by Jesse Jarnow

In transit: Auburn Hills, Michigan to Oberlin, Ohio

The Palace, Auburn Hills, Michigan

An oddly subdued affair... no barns to be burned... instead, constructing them carefully and languishing in their corners... Vinnie gets his digital camera taken away... a sterling performance on the trampolines, the Swedish judge gives it a 7.5... the Albanian judge, not quite accustomed to such demonstrations, gives it a 9.3.

I got shat upon, quite literally. An auspicious beginning for the mini-tour. I hopped out of my car, over a nicely manicured garden box, with the intention of bopping into the small enclosure housing the cash machine. As I hit the pavement, I felt a glob on my face, atop my eye, between my glasses and skin. The vision in my left eye blurred momentarily. I looked up to see a pack of birds scattering from a tree overlooking the sidewalk. I cleaned my glasses and face, shrugged, and retrieved loots from the automatic teller.

Except for that, and the odorific smellscape of downtown Detroit, the journey was quite uneventful. Quite frankly, it was eerie. For one, we made it to the venue without any hassle. In the miles preceding the exit, though, we saw no signs of tour life -- no bumper stickers, microbuses, or compacts with Colorado plates. Arriving in the lot, there didn't seem to be much of a scene either. This, besides some mini-runs, was the first time I'd attended a tour opener. I'd always enjoyed a vision of hundreds of heads descending from all points onto an unsuspecting locale -- somewhere across between a swarm of locusts and an invading army; which probably amounts to the same thing, anyway.

Inside the Palace, the vibe was completely nondescript. Again, this confounded expectation. Despite the corporate arena, I fully figured that the energy would be veritably pulsing, the industrial sterility converted into a crawling organic being. Nope. By showtime, the upper levels were still empty towards the back of the room. The seats behind the stage were completely empty, a giant black backdrop dangling comfortably from the lighting rig behind band's setup. On one hand, it was slightly discouraging seeing so many empty spots. On the other hand, the backdrop provided for some level of intimacy usually missing at arena gigs. If it is, in fact, a harbinger of things to come, perhaps that'll be a good thing, too. Less people on tour is probably healthy at this point.

Waiting for the show to start, I prepared for the comfortable rush, the oncoming frenzy, when the houselights went off. Coupled with the fact that I hadn't seen Phish - nobody had seen Phish - since the last tour, two months ago, I figured it would be unbearable. It wasn't. There was the intense potential of them being a completely different band than had walked off stage after the Albany tour closer in October. They weren't. I can't say I was disappointed, but I wasn't surprised. The band walked onstage, Trey casually began strumming the intro to Runaway Jim and the show was off and running. Off and walking, actually. The jam pushed tentatively in several directions, but never settled on any one theme.

Farmhouse followed and provided the model the band would follow for their improvisation in the first set. Slightly rearranged, and boasting a new ending refrain, it provided a framework to showcase the band's increasing ability to create improvisations that resemble carefully put together studio arrangements. Here - and in Heavy Things, Roggae, and Velvet Sea - the band wove a delicate balance between clean sounding Trey soloing, Fish's delicate cymbal work, and measured upper-range contributions from Mike and Page. The quiet sections of Roggae, in specific, before the majestic power chords signaling the end of the song, were stunning in their dynamic.

Phish, in 1999, are not a band that need to burn barns, or storm them for that matter. Nor do they want to. Fire is not required and there is little to prove. With that, there are few pyrotechnics. Perhaps this accounts for the empty seats. Instead, the band has elected to erect nearly perfect structures in which to sit and contemplate. Or, for that matter, pay large amounts of money to have 200 year old barns transported to their property in which to record, as Phish have been doing for the bulk of the past several months. That's not to say that the band can always entirely suppress their exuberant adolescent urges to set things, parts of the barn, ablaze. It's not that the first set was without energy, it's just that it was a more conservative kind -- more along the lines of picking up where they left off sometime ago than starting anew.

The requisite big jam in the first set - Run Like An Antelope was a marginal success though, like many versions of late, it seemed to amount to not much more than the band running through the motions of the tune. Several times, the band verged on points of no return: dropping into joyous chaos, building and releasing back into the chord progression. Five years ago, the band would've turned the joyous chaos into the bed for the next part of the jam, continuing to build into ecstasy before letting go with an unparalleled precision. Here, the Antelope jam in general, and the chaos contained therein, seemed token signposts to a time long passed.

