“You Paid Us!!!”

11/30/97, Worcester, MA, Worcester Centrum

SET 1: Guyute, Funky Bitch, Wolfman's Brother -> Love Me, The Squirming Coil, Loving Cup

SET 2: NICU, Stash -> Free > Jam -> Piper > When the Circus Comes, Run Like an Antelope

ENCORE: Them Changes

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There’s a question that’s been itching at the back of my mind on this run through Fall 97: was Phish mad at us? In Bittersweet Motel, the band – or at least Trey – come off a little cruel, cutting off fans’ heads in photos, singing about too many dudes in the front row, and choosing unfortunate metaphors to describe the hard work of creativity. I’m not sure how much of the online criticism about their new direction made its way to the band, but as friend of the newsletter Jake Cohen recently said, Trey’s Island Tour comment that “if you wanna take off, take off” before taking Cavern into a funk jam can be read as a months-in-the-making eff-you to any disgruntled fans still complaining the next April. 

And in the midst of the raging all-nighter (all-monther?) that is Fall 97, there are occasional musical flare-ups of irritation. Maybe none more jarring than what happens in this show’s first set, in a Wolfman’s that – for its first 15 minutes or so – is a rather pleasant and groovy experience. It’s ramping up in intensity when Trey finds a sludge metal riff at 19:09 that he apparently likes very much, because he’s going to play it for the next 12 MINUTES. He’ll sing the Sanity and Esther lyrics over it, ask Toph to turn the lights off, and fiddle with his tone, but it’s otherwise unaltered, a merciless pummeling-by-guitar, as angry as anything I’ve ever heard in a Phish show.

It’s not clear what crime this corporal punishment was meant to address. Maybe some dork criticized the marathon Jim on 11/29, and the unrelenting stasis of this jam was a severe corrective to the idea that the previous night’s centerpiece had too many personalities. Maybe they’re responding to the “every jam is a funk jam now” complaint with the least danceable music possible. Or maybe it’s a genuine psychedelic experiment with minimalism at loud volume, playing the same five-note riff until time starts to fold in on itself, and simultaneously flipping the bird at anyone who ever accused Phish of “too many notes.”

It’s a jarringly aggressive interlude to what is otherwise a very cozy show, thick with that beloved Sunday show feeling. Guyute might be a dark opener, and Stash later threatens to return to that locked-groove dissonance, but like a lot of the night’s songs, it sinks into a relaxed mood instead, so comfy it doesn’t bother to end. Mellow vibes also dominate before the Wolfman’s in Funky Bitch, which lives up to its adjective in an exploratory version second only to 11/22/94 in the song’s history, and in the gentle ambient interlude providing the connective tissue between Free and Piper. 

Repeatedly returning to this especially laid-back baseline might itself be a passive-aggressive move on the part of the band. If you came to see Trey shred a Funky Bitch solo, well, he still does that between the verses, but the song doesn’t get its usual bright white light climax at the end, instead strolling off into the night. In Free, a reliable fist-pumper of 95 and 96, Trey again chooses rhythm over lead, and the 7-½ minutes of Piper aren’t that far removed structurally from the Wolfman’s perseverance, just replacing five notes with six chords. If you were a Worcester-only fan that hadn’t seen Phish since the holiday tour of ‘95 or the final show of ‘93, you might wonder where the big thunderous rock-and-roll moments had gone, outside of Loving Cup and Antelope set closers.

Then again, a Phish fan paying close attention would know that they’ve always been confrontational, in their own special way. Another Bittersweet Motel scene asks Trey and Fish (12 days after this show, I believe) to tell the story of their very first show, when their audience tried to drown them out with Michael Jackson. Trey’s response was to hold up their check for the performance and yell “YOU PAID US!!!” while they played Proud Mary for at least the second time that night. He could’ve made the same declaration over that Wolfman’s riff 14 years later, taunting anyone fleeing to the Centrum concourse for cover.

Of course, it’s always a continuum with Phish, a needle wobbling between their desire to make sure everyone has a good time and their impulse to do whatever they want. On his recent Undermine episode, Trey talks about the band’s attitude earlier in the 90s of “I am now going to play something you’ve never heard, and you’re coming on the journey whether you like it or not.” But Trey isn’t always the most reliable narrator, and their self-indulgence was usually cut with plenty of crowd service: the levity of a vacuum solo, or a gallery of different genres, or some familiar covers. They had an audience to build, after all.

Left: Phish in 1997. Right: Us.

Those concessions have slowly disappeared over the course of the mid-90s, and they’re almost completely absent by Fall 97. I wonder if that onstage combativeness might not be related to the new backstage diplomacy: When they instituted the no-analysis rule and stopped being so hard on themselves, maybe they aimed some of that antagonism outwards. The aggressions might sometimes be micro-sized: like playing My Soul three shows in a row or leaving fans with the sour taste of a Bouncin’ or Rocky Top encore. Or they could be a dozen minutes of grinding metal.

It was a smart gamble: If that lack of compromise weeded some fans out, it sunk its teeth into many more. You can’t really separate the achievements of Phish in 1997 from their occasionally obnoxious swagger; that confidence, bordering on arrogance, is what made it such a memorable tour. For fans who were willing to toss out their expectations and submit to the band’s dominance, the punishment was pleasure. They had such sights to show us, if we could only take a little pain.