[Wrote the following yesterday in a rush and can't figure out now whether I buy all of it. Consider this an obviously immodest proposal.]
[Good, observant comments on this one - have a look.]
A number of Phish fans hold the opinion that the band saw a dropoff in quality in 1998 - the touring year that produced the famous Loaded and (infamous) Dark Side of the Moon sets, the epic Lemonwheel festival (including the 'ambient jam' that is the cornerstone of the band's evolution over the subsequent two years), a strong New Year's run, several tours' worth of dance-funk variations, and the arguably-best-ever 'Island Tour.' It was a fun year without question, and the band was at the peak of its popularity and musical daring. What could possibly be wrong with such a run? Maybe 'wrong' and 'dropoff' aren't the right words. Something was (always) changing in the band's approach that year, and America's biggest touring band is worth understanding on good days and bad.
It's clear that there was a loss of precision in '98, and bandmembers have confessed to a much reduced practice schedule at that time, but the improvisations remained strong, integrating ambient textures into the quartet's fall '97 'space funk' style - itself a blend of Afro-beat minimalism, Floydian psychedelic textures, and Phish's own generously catholic American-songbook approach. (And it's not a coincidence that the band's playing entered extraordinary new territory they year they stopped playing from preordained setlists.) Trey Anastasio's batch of new songs from summer '97 and early '98 blossomed over the summer, offering up 'Piper,' 'Twist,' 'Birds of a Feather,' and the new vocal arrangement of 'Moma Dance' as improvisatory springboards. It would seem that the band was riding high all year...
...but there's the issue of the covers.
[Before we go further: Wanna know what the summer '98 funk sounded like? Sounded like this. Torrent and direct-download links near bottom of page - use the torrent if possible, direct downloads are pricey for the site's generous owner!]
Through the mid-90's Phish's virtuosity could have an irritatingly cerebral, nerdy-white-kid quality: the Broadway-D&D rock vibe of 'Gamehendge'; pranking the Deadheads by inserting Hendrix's 'Fire' into late-80's Scarlet > Fire Dead-cover diptychs; whole sets built around a ludicrous story-song about a boy and his plucky dog Harpua; onstage improvisations that played like mathematical exercises rather than earnest melodic exploration. What the (nerdy white) fans liked best was the reason most listeners stayed far away. But whether the style was to your taste or not, the quartet undeniably overflowed with talent and curiosity, both qualities very much on display in 1998: having shredded an entire Velvet Underground album at their Halloween '98 show, the lads performed Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety on two days' rehearsal for the smallest audience of the tour in Utah. The boys then dropped a Nirvana cover for the encore - and judging by the cheerfully catastrophic performance, they might've done so simply from memory.
Plus there's the small matter of the band covering 'Terrapin Station' on a couple of days' practice in August '98.
For plenty of Phishheads the covers provided moments of associative/identificatory clarity - you know where they (and you) stood, and what they (and you) meant, and could take a break from the taxing work of following lengthy unpredictable group improvisations. Rest your ears and mind, in other words. Yet it's the covers that, for me and a surprising number of other (especially older) fans, perhaps mark an unfortunate turn for the band. Not the fact that in summer and fall '98 Phish threw down a number of jokey one-off covers, but the near-universal stupidity and jokiness of the songs themselves, and the sloppiness of the performances. Consider:
- 'Running with the Devil' by Van Halen
- 'Tubthumping' by Chumbawumba
- 'Sabotage' by the Beastie Boys
- 'Getting Jiggy With It' by the Fresh Prince
- 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana
- 'Sexual Healing' by Marvin Gaye
- 'Been Caught Stealing' by Jane's Addiction
- 'Roses Are Free' by Ween
With the exception of the first in the group and a couple of other summer '98 covers ('Sweet Jane' and 'Ramble On,' both lovely), the common thread is that these aren't songs that the members of Phish grew up with, but rather songs (perhaps ironically) beloved of their young fans - the first time such a situation prevailed. The 'Terrapin,' Dark Side, and 'Baby Elephant March' covers of summer/fall 1998 would hearken back to Phish's musical roots, but fans found themselves cheering for songs that Phish might have derisively parodied in the past (as they did to Oasis's 'Champagne Supernova' and Collective Soul's 'Shine' at NYE '96 and '95, respectively). Though the Ween number would produce some classic long-form improvisations in concert (cf. Jones Beach '98 and NYE '99), the others were dimwitted modern-pop allusions, not even singalongs but laughalong songs, the band's emphasis for the first time on recollection rather than exploration. After busting out the ridiculous proto-disco Stones tune 'Emotional Rescue' in November '97 and 'Psycho Killer' two weeks later, Phish stocked their cupboard of covers with well-known crowd-pleasers largely from their own contemporaries.
