then played that second night’s setlist with only slight variations for the rest of the summer.