SET 1: First Tube > Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Fee, Bathtub Gin, Glide, My Soul

SET 2: Twist > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Tweezer, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Meatstick > David Bowie, Tweezer Reprise

ENCORE: You Enjoy Myself

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I’ve been writing semi-professionally about music for almost a quarter-century; closer to 30 if you count the rec.music.phish reviews that were practically my first foray into posting my thoughts online. It’s come full circle from hobby to a thing people improbably paid me for back to mostly hobby again. Along the way, I hope I’ve gotten better at it, or at least more mature. One of the things that I’ve learned, and increasingly tried to keep in mind, is that the musicians I’m writing about are real people, doing a job. Because music at its best can have such magical properties, it’s easy to forget that it’s produced through the hard work of human beings.

And if I’ve learned one thing from the last six(!) years of doing this newsletter, it’s that this shit is hard. On one hand, it’s ridiculous to compare typing on a laptop in my home to virtuosically performing for three hours in front of tens of thousands. But ever since I started the 25th anniversary publishing schedule, I’ve at least had a window into the performing cadence of what it’s like being in Phish. Doing the same thing 70ish times a year – 4 or 5 times a week during busy seasons – while staying creative and maintaining professional standards…it beats mining coal, but it ain’t easy either.

I hold Phish to a high standard, but it’s out of respect. They built one of the most remarkable American rock band careers out of taking risks, and risks aren’t risks unless they produce some flops. It’s unfair and unserious to lambast them for every show not being as good as [insert favorite show here], but it’s also boring to just credit them with putting on an entertaining performance night in and night out. In order to sufficiently praise the times where everything is working, you also have to point out when they don’t.

At the same time, I want to treat Phish with empathy. The amount of shows they played in the 90s is pretty astounding, and I didn’t even cover the busier half of the decade. If you count travel, they spent close to half the year on the road up through 1994, lowering it down to a mere quarter for the remainder. In between, they were writing songs and recording albums, practicing and planning for the next big festival or holiday surprise. The work never stopped.

Once they built up a reasonable audience by fastidiously playing everywhere that would have them, they could’ve coasted. It would be far easier to just give the people what they want, and by the mid-90s, they had a roster of songs and a bag of tricks that could have kept a pretty large portion of the fanbase coming back for decades. They could’ve played peaky-dancey major-key Tweezers and emotional build Hoods and jumped on trampolines every night until retirement or death like a jammier Jimmy Buffett, resting on reliably profitable laurels.

Instead, it was pretty much precisely when they achieved that financial security that they decided to experiment artistically, challenging themselves in both songwriting and live performance to constantly find new territory. They spent the last seven years of the 90s continuously reinventing themselves, without alienating (most of) their following – a tightrope act that only a rare caliber of artist has successfully pulled off.

But constant evolution is exhausting, and by the time the calendar flipped over to 2000, the boys were burnt out. It’s tempting to speculate about stock Behind the Music reasons for why they needed a hiatus: Artistic differences! Substance abuse! The creativity-extinguishing curse of financial success! But it’s Occam’s razor that they were just running on fumes, unable to match the furious pace of work and regeneration that they could maintain in their twenties.

So 2000 doesn’t end in catastrophe, like 2004 does – it ends with a wheeze. This tracks; in 2004, they had to stop or someone would die, while in 2000, they just really, really needed a rest. Post-Japan, the whole year feels like an all-nighter that has gone on a little too long, occasionally throwing up second winds and useful delirium, but with lower and lower frequency. It ends with a four-night run that is mostly a squib, a heavy-lidded final mile before collapsing into bed.

Which is why it’s taken me so long to get to this “grand” finale, a historically significant but distressingly hollow show. They stuff it full of Phish classics – Mike’s Groove, Gin, 2001, Tweezer, Bowie, YEM – but maybe because there’s so many big numbers present, none of them individually get the space to do something unique in their farewell performance. When they do start getting interesting, like midway through the Tweezer, they get neutralized by Trey switching to keys and peter out, a very era-appropriate problem.

The YEM encore tries a half-hearted reggae swerve near the end, but all it does is confirm the fuel light is blinking furiously. There’s nothing sloppy or bad, it just might be the most unremarkable pre-2003 show on the LivePhish app, released for the chapter-closing milestone it represents rather than the music it contains. They didn’t just leave it all on the table, they left it all on a table several months ago, and kept going.