It all felt like something was being lost, namely the oddity and uniqueness of Phish's place in contemporary music. If the band had been playing good modern music, that'd be one thing, but while tributes to the Beastie Boys, Ween, and Nirvana might make sense, butchering their insipid radio songs isn't the way to go about it. And if it was all just a good time for the band, a way of offering the young fans a jolt of premature nostalgia, there was no reason for the less pop-culture-connected audience members to give a damn. And they didn't.
My generation grew up on Nevermind and Ill Communication, but - not to sound too parochial here - I turned to Phish to get away from radio-rock shit, not watch 80,000 fans pump their fists to music that was aggressively lowbrow the day it was written and hadn't exactly revealed new complexity over time. And I love Fishman's adorably inept cover of 'Sexual Healing,' but Fishman tunes have always been the band's jokey-cover pretense. But hearing Trey belt out Beasties lyrics at Lemonwheel I felt bad for the man - his band came of age at a time when 'Listen up y'all it's a sabotage' passed for a generational anthem, and unlike their spiritual forerunners the Grateful Dead, Phish didn't have an assortment of brother-bands that made sense sharing a bill, didn't belong to a contemporary improvisatory/stylistic subculture with a positively oppositional aesthetic/cultural role.
In summer '98 I was forcibly reminded that the real world didn't actually get left behind when I stepped into a Phish show. I didn't want to know.
* * *
You know how it all feels? Here's how it feels.
* * *
Phish's 1998 improvisation presented challenges as well, some interesting, some frustrating. By 2000 the band's setlists would be studded with tunes like 'Gotta Jibboo,' 'First Tube,' and 'Sand' - simplistic grooves imported from Anastasio's side projects - which would end up paired with wide-open sometimes-rhythmless textural pieces like 'What's the Use,' 'My Left Toe,' and the ever-expanding 'Piper' (which often sped up until it became noisy, rapturous sludge). On the plus side, the band was by then able to stay with ideas as they emerged in improvisation, having moved decisively past their kitchen-sink early-90's approach and the stormy intensity of their mid-90's rock playing. With nothing to prove, the band could begin, simply, to sing. Which meant in part that one song would do as well as another, as long as the performances were generous and true - and which softened the group's focus a little, to the music's occasional detriment.
The 'ambient' sound that flowered in Lemonwheel's extraordinary after-midnight set and overran the notorious third set of the Vegas Halloween show had first appeared at the band's Bearsville studio sessions in May 1998 (cf. the weirdly involving Siket Disc and the widely-circulated Bearsville soundboard outtakes), and the 'Ambient Jam' notation began to appear on fan setlists in summer and fall '98, whether or not the passages in question fit the popular definition of 'ambient music.' Phish's fiercely rhythmic rock playing of the early 90's started to give way, in '98, to unmetered textures and melodies over washes of drum sound, pushing the very limits of the audience's noodle-dancing ability but nicely complementing the mindstates of those fans whose chemicals of choice came from the electronica/rave scene rather than the co-opted psychedelic Deadhead culture. Anastasio's cascading feedback-heavy guitar lines of fall '97, which had occasionally punctuated a climactic jam, became a dominant motif in the band's improvisation - check out 12/30/98 for the year's best example - and the band stepped more decisively than ever into the realm of formless 'abstract psychedelia,' rock's answer to free jazz, which marked 'Dark Star's of Dead concerts past.