Are they adolescent urges, though? Are jams with monumental releases and shimmering climaxes somehow more immature than textual ambient explorations with no clear point A or point B other than the moment the music begins and the moment that it ends? This could be exactly the reason that tension and release jams get a bad rap. They are inherently predictable, in some sense, by the fact that they will ultimately resolve back into a song. The urge to get to this release can be seen as a sort of musical impatience; like a child wanting a clear ending or obvious moral resolution to a troubling story. Sometimes that¹s okay, though.

And sometimes the question of which approach is better or more worthy is completely irrelevant. The second set this evening focused on grooves, heavy grooves. The grooves weren't tensionless by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, there were occasional releases in the forms of clavinet and bass breakdowns and other spontaneous arrangements. Trey's guitar work on Steve Wonder's Boogie On Reggae Woman, the set opener, was a good example of this. For the duration of the ten minute jam, he played an A chord. A simple concept. No more. No less. As the jam progressed, with Page and Mike exploring various melodic ideas, Trey played with different voicings, altered his rhythmic attack, and cycled through a variety of guitar tones. There was a logical progression to all of this, and when the band went back into the chorus at the end, it made sense... even leaving the listener wanting more.

Likewise, the sheer funk of Gotta Jiboo and Also Sprach Zarathustra expanded on the idea of a tensionless tension. Both jams were characterized by an unrelenting groove, Page's work on the Fender Rhodes recalling early 70s Miles Davis. On top of this, Trey and Mike laid down a variety of noises, alternating between gorgeous soloing and ambient noise -- Fish keeping the beat in a completely straightforward and totally compelling manner. Sandwiched in between the two was a Bathtub Gin which featured a more traditional elucidation of the song's theme, culminating in a chaotic build (with numerous reprises of the Gin theme) which dissolved into fractured fragments before the Also Sprach beat kicked in.

For much of the band¹s career, up through the mid-90s, You Enjoy Myself was pretty much the band's sole vehicle for funk. Though the song's jam is chameleon-like - often taking on properties of whatever approach the band is focusing on - it has shined particularly for the past several years, seeming tailor made to the sparse grooves the band so loves to plumb. For all of its chameleon-like qualities, it's one of those songs that can help one get a good idea of what the band is into at the moment. The jam out of Y.E.M. tonight was a culmination of the evening¹s improvisations -- a combination of deep staccato grooves and more traditional building progressions. All in all, while mining a rock-steady vein, the band morphed the bed into something entirely new -- my favorite kind of Phish jam: a completely improvised chord structure on which the band builds the next part of the improvisation to the point where it sounds like they know what they're doing. Midway through the Y.E.M. jam, Trey and Fish began oohing, integrating in the spontaneous arrangement part of their recent foci.

All of these themes continued as the band wound up the jam, ending it neatly, before starting the vocal jam nearly completely from scratch. What resulted was something that was genuinely beautiful. Where usually the band moves into scary harmonies and mouth percussion, augmented by vocal delay loops and swirling dark lights via Messrs. Languedoc and Kuroda, tonight's vocal jam was straight-up Phish. The band created gorgeous chords, changing them one note at a time in a mature spontaneous arrangement. It sounded like nothing short of a song Brian Wilson never wrote, gently cascading and carefully twisting with the slightest turn of sound. By the end, it began to sound like a small choir, caroling. When the familiar melody of Little Drummer Boy began to take form, a cheer went up from the crowd. From the mesh, Fish began to sing. "I'd like to make love to you, bum-rum-bum-bum-bum..." If I didn't know any better, I would've thought it an outtake from "Pet Sounds." Soon, Fish was left alone on stage to serenade the crowd.

Now, back in the car, rocketing back towards school and class in the morning and afternoon. Tour, or a collegiate approximation of it, has begun again. Yes, there was mad energy in everything that happened today, preceding the show... but now that it's over, it feels almost like a routine. We've done this before. We'll be home in an hour or so. I'll post the setlist and climb into bed. In the morning, I'll peel myself out of bed and go to class. After my afternoon lecture, we'll pack up the car again and head off to Cincinnati for two more days of fun and high adventure. It's a pattern that I'm sure many are following. It's not new, but that doesn't make it any less exciting: it's a matter of perfecting the dynamic somehow, understanding it.