As several members of the band put it in the 'IT' documentary, Summer 2003 was a real test for Phish: to see what remained of the group that could be sustained and built upon in the years ahead. The IT festival itself, as they saw it, was the coming-out party for a whole new version of the band. They'd learned to rock, and to stay sober (for the moment), and each member of the group was playing with a new sound unlike any he'd explored yet. The group's overall sound was newly balanced, with chunkier guitar, much more pointed bass, heavier drums, and much more complex keyboard work - in other words, they sounded more like a rock band that could play funk, jazz, and bluegrass, and less like the unnameable hybrid group they'd been for most of their twenty years.
And in 2003 you could hear the full weight of those accumulated years. The group was audibly eager to get right to its collective improvisations, but seemingly from outside the songs, even of the band itself: you could tell they wanted to start tearing things up a little bit. That meant killing some sacred cows and improvising some new formulae: suddenly 'Harry Hood' wasn't the sacred feel-good thirteen minutes of years past, doubling in length and getting wonderfully ugly; 'Runaway Jim' wasn't just a bombastic country-rock vehicle for an ostentatious guitarist; the sorta-Latin dissonant nightmare 'Stash' could become an outright major-chord rocker; 'Tweezer' could rediscover its roots as a bluesy rock riff and shake off the plodding tempi of its later years; 'Ghost' would come to resemble not the porno-funk of Fall '97 but the intricate melodic interplay of 'Bathtub Gin.' Songs ballooned to a half-hour in length all over the setlist; big jams started right off, closed first sets, hid in encores. Song placement seemed arbitrary or even willfully perverse. (This tradition continued until the end of 'Phish 2.0': At one of the 2004 Brooklyn shows the band finished a roaring 'Character Zero' about an hour in to the first set, a song that had closed dozens of sets in its short existence, a song written explicitly for that purpose - and only then did they kick in 'Tweezer,' the monster improv vehicle that formed the backbone of their most memorable mid-period second sets Back in the Day.)
Yet for the first time in years the lads were also clearly practicing like they used to - Trey Anastasio's famously complex written compositions were performed without flaws, but fluidly, a feeling of discovery and appreciation flowing between band and audience, the players taking chances with improvisations inside the songs. Their sense of whimsy was stronger in 2003 then it had been since the 'Dark Side of the Moon' set in Fall '98 (arguably the peak of the band's virtuosity). In their early days they'd been a comic-prog-rock band with a theatrical flair and seemingly limitless technical ability - too manic for many people's tastes, and understandably so. But the four members of Phish had aged well: their tastes had strengthened. (At the end of their 20+ year run they were still playing David Byrne's 'Cities' - but the Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage,' another artifact of 1998's top-of-the-world jokiness, had been taken out behind the barn and put to rest.)
The first show of Summer '03 opened with a run of classics no less than eight years old: 'Stash' (1990), 'Sample in a Jar' (1993), and 'Billy Breathes' (1995); in chronological terms that's like the post-Let It Be Beatles reuniting to play a show consisting solely of songs they wrote with Pete Best. The last show of Summer '03, the IT festival in northern Maine, saw the following set on its first night:
8/2/03 II: Rock and Roll → Seven Below → Scents and Subtle Sounds → Spread It Round, Bug
The opener is a Velvet Underground tune, the closer a staple of Phish's 1999 shows; the middle three tunes had debuted only a few weeks before, and 'Spread It Round' was getting a late-second-set airing at the biggest show of the year in its second public performance. Along with the unannounced 2am 'Tower Jam' (an hourlong improvisation played from the top of an aircraft control tower), the first night second set was the highlight of the show. New sound, new songs, new attitude: a new band, it seemed. (And through June 2004 you could easily have made the argument that Phish was playing on par with its best pre-hiatus work, the canonically intense Fall '97 and 1998 tours.)
With vanishingly few exceptions, Phish didn't fail to put on a good show, night after night. Unlike their comparatively genre-bound spiritual ancestors the Grateful Dead, Phish could swing effortlessly from straight-ahead jazz standards to Floydian soundscapes to wailing funk nastiness in the style of early-70's electric Miles; not counting several hundred one-time songs (mainly covers, including the entirety of the White Album, Loaded, Quadrophenia, and Remain in Light), the band drew throughout its career on a songbook of four hundred tunes; at the height of their power and popularity in 1998, the band pulled out 238 different songs in a single year of touring, the equivalent of performing a new double-album in concert every month. (For comparison: the Beatles wrote and released a total of 214 songs in their entire career.)
Moreover, at their best Phish could do this code-switching naturally, fluently: on days like 11/22/97 (get the mp3's) or 2/28/03 the band could play a half-dozen different styles of music in half an hour as if they were born to 'em. Just listen to the second set of that Hampton show! 'Halley's Comet' flows from dark midtempo rock to clav-driven wah-wah funk, through an ambient interlude, and into the sort of downtempo 'space rock' instrumental you might find on a latter-day Flaming Lips album, before fading out to make room for an explosive version of 'Tweezer' - which is after all nothing more than a single riff with some dumb lyrics to fill the time, and which morphs from bar band funk-rock into the crisp sexmachine licks of 'Black-Eyed Katy.' The music owes as much to the white-boy cooptations of 70's jazz-rock as it does to the rock/R&B/funk sounds that preceded the emergence of that benighted genre, but Phish grew up on Zeppelin's hard rock, the minimalist nerd-pop of Talking Heads, and the Dead's Americana too - and their catholic approach to their music in 1997 reflected their diverse stylistic and generic heritage. Watch how the genially schizophrenic 'Run Like an Antelope,' with its goofy frolicking-carnival-animals opening and island-bounce coda, nonetheless makes sense on the heels of 'Piper''s life-is-a-highway backstretch and drawing room closing. And listen for the moment a little after the climax of 'Katy,' around 5:13 in, when Anastasio suddenly starts fanning that high E-string, putting an authoritative, almost martial stamp on his bluesy solo. (Plus check out the usually-restrained Page McConnell beating the hell out of his keyboard four measures later.)