In a way, this new improvisatory form was a reaction to, or perhaps correction of, the band's heady 1997 dive into 'cow funk,' which integrated Talking Heads' dense minimalist[*] polyrhythms into Phish's spasmodic rock improvisations to salutary effect. (Fans called Phish's funk playing 'permagroove' at first, but it rapidly came to resemble a less icy version of, say, Medeski Martin & Wood's New-Orleans-inspired funk style.) By late summer '98, Phish could play variations on a single slippery dance rhythm for a half-hour without stagnating - but having perfected their own peculiar dance-groove form and a uniquely atmospheric sound, you could feel the band pushing on to something new, looking for a new improvisatory end other than dancing and rhythm for (seemingly) its own sake. Summer '98 had a relaxed dance-party vibe much of the time, but Lemonwheel's climactic Ambient Set traded in dance rhythms for spacious, ruminative late-nite textures that would've been totally at home on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.[**] The band's mode of listening and song-assembly was the same as during their porno-funk excursions throughout the summer, but now that they didn't have to keep the audience jumping as in summer '97 (or guessing, as in '92), they could make music that breathed in a different way. The complex beauty of the band's late '98 ambient playing arises, it seems to me, from the jittery feeling of leaving behind something that had become safe'n'sound for band and audience alike.
Moreover, the band had discovered electronic 90's dance-pop - playing a 'disco tent' synth-raveup set at August 1997's 'Great Went' and incorporating something of techno's droning procedural logic into their late '97 and early '98 improvisations. There was a strong dose of electric Miles Davis in Phish's post-1996 music too; and Anastasio has spoken many times of his affection for My Bloody Valentine's ear-splitting indie classic Loveless, an album more respected than enjoyed I imagine, and which explored the interface between soupy indistinct electric textures and pounding dance-rock beats. In 1999 this blend of influences (along with other influences of the psychoactive chemical variety) would produce what some fans call Phish's 'millennial' sound: Anastasio started hopping on an electric keyboard or sticking entirely to guitar loops/rhythm scratches/eerie ambient noise during dance tunes, completing Phish's turn toward organic post-electronica.
Starting in 1993, Phish seemed to alternate odd-year leaps forward (1993's improvisational risks, 1995's cavernous psychedelic textures, 1997's 'cow funk,' 1999's cloudy post-electronica) with biennial consolidation and transition. (1996 is a write-off year for some fans, particularly given the availability of great '97 material; '94 has more than its share of classic shows, particularly the thrilling November run, but beyond the bluegrass material there's no readily-apparent big step forward for the band.) Phish's 1998 performances definitely had that feel, which is even stronger in retrospect: the dance stuff was less risky, tempos slower, segues more rare; the Talking Heads-like spikiness of 1997's funk flattened out - cf. the 1998 arrangement of 'Ghost,' which jettisoned the pornographic rhythms of the original in favour of a smoother midtempo rock groove; even the ambient material sometimes seemed like an aimless mirror of the by-then-traditional dancefloor style. (Consider that the rapturous Lemonwheel ambient set actually includes funk, space-rock, and tinkling Phish-jig sections in its 50-minute running time.) In 1999 and 2000 the band's ambient playing would reach total maturity[***], but its initial 1998 appearance was compelling/maddening in part because it hadn't quite found its place, and still seemed a little jarring in the band's then-current dance-music style.
Of course I'm biased. So's everyone, right? I saw several shows in 1998 and loved Lemonwheel and the April Providence visit, but had started to sour on the fan 'scene' a bit by that point, and missed the easy accessibility of '97-vintage cow-funk. The fall '98 tour closer in Worcester reached its zenith - or nadir - with a screeching, almost industrial noise jam out of the generally-pleasant 'Simple,' certainly an adventurous choice but hardly an enjoyable one. Coming as it did on the heels of a thoroughly lame guest appearance by young blues guitarist Seth Yacovone out of Vermont, 'Simple' put me off the band's shows for nearly two years. By the time I came back - 9/11/00, Great Woods - Phish had announced their hiatus, and things seemed to be winding down; the Great Woods show holds up quite well on tape[****], but the 'millennial' style seems to have proven a dead end for the band, such that even a second set that read Chalkdust > Twist > Piper > What's the Use > YEM left me bored stiff. When Phish returned in 2003 they did so with a dirtier, less enveloping sound reminiscent of (shockingly) other rock bands; and though they'd work their way around to complex ambient textures over the course of the year, the slinky, compressed, devilish atmosphere of 1997/98 Phish didn't come back with the band.
