Phish Destroys America: Fall 1997
November 20th, 2007
These are bittersweet days for the nostalgic Phish fan. The tenth anniversary of the legendary Fall tour of 1997 is bringing a few things into sharp relief: how lost we are with Trey in rehab and Mike in hiding, how we still haven’t gotten over Coventry, and how embarrassed we still are by just how much we love this band. Mike was right: they had another 21 years in them, easily. That’s the bitter part.
And the sweet part? As always, the music. I’ve been embroiled in a fiendish listening orgy, making my way through the tour set by set, often dropping everything I was doing to stand in awe of the continuously developing sound and earth-shaking improvisation. Since they first graduated to arenas in 1994, Phish had perfected its tension-and-release jamming for big venues, but it wasn’t until the low-pressure European tour of 1997 that they discovered new spaces and rhythms in the music — a style that came to be known variously as cow funk, intergalactic space funk, and porno funk. Whatever you call it, it was groovy and psychedelic and very, very tasty. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!
At the time, that magnificent noise, sometimes driving, rising, sometimes standing still in imperceptibly morphing waves, sounded like the future to me: this was the mothership. Now it comes heavy with nostalgia for a season when I was setting off on a road trip from the Deep South to New York City with a new haircut and a brand-new girlfriend, a promising writer with a funny name and an even funnier sensibility. I met my future Schwiegereltern, saw movies that never made it to Mississippi, and crashed the Mayflower Hotel with Andy Gadiel’s crew for an epic holiday run at the Garden — only the first of four memorable New Year’s Eves I spent with Phish. Ten years later, the band is gone but the girl’s still with me.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be listening to a lot more Fall 97, and I doubt I’ll be able to resist posting about it again. For now, here are a few tunes from the beginning of the tour, sorted by ascending dankness: Black-Eyed Katy is friendly enough, but anyone except the hettiest brahs might get hurt listening to Tweezer and Run Like an Antelope. (These are all audience recordings, which accounts for the somewhat muffled quality. Just turn it up. If you dig any of this, I highly recommend Live Phish 11, the official release of 11/17/97 Denver.)
From 11/13/97 Las Vegas, Black-Eyed Katy, a new song that defined the tour and later, with added lyrics, became The Moma Dance.
[audio:Phish-BlackEyedKaty-971113.mp3]
Gumbo from 11/14/97 Salt Lake City
[audio:Phish-Gumbo-971114.mp3]
Timber Ho! from 11/16/97 Denver
[audio:Phish-TimberHo.mp3]
The half-hour Tweezer that opened 11/17/97 Denver, and a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ Fire. Again, you can get this in soundboard quality on Live Phish 11.
[audio:Phish-Fire-971117.mp3]
[audio:Phish-Tweezer-971117.mp3]
Also Sprach Zarathustra and Run Like An Antelope from 11/19/97 Champaign
[audio:Phish-AlsoSprachZarathustra-971119.mp3]
[audio:Phish-Antelope-971119.mp3]
- More from This Month in Phish History
- Download every show from Fall 1997
- Setlists from the tour so far after the jump.
Down By the River
July 7th, 2007
Has it really been ten years? The plan was to post a little piece about the two shows a bald version of myself saw Phish play at the SFX Centre in Dublin in June of ‘97, notable for the 13 new songs they tried out on the tiny, Guinness-drunk crowd (Ghost, Twist, Velvet Sea, and Piper among them.) You could tell the band felt there was little at stake, which led to the kind of relaxed excursions that would blossom into full-fledged intergalactic space funk by the time they returned to the U.S. for a now-legendary Fall tour. But we already missed the anniversary by a few weeks, and it turns out that my audience recordings, stashed in a back corner of the closet, haven’t aged all that well.
So instead, here’s a tasty old chestnut I came across digging for the Dublin tapes, unavailable on YouTube until today: the first time Phish shared the stage with Neil Young, during the Farm Aid broadcast in 1998. (They would play together again at Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit.) Willie Nelson, Paul Schaffer, and four unidentified Native Americans joined for the big finale. The setlist:
10/3/98, New World Music Theater, Tinley Park, IL
Birds of Feather, Farmhouse, Moma Dance, Runaway Jim -> Arc* -> Down By the River*, Moonlight in Vermont*, Will the Circle Be Unbroken*, Amazing Grace*, Uncloudy Day*
You can download the set from etree, and there is a nicely mastered DVD going around the torrent networks, too. Here’s the centerpiece, a twenty-minute Down By the River featuring Pepe Le Pew Anastasio and Neil playing Trey’s backup Languedoc. In the immortal words of the CMT commentator, “That was, uh, quite a jam.”
Update: I uploaded the rest of the set to YouTube. Follow the links in the setlist to watch, or head straight for the playlist.