But I feel for them, because I’m exhausted too! This year has been a slog to cover, without the annual delivery of fresh ingredients that typically keep me going. There were barely any new songs or covers, the improvisational style essentially just extended what was happening in 1999, they played mostly the same cities and venues, they skipped the summer festival and their holiday traditions. I can only write so many times about how they’re tired – this essay is at least the third time this year – before it starts to get stale, even if it’s pretty undeniably the prevailing narrative of the year.

I love this project and I’m still happy I started it – as I often tell people, I was going to have these thoughts anyway, so it’s nice to write them down somewhere, and if people want to read them that’s just icing. But I do sometimes wonder if the full immersion has been a good thing overall for my personal fandom. I absolutely get tired of listening to Phish so much, particularly while covering a mostly static tour like this one. I worry that it creeps into my writing too often, and that my takes get too cynical as the shows pile up. This time around, I’ve felt stuck covering a low ebb of Phish’s past and jealous of everyone enjoying Phish’s vibrant present; though that there even is a Phish present, never mind a spectacularly successful one, is a great problem to have. I want to listen to Page’s surprise ambient release, not this dull-ass show!

Then again, that may have been the right frame of mind to cover Phish’s 2000. After fatigue, frustration is the other buzzword that describes that year; frustration about not being able to find the next phase, about being stuck in the same old formulas, about breakthroughs and euphoric moments not coming as easily as they used to. It’s an artist’s first instinct to try to push through that resistance; for Phish, the strategy had worked for years, until it suddenly didn’t. And I think it’s kind of poetic that we both arrived at the same conclusion at the same time: we need a break.

But like Phish, I won’t be going away completely. I’ll do a little coverage of the side projects that occupied them during the hiatus, just not comprehensively; sorry, I’m not listening to every Oysterhead or Vida Blue or Pork Tornado show. I also want to break from the 25th anniversary schedule and go back – way back – to an era of Phish that’s always been a blind spot. And I can’t help but be excited to eventually cover 2.0, a stretch that I’ve always been a little scared of, the time when the Phish experiment was at its most combustible. This isn’t the end, it’s only a pause. As I try to say every time a year ends – and it ends a little early this year – thank you for riding along on this obsessive journey, for what’s now a grand total of 2,179 days. Be safe, be kind. See you soon.

SET 1: Carini, Stash, Boogie On Reggae Woman, Mellow Mood, Maze, The Moma Dance, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Heavy Things > Down with Disease -> Spock’s Brain, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Rift, Cities > Sand > Golgi Apparatus, Brian and Robert, Bold As Love

ENCORE: El Paso, Chalk Dust Torture > West L.A. Fadeaway

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The third of Fall 2000’s guest appearances is the biggest and best of the three. But if you’ve been following along, that’s an extremely low bar, and it comes at an awkward time to boot. Tonight’s surprise adds more fuel to the theory that the hiatus was a last-minute decision; I’m pretty sure a planned-out farewell would not have included a very distracting drop-in on the penultimate night. As Phish was very slowly sliding out from under the shadow of the Dead in the eyes of the mainstream, closing off their first era by jamming with one of them was as counter-productive as it was poetic.

I’m talking, of course, about Bob Weir, a guy who knows how hard it is to escape someone’s shadow. If you want to hear my full, often conflicted, thoughts on Bobby, there’s about 100 hours of audio for you to hang with during this newsletter’s hiatus*. But to summarize, he’s a man of contrasts. I think he’s just about the greatest rhythm guitarist in the history of rock and roll, but also one who developed a tin ear for tone and an unhealthy slide guitar addiction. He’s a showman whose bottomless energy kept the Dead spry through some dark eras, but he’s also a ridiculous ham. The Dead undoubtedly wouldn’t be the Dead without him, but his stewardship of their legacy in the last decade has been as frustrating artistically as it’s been successful financially.

The fact that he was a year late and second place to give Phish the Dead’s blessing fits with my mixed feelings. When Phil Lesh dropped by last year’s Shoreline run, I wrote “As the most consistently forward-thinking member of the Dead, it makes sense that Phil would be the first to recognize Phish as equals, not disciples.” In the Dead’s on-again, off-again divorce, Phil got custody of the band’s improvisational and experimental spirit, while Bob inherited the songbook – even if he didn’t write the more esteemed half of it. It’s fair to say that Phish was descended more from the first of those elements than the second, and despite the awkwardness of two bass guitars, jamming with Phil would always feel more natural.