* * *
In a discussion of Phish's 1998 playing - with its increasingly spacious ambient/funk character - it's worth anachronistically mentioning the band's summer 2003 performances, which climaxed with the IT festival in northern Maine (site of Lemonwheel and the Great Went). [*****] The centerpiece of IT was the Tower Jam, an hourlong wee-hours set played from the top of the air traffic control tower at Loring Air Force Base. Alongside the after-midnight soundcheck from 24 hours earlier, the Tower Jam provides connective tissue for a history of the band that crosses the two-year hiatus, linking 1994's self-consciously weird noise passages and multipart improv structures, the wild country-shed free-rock suites of 1995, the dense polyrhythms of 1997, 1998's ambient playing, 'millennial' pre-hiatus textures, and 2003's dark knotty rock tunes. The Tower Jam's ambience differs from those of the other long textural Phish jams: it's more deliberate than the Fukuoka 'Twist' or the famous Sand > Quadrophonic Toppling from Big Cypress (NYE '99), freakier, heavier on specific sonic mimesis and discrete odd noises than the glittering melodic surfaces of 1998-99. Indeed, portions of the Tower Jam are pure noise made with musical instruments (rather than noisy music), depicting extramusical events and forces rather than evoking them. While the band played atop the tower, a team of dancers performed while suspended on the side of it, a ballet hundreds of feet above the ground for which Phish provided an improvised prog-noise score. It's the most out-there post-hiatus Phish, and while it bears little stylistic resemblance to the Lemonwheel Set IV or even Big Cypress's most heavily altered musical states, the Tower Jam is assembled from components assembled over more than a decade of collective improvisatory development.
What it lacks is funk. That's a key fact (if there is such a thing) about post-hiatus Phish: having learned important lessons about jam-construction and -evolution from their cow-funk days, the band found a way to incorporate the funk's structure into its evolving style, recasting 1998's ambient experimentation as a stylistic turn rather than a shift in method. If Phish eventually made a new kind of improvised music, the big shift occurred in 1999 and 2000, for better or worse, within a concert repertoire specifically chosen to allow new playing. (The relationship between this shift in repertoire and the decision to disband temporarily in late 2000 isn't for this essay.)
And there, at no doubt off-putting length, we have it. Whatever it is, whoever we are.
* * *
[*] Not an oxymoron: David Byrne and Brian Eno imported Afro-pop's modular construction and Latin/Caribbean criss-cross polyrhythms to produce incredibly busy sound collages, Tourettic Rube Goldberg machines for the dance floor. Phish's 1997 innovation was to apply the same logic of construction as an improvisatory principle, patiently layering sounds without an obvious lead voice so as to generate a new rhythmic/melodic baseline for expansion, so that the point of departure of a jam wasn't the original song's changes but a new, dynamically-generated but still compositionally complete song-form. 'We're jamming on minute seven of this very jam,' that sort of thing. You could dance to it, and think with it, and it was more orderly and coherent than it had a right to be; it was also something of an end in itself, a seeming terminal point for the band's improvisatory method. No wonder the band burned out a couple of years later.
[**] Think for a moment of what Phish could do with Wilco's best album, or the echoey bombast of My Morning Jacket.
[***] The show to hear is 6/14/00 Fukuoka, Japan, which contains an hourlong Twist > Ambient Jam > Walk Away > Ambient Jam > 2001 run that's probably the most achingly beautiful stretch of latter-day Phish on record. The entire Japan 2000 run, much of which circulates as soundboard recordings, is worth hearing, not least for the small club audience's quiet attentiveness and receptivity to the band's delicate onstage experimentation. There's a rote quality to much of Phish's Y2K playing, but the Japan 2000 tour is exquisite.
[****] The dreamlike 9/11/00 set II songlist masks the fact that all the segues are long live fadeouts, with each song starting up out of the sludge left behind by the previous. If this is a method, it's a limited and even predictable one; more likely it's a function of the band running out of creative steam with disquieting regularity. What's missing in those Phish2K shows is the Big Idea, the relentless forward motion, the obsessive pursuit of a complex communicative gestalt that amounted to something more than groove. There are powerful passages in that Great Woods show, and the individual playing is as fluid as ever (though reaction times have slowed somewhat), but much of it sounds more like a soundtrack to happy wandering than the painstaking art object that was Phish's earlier improv. Not to moralize, but it sounds to me like a quartet containing at least one drug addict.
[*****] If you're willing to buy live Phish recordings and want to make just a single post-hiatus purchase, go to livephish.com and buy the full IT package just for the Tower Jam and soundcheck. The colossal 40-minute version of '46 Days' and best-of-tour Rock and Roll > Seven Below > Scents > Spread it Round > Bug run provide additional links to the band's pre-hiatus practices.
