Well, here we are at the end of Summer Tour '09 Leg One. Honestly, I'd figured when I started listening at Hampton that I'd get bored and give up within a few shows, but this has been legitimately interesting, both from a musical perspective and an historical one, and I'm hoping to make it through the rest of '09 at least before this year's summer tour kicks off and I get inundated by listening to Phish music that hasn't actually happened yet. If anything, this listening project has made it clear to me for the first time exactly how fucking much Phish there is out there to listen to, and it's fun to imagine going through the '10 tours next, and then '11 and '12, and then maybe going through all of 2.0, and a bunch of the archival LivePhish releases that I haven't heard yet. Then, once I've exhausted all of the soundboards I have, I could dive into The Spreadsheet and start listening to some of the more well-known runs of Phish (summer '94, fall '97, etc.) in their entirety for the first time...
Even listening at the rate I've been listening lately (and I think I'm going to have to back off a bit from that as I am getting a bit burnt out and wanting to listen to other music more often), we're talking years and years of entirely new music, and that's not even counting the times I could skim back over my show notes and say "Aha! I really would like to hear that Hampton "Tweezer" again!" This shit is huge, guys. And it appears I'm just getting started.
Speaking of beginnings, here's where the boys' first leg of their reunion tour ends. Alpine II, judged by many to be one of the best if not the best of the leg, though to me it's probably on par with Deer Creek and a few notches below Camden. Here's why!
I love "Brother," and having here as the opener is excellent. It's not a particularly unique or noteworthy reading, but it's "Brother," and it's awesome. The "Wolfman's" that follows is straightforward and surprisingly unfunky. Trey unloads a lot of typical guitar-god shredding, and we move on. Thankfully, someone apparently requested "Funky Bitch," because Page and Mike really jump on the funk here. Page makes this version, and I love it. There's a nice segue into "Divided Sky," but it's another of those momentum-killing early-first-set "Divided Sky"s that I love to bitch about. Bitch bitch (funky) bitch. This version does include a rather extended "jam" section at the end, featuring a brief bit of Treynnihilation that sounds almost like '93 or '94 instead of '09. "Joy" is a terrible follow-up to "Divided Sky," but it's a good song as long as its not overplayed...so I guess I'm ambivalent about its appearance here. You can pretty much guess at the content of the middle section of this song-stuffed first set by looking at the setlist, but things start to get interesting again with a brief but gorgeous "TMWSIY" > "Avenu Malkenu" > "TMWSIY" sandwich...aaaand then there's "TTE" to close out the set. Almost like a "really old song/really new song" thing going on there at the end. Overall, the first set is one of those "Let's see how many songs we can fit into 80 minutes" sets, and as a result, the flow suffers quite a bit. Nothing really careens around outside of its usual structure, and so the result is a set that's hardly nothing to be ashamed of from a technical standpoint but hardly anything to be excited about from a listener's standpoint.
The second set, on the other hand, makes up quite a bit for the shortcomings of the first. We open with "Crosseyed and Painless," another of my favorite Phish covers and one that often leads to deep space. This particular "Crosseyed" follows the now-blueprint of some of the better jams of this leg: Type I soloing from Trey all the way until the final 3-4 minutes of the song, when there's a sudden left turn into a spacey-ambienty sort of place, followed by a brilliant segue. The requisite spaciness at the end of the "Crosseyed" jam is extra abstract, featuring a lot of droning and arrhythmic chording, but, like many of these jams so far in 3.0, not featuring any overall theme or momentum or coherent structure. To me, this is the difference between these early 3.0 space jams and ones like the '11 Gorge "Rock and Roll": whereas that jam lasts nearly 20 minutes and moves through a number of clearly stated ideas while still succeeding in being abstract and at times ambient, these earlier jams don't have that trajectory, so while they're fun to listen to, they're fun for about 2-3 minutes. Then the novelty wears off and you're waiting for the next song to begin. Fortunately, the band seems to realize this (unlike in some of the worse 2.0 jams), and right when these jams are starting to fizzle, they often transition into a new song. That happens here, with a beautiful segue into "Disease."
"Disease" follows the same pattern as "Crosseyed": it rides on Trey's powerful soloing for 11 minutes of its 13 minute length, then turns a sudden corner and spends a few minutes almost reprising the space jam at the end of "Crosseyed." It's neat to see Phish doing such abstract improvisation this early in their return, but at this point I'm also feeling a bit like "Yeah, we get it. Can you do something else now, please?". Though I imagine if I weren't listening to all of these shows back-to-back-to-back over the course of a few weeks I might feel differently. Anyway, Mike and Page finish off "Disease," Mike with that extra-sticky swamp bass and Page with some organ that recalls Zep's "No Quarter." Then we slam into a standard reading of "Bug," which turns into a "Piper" which, for my money, is the best jam of the second half of this leg (if not of the leg in its entirety).
The "Piper" jam is really what elevates this show from good to great. Everything else that comes out of this show we've already heard before, and often in more inspired incarnations. But this is new, and awesome. The jam almost immediately moves into space-funk territory, with Trey's Story of a Ghost-style strumming overlaying a driving beat from Fish. After a bit, Page starts putting some very low organ notes underneath this template, raising the Sinister Level from 0 to about 75. Things get more and more dissonant, tonally and otherwise, until the wheels come off completely in the most beautiful way possible. This "Piper" sounds like the breakthrough that the band repeatedly wasn't reaching in all those previous space jams that sputtered out at the 3-4 minute mark for the last few weeks. This is a great note to end the tour on because it feels like a sonic breakthrough...plus, it's just a damn great jam that's worth a few relistens.
The rest of the show, honestly, is just filler, albeit strong filler. There's a patient, building "Slave" in the vein of many of the "Hood"s we've heard lately, a proto-plinko "Boogie On," and the tour closing "Frankenstein," with a lot of extra Wall of Noise, which actually makes this one of my favorite versions. But it's that "Piper" that really matters, that really makes me excited for what's going to happen in leg two.
But not so excited that I'm going to listen right now. There's other music in the world, folks!
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