Still, tonight’s encore mini-set is pretty good! If Phish has really been up for 100+ hours straight by this point, they pull it together enough to be professional for Grandpa Bob’s visit. And the 2000 edition of Weir hasn’t fully sunk into the somnambulant tempos and metallic treble guitar sound of today. He’s a good sport, avoiding the obvious Dead cuts and even, like Phil before him, playing along with a Phish original.

Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” might be the most adventurous choice of the bunch, given how rarely Phish plays straight country instead of its more hyper bluegrass cousin. But Trey’s solos are lovely, with a buttery tone and light touch that’s rare for the era – yet another example of how deftly he can blend Jerry’s singular sound with his own. Throw in Page’s pastel-sunset piano, and it’s the closest the song has sounded to its early 70s sweet spot since the Wall of Sound was hanging overhead.

Then there’s Chalk Dust, where Bob is, frankly, hanging on for dear life for the first several minutes, just tossing in the occasional twangy accent note. But when it hits the solo, he’s in his element, using weird chords to nudge Trey off his default routing. The result is a deliciously weird version that doesn’t hobble its usual manic pace to accommodate the elder statesman; I prefer it to the ramshackle Phil and Friends take, but that may be more of a Fishman upgrade than Weir scoring one over Lesh.

It’s so off its kilter, in fact, that it can’t find its way back to an ending before drifting into another oddball choice: “West LA Fadeaway.” As one of the late-era Dead’s sleaziest songs, it’s a good fit for Fall 2000 and Phish’s polished funk groove chops; as a Jerry-to-Bobby vocal conversion, it’s among the least distracting. The Trey-Bob interplay is more audible in the slinkier mix, and Mike gets more freedom to cosplay Phil’s busy low end without the man himself around.

All in all, it’s a successful sit-in, but a strangely routine one after the symbolic significance of the previous year, and one that was superseded by Bob’s more expansive return visit 16 years later. It also feels like a needless diversion in the middle of Phish’s last two dates for the foreseeable future, filling out a show that otherwise feels mostly perfunctory, like they’re checking off a list of songs they want to play one last time. With the limited hours remaining, for now, reestablishing their cred as the Grateful Dead’s heir apparent seems pretty unnecessary, relitigating a battle that was already won. Phish had only 48 hours left to be Phish, that should have been enough.

* - More on that tomorrow! It’s not as bad as you fear.

SET 1: Chalk Dust Torture, Guyute, Wolfman’s Brother -> Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, Limb By Limb, Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown > Beauty of My Dreams > Axilla, Horn > Possum

SET 2: Drowned -> NICU > David Bowie, Halley’s Comet -> Walk Away, Piper > Character Zero

ENCORE: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

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Here’s the thing that bothers me about that quote from Trey I included yesterday, the one about staying up all week leading up to Shoreline because “we didn’t want it to end.” What, exactly does the “it” refer to? If Trey was referring to the experience of playing music with three of his closest friends, you would expect this final run of shows to be long ones, the band making the most of every pre-curfew minute they could. But they are decidedly not, with none of them coming close to the three hours of music you can usually count on today. The fact that, if taken literally, Trey’s week of all-nighters includes two days without a full show is also a disheartening indicator that the part of being in a rock band they were pre-mourning…wasn’t the performances.

I don’t really want to speculate about what they were doing offstage that was so fun during their extended Lost Weekend; I don’t want to know. I’m more interested in how often they sound like they’re enjoying each other’s company onstage, in the two-or-so hours of nightly audio evidence we have. And the answer, at least in these first two California shows is…not much?

For all the moral flaws of Las Vegas, they certainly sounded like they were having a blast in Sin City, with all the usual signs: weird bustouts, inside jokes, silly covers, surprising segues, communicative jamming – maybe not so much the last two, unless you include Phoenix. But the dazed performance in Chula Vista possessed none of those qualities. Irvine is a relative improvement, but the occasional moment where the band seems to be genuinely enjoying each other’s company on stage just throws the rest of the workmanlike music into sharper relief.