It's all of a piece. At their best, Phish played the sort of music only Phish could play - not just in terms of precise technique but in their telepathic improvisation and command of an enormous range of textures to be blended without regard to commercial expectations or genre rules.
Now fast-forward back to 2003: it's like that, but louder, chunkier, more aggressive, more complex (the entire band now playing with the polychromatic intricacy of Anastasio at his peak). The pop songs were more accessible, the rock tunes got nastier (check out the band's last two studio albums for evidence of their latter-day rock pedigree, culminating in the eerie, ballsy 'A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing'). The band had lost a step in terms of precision, though compared to their sloppy nadir in 2000 they sounded like the London Symphony. But they more than made up for the technical limitations of middle age with an improvisational ease and patience that illuminated their back catalogue and brought a batch of strong new tunes into the fold. It was a fully integrated sound - check out the 12/2/03 (20th anniversary) 'Piper,' with its slow slide from that song's usual loud-n-proud rock into a dirtier, busier version of the band's late-90's 'cow funk' sound, then down to a weirdly-textured disco rock jam and out through one of their patented 'Pink Floyd if anyone in that band was capable of feeling pleasure' soundscapes. Listen, too, to the 18-minute 'Rock and Roll' cover that's the show's second-set highlight, which indulges nine minutes of Live Fast, Die Young bombast before settling into a spacey, naughty uptempo freakout with its tonal roots in barroom blues and a melodic heritage stretching back to early jazz fusion (yeah, it's as messy as this description - but perfect).
Or turn to the 7/26/03 Waves/Tweezer/NICU triptych, which showcases the band's ability to integrate textures and melodies across multiple tunes and collectively structure improvisations (check out the middle of that 'Tweezer') - along with its willingness to follow a stray rhythmic impulse, as an improvised uptempo bridge out of 'Tweezer' turns into what passes for ska at a Phish concert. (The whole show is worth the purchase - the Big Improv of set II caps a songwriterly first set that's all about the old stuff, and gives a taste for the band's compositional sensibilities...All that and a relatively low-key 21-minute 'Piper.' Overall, 7/26 offers as much bang for your buck as any 2003 show, and is a good starting point for the maybe six people on earth interested in exploring late-period Phish at this point.)
The point being: this is a band that (as far as I'm concerned) peaked on a Fall 1997 tour that was all about dark, complexly polyrhythmic improvisation and collective textural exploration; sustained that peak with few missteps through a loose-limbed 1998; completed its origin story on NYE '99 with a canonical seven-hour single set in the Everglades; struggled to reinvent itself for nearly five difficult years, completing one 18-month hiatus and finally requiring a full five years off. And yet you can listen to the Summer 2003 shows and hear music that would be the envy of any so-called 'jam band' of the last 15 years or so - a wide-ranging original rock songbook coloured by electronic dance and ambient music, New Orleans funk and New York acid jazz, the effortless ongoing improvisation of bluegrass and the unironic bombast and infectious joy of (yep) Broadway musicals. There were nights in 2003 and 2004 when Phish could play for two full hours at the intensity that used to characterize the very peaks of their 1993-1997 music. It lacked the laughing virtuosity of August '93, the fury of late '94, the sense of possibility of December '95, and the thrilling lockstep polyrhythms of '97-98. But Phish's late music went places the band could never have imagined even five years before (we'll see where they go in 2009).
They're middle-aged men now and they play like it, and that's a compliment.
hi wax,
your written output is disarming. i'm not sure anyone could possibly keep up with your blog, unless they were being paid :)
you're spot on some of the time (that summation of eras in the last paragraph is really nice), but i'm having a hard go at this 2003 stuff. i did most of the 2000 tour (last time around the country for that band), and saw a handful of shows in 2003. NOTHING i saw in '03 felt anywhere near as inventive or "pushing" as music i heard say, 15 or 16 years ago. gone was the playful darkness of 2000, which seemed to have the band, previously poised on the brink of mental and spiritual collapse in '99, already fallen over the lip and playing from down in the trench, down in that darkness. it felt ok, tho, as if they were going to milk that darkness for a while, see if it bore fruit. and it did! witness the best moment from the 2000 tours, the "dog log" from blossum. caustic, CNC-machined tightness, swinging like a cybernetic marley. an old gem that was dusted off, segued into, and blown apart. it's the perfect song to sum up that era.
the 2003 shows felt rote, forced, and full of the mindless 20 minute ambience that didn't evoke eno or fripp but rather the inerpellations of countless bad reviews targeting the "wankery" and "noodledom."
guess i'm a little worried about these shows coming up, and tho i've secured a place at the fox (first theatre show in 15 years?), i'm hoping the playing will resemble that push, that hunger. 2003 didn't feel hungry, it felt full, as in bloated, tired, all those elephant jokes come true.
Posted by: kevin are hollo | 04 February 2009 at 04:25 PM