Heavily Fortified

177 White Plains Road
Tarrytown, New York

Crusing the grid, discovering pathways, and enjoying the main space... we will rock and roll and like it... we will descend into the neon depths of the perfect underworld and like it... we will trip blissfully up the stairs to the blurry edges of a cir cus and like it... we will dance a loopy dance and like it... we will don utility belts and like it...

Planning ahead, we took off much earlier for tonight's show than yesterday's, and - for the most part - cruised quickly into a mellow lot scene. The PNC Bank Arts Center is suited perfectly for a Phish lot scene. The main lot is divided in two by a spacio us field. Flanking the field are two main drives which, once the lot is full, are closed off, providing parallel Shakedown Streets. Just off of each of these drives are dozens of channels, which provide for cool avenues and sidestreets, where the more ske tchy and shady elements of the business district can retire to to complete their transactions. The pre-show scene was mostly unhindered by cops (who were out again in droves after the show, shining their flashlights in peeps' faces and generally doing the ir darndest to get in the way).

Two friends of mine got me down to the front section for the show. By the time the band came on, people had poured out of the rows like water and into the aisles. I found myself about three rows back, directly in front of Trey. This provided an extremely interesting twist for the more boring tunes -- like the double-bummer Funky Bitch, Wilson opener. Each was made more interesting by watching the interactions between band members. The Trey-led metal section in Wilson was made much coo ler by being able to see the way Fish visibly reacted to the attack, the way he danced with his kit. By the end of Wilson, Trey had settled down and was ready to channel his excited kid energy.

The Limb By Limb was familiar but wonderful -- in a weird kind of way, much like this past week of tour. I've been on home territory, which is - duh - familiar. I've done all this before, been to these venues, but it's somehow more refined this tim e around. There aren't any real surprises in the traveling aspect of it, but I can watch the sides of the road more instead of worrying about which exit to get off at. The Limb By Limb was like that. The band played the song, went out in a few plac es, but mostly just did it damn well.

Towards the beginning of Drowned, always a treat to hear, Trey stepped in front of his monitor line and, well, wanked. This was fun to watch from up front: watching a guy essentially moving his hands a matter of centimeters and hearing it reflect on the gigantic amphitheater P.A.. The second Trey stepped back to his spot by the keyboard, looking at Fish and Mike, the jam dropped into something beyond the song, and moved through a variety of sections - ranging from clipped funk to all out balls-to-th e-wall rock - before dropping into a barn-burning rendition of Rock and Roll.

The second set was structured similarly to the tour opener in Nashville on the 22nd -- the first half of the set was comprised of deep, heavy jamming while the second half was filled with fun tunes. This seems to be an ongoing battle within Phish, a certa in kind of schizophrenic tension that is gnawing somewhere near the core of their existence. In the early days, Phish mixed their serious composition with their playful sense of humor -- witness Dinner and a Movie or just about anything else of "Junta". In more recent years, the seriousness has taken on a life of its own.

Now, the two elements exist as a parallel -- things are rarely funny and serious simultaneously anymore, which is really too bad. Zappa asked "does humor belong in music?" Of course. More pertinently, one might rephrase the question: "does humor belong in 'serious' music?" The answer is a firm "yes". Just like a person needs to have a sense of humor, more as a safety mechanism than anything else, to function in the world, things do need to have a sense of balance. With older Phish, the balance seemed to be contained neatly within each tune. Recently, the balance has played out in more obvious and violently divisible ways -- both sides enjoyable.

The Birds opener went far quickly, evoking memories of the multi-sectioned version from the first night of Deer Creek last summer (7/25). The jam jumped gloriously through sections before landing in a big, major groove which led into the band's latest spontaneous arrangement of Catapult -- check out 7/18/99, 7/24/99, and 12/31/99. This one, now with Page added to the vocal mix, may have been the strongest yet, both in terms of actual delivery and what the band did with the jam afterwards, winding into a stately fading progression, during which Trey introduced the keyboard loop that runs through Heavy Things.

After a one-beat pause, the band launched into their would-be hit single. During the proceeding jam, Trey introduced a darker mutation on the Heavy Things loop, which he let run through the course of the song. "They turned Heavy Things into a weapon," my friend Jaimee enthused. "It was like being smothered by your own teddy bear!" That's about right. The dark loop permeated the tune, giving Trey another pole to wrap his solo around.

Just as the band rotated around the loop in Heavy Things, they rotated around (and gravitated towards) the groove in Sand, which was absolutely monstrous. While the Nashville version got far out from the song's rhythmic core, tonight's version held very true to it, with the bulk of the jam being comprised of abstract tonal explorations on top of it, mostly by Trey (on keys and guitar) and Page. In places, the washes threatened to overpower the pulse behind it. In those places, the jam was incredible. The band returned to the main theme for a quick reprise before ending the song quickly.

Meatstick, the first version played in the United States since Big Cypress, was chockfull of fun and games -- the obvious dance, banter, stage divers, improvised lyrics about the crew, and a Japanese translation. Trey's happy freestyling this evening (in Meatstick and Cities) was much more effective than his attempt at Roseland. Perhaps soon he'll be able to get through a whole improvised verse.

Both the segue from Meatstick into Cities and from Cities into Walk Away were tight in very different ways. For the former, Trey signaled to Fish and the song turned into Cities on a beat. In the latter, Trey initiated the transition by playing a couple of rhythm hits from the song. On the downbeat, the entire band modulated into the intro of the 1970s nugget. This transition brings to light something that is extremely easy to forget, especially in this day and age of nearly unconscious grooving: that Phish are amazingly good at listening to each other.

In 1992 and 1993, when the band first discovered that they could turn corners with a psychic abandon, they did it everywhere, at every show, and in every jam. Gradually, like a new song, the style got assimilated into the arsenal. The kind of listening that produced the nearly seamless drop into Walk Away only gets pulled out occasionally, but to great effect. Each style Phish assimilates is like a weapon, ready to be called out when they need it. Phish are heavily fortified, though they are reluctant (at times) to show off their supreme arsenal.

Unfortunately, things get lost in the shuffle. If a weapon doesn't get used for a while, it rusts. If a song doesn't get played in a while, it's usually sloppy when the band busts it back out. Likewise, if they don't concentrate on it for a while, a style can grow stale. I've been thinking more and more about the plight of Harry Hood and Run Like An Antelope. Phish has learned how to groove well recently. The very idea of groove is one of patience -- a kind of thing that a band should be able to slip into timelessly. Trey has described the feeling as "floating".

Unfortunately, this has come at the expense of the band's more traditional tension-and-release jamming, which is featured on songs like Antelope. The basic idea behind Phish's groove explorations is that they can change the specifics of a groove (the parts of any given player) while still retaining a feel for the whole. Sand was (and is) a textbook example of this. In the process, the band seems to have trained themselves to observe the groove of a song at all times. This means staying in one place, even if the one place is morphing and moving. This is a problem when it comes to pieces of music that need to move swiftly and visibly from one point to another. Antelope is one of these songs.

As the band assimilates the idea of groove into their utility belt, it will become just another tool. This is happening already, as tonight's Antelope stretched further away from the groove than I've heard it do in a long while. The Frankenstein , Velvet Sea closer was a bit of a bummer, especially to cap such a monumentally good set which mixed deep exploration with fun song choices. The Character Zero encore was downright great, thankfully. The song is about ready to move into a new berth somewhere near the beginning of the second set. The recent versions (5/21, 6/23) have been simply bursting with energy. It was a good way to cap a great show: a jam bursting at the edges with potential.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage.