With The Smell Of Fire Lingering

The hood of my car, parking lot, E Center
Camden, New Jersey

Phishheads, armed to the teeth, prepare to capture an underpass in Camden, New Jersey, then procede to celebrate the birth of their nation by blowing up a small part of it... Phish celebrates the birth of their fanbase by blowing up a small part of it... ditto for their song catalogue... big jams... little jams... loud jams... quiet jams... Page McConnell returns from the land of the mum to the land of the Mummers...

Stoners with fireworks: bad combination. Ditto for bottle rockets. The scene around me is savage. Heads are shooting off Roman candles out of Sammy Smith bottles, while an occasional straggler - loopy on nitrous - knocks one over and sends sparks spinning around the asphalt. Underneath an overpass, heads are conglomerated, beating on drums, chanting tribally, setting off fire crackers, and generally causing havoc.

At one point, a police cruiser ambled through, sirens blaring. It stopped dead in the middle. The officers sat in the car, completely and utterly confused as to their next course of action. Meanwhile, the sirens simply blended in with the ruckus, creating a sheet of white noise. It was wonderful; uninhibited and in total celebration. The car eventually left, the officers still boggled, but the celebration continued. And rightly so: Phish came through in full force on a holiday. Tonight is the night that all praises are reserved for -- a night of nearly perfect music.

A pattern seems to be emerging in the band's two night stands, at least on our part: get there just in the nick of time for the first show and vow not to make the same mistake the next day. So we don't. We get to the lots mad early and have almost too much time to bop about, chain drink Gatorade, and gossip. Today was no exception. We stayed with some exceptionally wonderful friends in Jersey, south of the venue, last night. Today, they led us on a twisting backroads route back into Camden, where we popped out about a block from the venue, managing to bypass the gnarly traffic we nearly got suffocated by the day before.

Time is a wonderful thing to have, to be able to afford, which is one of the reasons I attribute to the fact that the midnight set at Big Cypress was so amazing. It wasn't simply the fact that the band had eight hours to play within, it was the fact the pocket of space that the eight hours themselves existed inside. For many, the ultimate goal of a Phish show  - on both musical and experiential levels - is to transcend structure. It's an awfully hard thing to do when one is worried about when one is going to attempt execute such a maneuver -- like it's something one can just write into his daily schedule. When is allowed to forget time, it's that much easier to be able to get beyond the very concept of it later on.

We had plenty of time to ease our way into the show tonight, to forget about what time it was, when the band was supposed to go on, how long they were expected to play for, and all that. By the time they wandered onto stage and opened with a patriotic a capella rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, people were smiling and ready. With a few notable exceptions, Phish has had a history of not going above and beyond the call of duty on special occasions (holidays and such). Tonight was a notable exception, though the Farmhouse that followed had many holding their breath that tonight wouldn't end up like others.

The duration of the first set was made up of pretty much exactly the songs I - and many other people around me, it seemed - wanted to hear. They were the songs that get busted out once a tour. And, when the stars are aligned properly, they get busted out alongside other obscure tunes. As with Glide last night, many of them were played somewhat shakily. For the most part, it didn't matter. Rift all but trainwrecked when Trey completely botched the middle section -- but so what? At least there was a middle section to botch. He hit all the right notes in the Lizards solo, albeit with not much confidence. Even if everything wasn't technically correct, it still managed to add up to a great set.

Stash has long been one of my favorite songs to hear. For a while, it seemed every version that I heard was absolutely epic (4/2/98, 6/30/98, 10/30/98). Many Phish jams - Stash in particular, though - operate around a point of no return -- a spot where, once the band crosses it, it is nearly impossible to get back to the original structure. Normally, in a Stash jam, the band works up towards that point and, if they don't cross it, recede back to the "maybe so and maybe not" ending. Usually, this is one specific point in the jam. Tonight, the band never quite crossed that point into otherness, though the potential to seemed to be embodied in almost every section of the jam -- most notably early on, when Page and Trey engaged in a melodic chase that sounded like a spontaneously composed version (arranged for Stash) of the bumblebee section in Reba.

Yesterday, I devoted a considerable amount of column space to complaining about Page's diminishing role in the band, at least on an aural level: his keyboards have been swallowed in the mix, it doesn't sound like the rest of the band is reacting, etc.. Tonight, it was as if Page rejoined Phish. He made visible eye contact with band members throughout the show - Fish in specific - and played an active, occasionally aggressive, part in the improvisation. A lot of this, I think, had to do with the fact that he played almost entirely acoustic piano, with a few switches during Gotta Jibboo and the places where he was required to play other instruments (the organ in It's Ice, for example).

When he did switch up in Gotta Jibboo, it was done so with a finely considered construction, and very much led the direction that the jam went in. Tonight was easily the best Jibboo the band has yet played. The first segment of the jam followed the tune's standard groove, but soon took for the outer territories and stayed there. The launch took place, oddly enough, exactly as Page switched from piano to clav. From there, the jam moved through a number of sections. After a brief return to the piano, Page swiveled around to the Rhodes (while Trey twiddled on his own keyboard) and the improvisation dropped into an extremely dark space, just inches away - it seemed - from entering into the intro to Also Sprach (which has been conspicuously absent since the tour opener in Nashville).

By the time the darkness had run its course, Page moved over to the Hammond. Soon after, the band entered into a hugely powerful major jam, which sounded like it could've exploded at any moment into the ending of Down With Disease. From there, it continued to build further as the band layered more and more sounds into the mix until they were in the midst of a swirling cyclone that sounded very much like the peak of First Tube. The band pounded away, Page now hunched over the baby grand. Finally, the band dropped into the descending chord pattern of I Saw It Again -- the stunted kid brother of Twist, which never quite made it off the ground with the rest of the batch of songs from June 1997.

The band only came out of the depths briefly -- the same way that a good Twist (in the new arrangement, anyway) should function. The song itself wasn't nearly great, but the entrance back into the jam was nearly flawless. Quickly, the band found themselves in the middle of a sparse, "Siket Disc"-like space. Mike contributed artfully, with sustained notes placed with a Zen-like clarity. Trey turned on the piano-like effect he uses at the end of What's The Use and the recent twisted endings to Bathtub Gin. With that, he spun a coiled melody which somehow found itself in Page's all too often missing Magilla.

While Magilla, for the most part, retained its traditional jazz structure of rotating solos, the music managed to preserve a large semblance of the experimentation that permeated the set. It was evident in Fish's drum breaks, in Mike's bass solo, and in Trey's guitar tone. Page stayed on the piano, somewhat helpless it seemed, as he watched his tune get mutated (in a good way) beyond all reasonable belief. It stayed Magilla, granted, but did so in a very playful way.

The jam in Twist, a good way to launch back into improvisational waters, had a little trouble getting afloat at first. Soon, though, things were buoyant once more and back into what seems to be the defining groove of summer 2000 Phish -- dark and watery, somewhere between rock and ambiance. And, Lord, it was good. The band again built to chaos, sounding very much like they were moving in the direction of Free. One expected the drop into the build at any second. Gradually, though, the band dropped down to silence and built back up into a nearly perfect Slave To The Traffic Light. Everything that the disgusting Raleigh version wasn't, this one absolutely was.

The explosion of fireworks inside the pavilion following Lawn Boy was incredible. They exploded in rhythm and, somehow, when the smoke cleared, the band was in the middle of the first verse of Good Times, Bad Times -- which I realized that the explosion was in rhythm to. And I swear, I was completely sober. Either way, it'll probably be pretty tough to check on the tapes, as the explosion no doubt distorted the tapes beyond all belief: a powerful moment, gone in a flash, with only a memory and the smell of fire lingering.

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