The first bright spot occurs early, when the band navigates a modulation from Wolfman’s key to Sneaking Sally’s, a tasteful throwback to the Island Tour and one of the smoothest ->s in a segue-famine year. But the brief mid-tour ‘97 revival has mostly faded away, and a first set funk fest is off the table when Sally exits the alley without time to breathe. In fact, it’s a weirdly tight set all around, with one run of 4 songs less than 4 minutes. What is this, a Ramones concert?

There’s more time to stretch out in the second set, but not much more to say. Both Drowned and Piper are firmly in the 2000 style, jams where the band sounds like they’re at a bar party where you have to yell to be heard instead of engaging in witty repartee over a quiet dinner table. I’m sorry, I know I’ve listened to more of these shows than any reasonable person should, but it’s boring! And I find it hard to believe that they found it any more stimulating than I do, at this point in the year.

The exception in the middle is the Bowie, a surprisingly nuanced version in between the loudness wars. There’s a couple of minutes of free-floating space before the hi-hat comes in, and a smooth pullback in the middle of the jam, enabling a period of conversation instead of competition. Eerie lines from Page and Mike inspire Trey to seek out a complementary part, and even Fishman seems to be drumming melodically to match it. It’s the kind of completing each other’s sentences chemistry that used to be second nature for the band, instead of the awkward anti-silences that’s their current default.

There’s still time for one good inside joke, a Zero gradually slowing down to sludge metal levels while Trey hoarsely warbles Fast Enough For You over the top, producing a convincing impression of a dying battery. Maybe a bit on the nose given the state of the band at this point! Taken together, these are pretty slim pickings for moments where the band sounds like lifelong companions and collaborators, not just co-workers. Maybe all the touchy-feely stuff was happening offstage and out of public view. But for a band that has always let its friendship fuel its creativity, these final shows are largely stiff and formal occasions.

SET 1: The Moma Dance > It’s Ice > Bouncing Around the Room > Funky Bitch, Reba, Dog Faced Boy, Run Like an Antelope

SET 2: Rock and Roll > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Sample in a Jar, Gotta Jibboo, Bug > Harry Hood > Cavern

ENCORE: Loving Cup

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After a weekend of urgent desperation in Las Vegas and Phoenix, the start of Phish’s first “final” run doesn’t sound like a band headed for a break at all. It actually kicked off a day before this show, at a taping of the Jay Leno Tonight Show where they turned in a completely pedestrian version of “Twist” to try to squeeze a few more units out of the five-month-old Farmhouse. They look pretty dang ragged, and Trey later told Rolling Stone why:

“It was a real emotional time, but in a positive way,” Anastasio said. “I mean, the last week of Phish I honestly don’t think any of us slept at all. We just stayed up all night for, like, a week, as evidenced by our raspy version of “Twist” on Leno. But it was amazing, because no one was sleeping [because] we didn’t want it to end.”

That all-nighter (all-weeker?) daze is also audible the next night in Chula Vista, a barely two-hour show the band sleepwalks through, despite two days (mostly) off. Instead of the bustouts and inside jokes of the previous weekend, it’s a very vanilla setlist. There’s no hint of “is this the last time we play this song?” urgency either, everything is as standard as the International Prototype Kilogram. Pleasantly mellow saunters through Reba and Jibboo work fine, but the fatigue takes the edge of songs like Antelope and 2001.

It all suggests that sleep deprivation was maybe not the best strategy for going out with a bang. But they were also handicapped by where circumstances found them at the end of their first era. California has never been Phish’s strongest territory, maybe because the Dead’s shadow is a little darker there – more on that in 48 hours – or maybe just due to the geographic reality of putting the west coast at the start or end of most tours. As such, it’s an awkward place for Phish to play such momentous shows, and further evidence that they didn’t officially decide on the hiatus until very late in the game*.

It’s in Southern California where these factors seem to really weigh on them, and that LA-SD sprawl is where they’re spending forgettable evenings tonight and tomorrow. My guess is that it has something to do with the proximity to the power centers of the American entertainment industry; Phish wasn’t ever a band that had to impress the suits, but all the hobknobbing with A&R dudes and celebs probably rubs off. It leaves Chula Vista feeling a lot like the safe version of themselves they put forward doing programs like The Mark and Brian Show and Hard Rock Live back in May.

