Ahem!
The Denver Hood is a classic, building from silkspun hush to roaring primary colours by way of Trey's bravura lead guitar work. In its cloudy sonics and simple lullaby-like melodic lines this Hood prefigures the sculptural Philly version from early December, and shares DNA with several beloved 1997 jams, from the Vegas Stash to the Darien Hood, not to mention the huge Timber jam that kicked off the second set just 40 minutes prior. It's a shapely performance: the band sets out to do one difficult thing and does it, seemingly without effort.Trey is prone to what some fans cheekily call 'TreyDHD,' a tendency to try and grab all his ideas at once and squeeze them into a set or show or even a single solo, which can make for jarring discontinuities or frustration for fans looking for smooth continuity first and foremost. He's always done well with Hood, which opens out into a languorous I-V-IV space and stays there a good long time; still, in his dual role as ornamental lead and architectural rhythm player, he doesn't always arrive at the final huzzah in one piece. But Trey achieved an impressive degree of relaxed focus in late 1997, stepping back from his lead role for long stretches and letting the band's democratic improvisations take solid shape before moving into his customary topside melodic position.
In the Denver Hood Trey strikes a delicate balance: his guitar curlicues have a singsong clarity and simplicity even as they template the band's ensemble movement. All four players achieve real lightness here, particularly Page, who builds an electrifying dissonance around Trey's single-note thrusts late in the jam, only to bring the whole thing crashing joyfully down at the close. Dig Page's I-IIb pushback against Trey's glowing major thirds in the seventeenth minute, and his surefooted sidestep into cheeky blues a moment later -- Page is doing an enormous amount of work here within a 'simple' three-chord jam! But Trey has the conn here: pushing the whole band into a martial build in the fifteenth minute, filling the upper register with fog to shift rhythmic focus to Mike and Fish, ascending (over three or four minutes!) the long major chord thirdwise to provide a series of plateaus for collective gathering and upward explosion. Mike and Fish empathetically mirror Trey's combination of upper-atmospheric haze and precise rhythmic punctuation, so that his lead guitar line never seems like a solo, but rather a element of some ongoing evolutionary process, a sand castle emerging from the shore as a topographic inevitability, a principle, instead of (say) clumped bucketfuls stacking, stuck together...
Of course they close with Izabella, which isn't anticlimactic so much as much (?) of a muchness, and maybe giving away the game entirely: I mean, in those days sometimes the fifth man was James Brown, invisible onstage, but for a lot of November and December 1997 it was Jimi Hendrix, as the phrase 'upper-atmospheric haze and precise rhythmic punctuation' shoulda made clear, *duh*. A soaring solar Hood doesn't really need another tune to follow it, but if the set isn't yet spent, it makes sense to build on Hood's governing sonic principle. The Hendrix cover is just an alembic -- it purifies a key ingredient...