That’s a year-long full circle the band probably isn’t proud of, going from biting their tongue and following the new album promo playbook back around to…doing the same thing by cheating on their buddies Conan and Dave with their archrival. There may only be two Farmhouse songs in Chula Vista’s setlist, but the rest of it plays like a “don’t scare the normies” sampler, a Phish live album you could buy with your pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. It’s an unfortunate consequence of the abrupt hiatus decision; if a break wasn’t so urgently needed, surely they would have held on to celebrate their legacy on friendly turf, instead of compromising it in a region and industry they never cared to crack.

* - Sometime during this final week, phish.com finally posted: “Phish has completed their touring for this year. There will be no additional shows in November or December, or immediately thereafter. Additional information will be posted when the band refines their plans for the future.”

SET 1: First Tube > Wolfman’s Brother, Back on the Train, Beauty of My Dreams, Vultures, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Billy Breathes, Llama, Lawn Boy, Runaway Jim

SET 2: Roses Are Free > Piper -> Guy Forget -> When the Circus Comes > Camel Walk, Driver, David Bowie

ENCORE: Waste

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It was a real gamble – no pun intended – to schedule a show the night after the big Vegas bender. The band actually sounds surprisingly fresh though; based on the audio evidence, I’d guess they were more hungover on 9/30 than tonight. Sure, they slip back into default setlisting mode early on, and Trey’s rendition of Inlaw Josie Wales here definitely sounds like his fingers are recovering from several birthday beers. But eventually a Fall 2000 realization kicks in: we don’t know when we’ll be playing shows again, so we might as well make the most of it.

While the band didn’t offer any reason to think they were breaking up for good, there also wasn’t a finite time put on the length of the hiatus. So with the number of remaining dates fading fast, they were running out of spaces to play the final (for now) versions of some of the catalog’s midrange rarities. Hence, a bunch of songs closing 10-20 show gaps: Vultures, Billy Breathes, Llama, Runaway Jim, Roses, Waste, all of which we won’t hear from again until 2002-04.

It’s a move that spices up what could’ve been a sleepy show, particularly once they get to Llama, a much-needed jolt of the “put a plug up my ass” variety. Trey’s solo ascends into Thurston Moore territory, inspiring a round of mid-song band introductions and crowd instructions. It’s that zany, crazed energy from the end of the previous show, mixed with the sex/violence undertones of Trey’s dream as he tells audience members to slap themselves, slap each other, then get naked and “make love.”

But it’s after the break that they cross off their biggest bucket list item, finally handing an official debut to one of their most obscure songs: Guy Forget. Though it’s one of only two originals debuted over the course of the year, Guy Forget is a very old Phish song, a soundcheck favorite in the spirit of Dog Log or Shaggy Dog and a lyric without any set musical backing, like Kung or Catapult. But it’s even slighter than those juvenilia, just a cheery mantra of “I never met a man that I could not forget except for…Guy Forget!” over the jam of their choice. Hilariously, this composition* took five people to write, and it has, at times, made it into the lede of the tennis player’s Wikipedia entry.

Tonight’s premiere manages to freshen up one of the tour’s most tired songs, Piper, and it does a bang-up job, emerging as the jam loosens up from the initial build and giving another frantic jam some much needed levity. On the video (included as a bonus with the Live in Vegas DVD), they’re clearly cracking each other up with the deep pulls, and it’s very sweet – because they’re running out of opportunities to crack inside jokes with each other too. I swear it even upgrades the inevitable Trey keys segment, which he spends tapping out a playful melody on what sounds like synthesized wood blocks – the singularity point of Trey’s mini-kit and mini-keys distractions.

It’s a welcome dose of unadulterated Phish goofiness in the era’s final week, even if it sort of foreshadows similar maneuvers in the bizarre final set at Coventry. A normal band on the brink of a pause might get lost in its own navel, buckling under the weight of trying to pay self-tribute to its own history over the last run of shows. To be fair, maybe that’s what Phish was doing here too; it’s just that for them, summing up their musical contributions at the (temporary) finish line means finally unveiling the pun earworm about the Moroccan tennis player with the funny name.

* - As the phish.net song history extensively delineates, the “Will I dance on grave?” lines featured here were from a separate song entirely, though they do fit with Guy Forget’s spirit of glorious idiocy.